At Apple’s “Let’s Rock” event held today in San Francisco, it was announced that a long-awaited “large” update was coming in the form of the 2.1 firmware update for both the iPhone and iPodTouch. The update will become available this Friday and should fix a lot of “bugs” that have plagued the iPhone 3G since its launch.
Among the fixes; improved battery life, fewer dropped calls, crashing App problems, increased speed for iTunes backups and various other fixes. Some new features will also be added with the update that are mostly music-related.
It was confirmed that iTunes 8 would ship out today with a new intelligent playlist composition feature which will be called Genius as well as a text-to speech feature dubbed Accessibility. The “Genius” feature more or less takes the music in your iTunes library and finds suitable matches to create an instant playlist.
Several new Apps were debuted today as well, primarily games. The company boasted that over 100 million Apps have already been downloaded by its users, which just engrains the fact that the iPhone and iPodTouch along with the integrated App Store remain an excellent distribution channel for mobile branding and marketing campaigns.
