Apple releases iPhone 2.1 Software Update

As promised during the Let’s Rock event, Apple today released its iPhone 2.1 Software Update, the latest update to the software for iPhone and iPhone 3G. According to Apple, the new software features a variety of improvements, including a decrease in call set-up failures and call drops, significantly improved battery life for most users, dramatically reduced time to backup in iTunes, improved email reliability, notably when fetching email from POP and Exchange accounts, faster installation of 3rd party applications, fixes for bugs causing hangs and crashes if the user has lots of 3rd party applicaitons, improved performance in text messaging, faster loading and searching of contacts, improved accuracy of the 3G signal strength display, repeat alert up to two additional times for incoming text messages, option to wipe data after ten failed passcode attempts, and Genius playlist creation. The iPhone 2.1 Software Update weighs in at 237.8MB for the iPhone 3G and 231MB for the original iPhone and is available now through the Update feature in iTunes.