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Upgraded or Downgraded to iPhone version 1.1.1

Well, depending on how you look at it, people can either upgrade or downgrade to iPhone version 1.1.1. I think of it as downgrading. I was really happy with my iPhone with the hacks, save some issues over the battery life and some crashing occasionally.

The process was indeed smooth, I was worried because I had jailbroken my phone earlier and had only just reverted it, as one would expect from Apple. The result is a hack free phone that is only a fraction as useful as it had been earlier in the week.

Many would ask why, in that case did I not stick with 1.0.2. Well there are many reasons, the first, and most important of which are the security updates. After reading through the list of bug fixes, or security patches, I decided that it would be much better to upgrade. It is really a sucker's choice though. The cross-site scripting flaws were significant enough to worry about. Also, the Bluetooth vulnerability was quite serious, especially since you probably have your home Wi-Fi network's password in your iPhone and at minimum most of your logins, perhaps some of your banking web pages in your phone's browser cache, etc. Not to mention how easy phishing attacks on the iPhone are, especially if you are surfing on unfamiliar Wi-Fi.

I mean, I can be safer, but far less productive with my device. The second reason is that the iPod section of the iPhone would crash whenever I tried to browse the web over EDGE while listening to music. This behavior appears to be fixed now. The third is for the iTunes Wi-Fi music store. I really do like iTunes, I like how smoothly everything works. The music store is fast, and intuitive, although I wish they had movies and music videos for download.

Finally, as a web developer, I need for Safari on the iPhone to be in the state that it will be in for most of the iPhone users who will be my customers. I have already found that the iPhone, while it used to ignore the meta viewport initial zoom tag, now correctly interprets the zoom.

However, for example, if I am out and about, I can no longer SSH into my server to fix problems, I no longer have a to-do list. The list of things I can't do now are way longer than the list of things I can.

I guess I should have thought about it before I bought the iPhone, I knew that it wouldn't support native 3rd party apps, but I believed AT&T and Apple when they said that EDGE was going to be fast enough. It is not, I call AT&T almost daily to complain about EDGE performance. I average about 56kbps over EDGE everywhere I go. That is no where near enough bandwidth to support even the most modest Web 2.0 application.

I have been thinking of late, however whether I would have bought my MacBook over again, if didn't support 3rd party apps like the Creative Suite, Aptana, Eclipse, NetBeans, Firefox, Second Life, or any of the other really outstanding applications that aren't from Apple. If that were the case, I actually would probably use Windows again.

I suppose that means that I should chalk up buying the closed iPhone as one for experience, and in a couple of years, once the Windows Mobile OS gets to the point where it doesn't crash every 5 minutes, buy a Windows Mobile device. I guess I'd never be touting Microsoft as being the open platform, but compared to the iPhone, it is an Open Source mecca.

It is intersting if you look at the legal section of the iPhone, you will see many open source licenses there, some of which require Apple to mail you the source for the libraries they have used. I wonder if that sort of thing could have been developed on a closed platform?

It is clear that Apple is picking a fight with the wrong group of people, especially as easy as WebKit has always been to find exploits in. Apple's "SDK" if you care to dignify it as that, may become useless in the face of the hacker onslaught. If I were Apple I would do an about face now and hope the community forgives and forgets, otherwise I'd suggest always using your iPhone through a VPN tunnel to your home.