Poll: Will 2.1 Have ‘Unannounced’ Features? – [Updated]

Posted on September 12th, 2008. Written by Arron.

[Update] (15.43pm) – This poll is now closed. Thanks to everyone who voted!

With the recent Apple ‘Lets Rock’ event, we saw Steve Jobs introduce iPod touch generation 2 which runs a new version of iPhone OS. 2.1. We also saw him announced that the software would also be available for iPhone owners this coming Friday (today) …

The strange thing was, Jobs seemed to skim over the ‘software’ section of the event, without actually telling us what iPhone 2.1 will add. He did however promise fixes for four specific issues which have made the release of 2.0 and subsequent releases completely underwhelming. These include:

• Call drops over 3G and Edge
• Application Crashes
• Battery Life
• iTunes ‘Backup’ time

I’m sure I don’t need to explain to you iPhone’ers what the exact problems with some of these are, but for those of you who are unaware, I will summarise. Since updating the iPhone’s firmware structure to 2.0 to accommodate third-party applications, Apple has lost basic functionality which was available seamlessly when under 1.X frameworks. Battery life is ok, but it could be better — If 2.1 enhances that, go Apple! Secondly, iTunes back-ups. This is really bad. I mean ‘really’ bad. Your talking waiting, on average, 2-4 ‘hours’ for a back-up of all your current data to successfully complete. I could understand that length of time if I had say 45 applications installed? – but I currently have 15.

So, what features do we know about in 2.1?
Honestly? – Genius. That’s it. Although Apple didn’t actually announced that the ability to create Genius play list on-the-go is coming to iPhone, it was available in the publicly shown version of the 2.1 iPod touch software – So I think that’s a guaranteed feature for us iPhone owners. Other than that? – We know nothing.

What makes you think we’ll get anything else?
The rumor of possible ‘unannounced’ features in iPhone 2.1 was recently sparked when Ars Technica were apparently told ‘specific features were removed from the developer seed of 2.1, to conceal new features from sight’.

So here it goes: Apart from the announced ‘Bug Fixes’ and Steve claiming this is a ‘Big’ update for iPhone owners and you should look out for it later today — Do you think iPhone 2.1 will have more ‘unannounced’ features?