Early this morning, Apple released iPhone Software Update 2.2. There are some great new features in this update. Some of my favorites include:
- Street View added to Google Maps. This will make it much easier to find places on the Map and figure out where you are when you are traveling. Plus, the implementation is very slick.
- Home button. If you have a lot of pages of apps on your iPhone, when you are on, say, page 4 and want to go back to page 1, you can now just click the home button and it zooms you back. This is much faster than swiping each screen, one at a time.
- Podcasts. Now you can download podcasts from the iPhone itself. I have wanted this feature for a long time. I won’t have to plug my iPhone in to my computer to get new podcasts to listen to.
- Safari stability. Safari sometimes crashes for me when I am using it, but this new update is supposed to reduce crashes. We’ll see, but I’m hoping for the best.
- Wide HTML e-mail formatting improved. Some of the HTML formatted e-mails that I get are so wide that the text is too tiny to read in the Mail application. Apple claims that this works better in this update, and while I haven’t received such an e-mail yet to try this out, this would be a very welcome improvement.
There are lots of other new features, plus the usual behind-the-scenes bug fixes. This looks to be a great update.
UPDATE: So far, the best description that I have found of all of the new features is this post on iLounge. Another good one is this post on The iPhone Blog.
