I am not getting too excited at the moment as it is still early days, but I think Apple may have delivered on their promise.

I applied the 2.1 update on Friday afternoon and made sure that my iPhone 3G had a full battery charge before removing from the dock. I have been testing all of the applications since and here are some of my early findings:

3G- New icon just shows 3G or a dot, depending on whether you are in a 3G signal area. I am now receiving a full 3G signal in certain areas of my house whereas before I was only getting 1 or 2 bars at best. On launching Safari the 3G signal is steady rather than dropping out. Browsing speed is more like you see in the adverts!

Performance – Everything appears to be much quicker, with no noticeable lag. This is especially true with the Contacts application which used to stutter before.

Apps – I never experienced the App lockout problem until I downloaded the latest update for Brain Tuner prior to 2.1 update. 2.1 seems to have fixed this problem, so hopefully this works for everybody else as well. Downloading Apps from the store and installing is a much quicker process. I also like the way if you update an App it retains it’s original position, rather than moving back to the home screen.

SMS – Never had a problem with this, but it does seem more responsive. The additional notifications for unread messages is a good feature. Do not go looking for this setting like I did, as it is automatic!

External Speaker – My speaker volume appears to have trebled. I can now hear the iPhone ringing in another room. I have even had to turn the volume down a few clicks as it is was too loud. Has anybody else found this?

Battery Life – Still to early to comment, but I am on a 35% charge with 3 hours usage and 20 hours standby.

Genius – I love this on iTunes 8, but not sure whether this feature will be that useful on an 8GB iPhone due to the lack of song capacity!

Dropped Calls – None as yet, but I do not get many calls at the weekend. I will update this blog later in the week with my findings.

Please post your experiences of the 2.1 update here.

By Wayne Cohn

‘I am the Business Development Manager at Coverpoint Solutions and my role involves developing and maintaining our supply chain and Sales and Marketing. I have written this Blog to share with you my day-to-day frustrations in the ultra-competitive IT Marketplace. I would be very interested to hear other people’s views on this subject, so please post your comments.

It was not long ago that the basics of buying and selling had an emphasis on a strong and binding human relationship between two parties. Most importantly, from a selling perspective, the focus was on how one or many individuals could look after customers and satisfy their needs. This could apply to any vertical market or segment.

As of now, I choose to talk briefly about the level of service and Account Management within the IT Industry. I am not one to name and shame, but at the same time it should be pointed out that the biggest culprits of red tape and bureaucracy are some of the major Hardware Manufacturers and Tier 1 Distributors that can supply an entire product range to help manage and maintain an IT infrastructure of any size. These are the companies and people that we rely on day-to-day, to ensure that we encounter minimal down time, enabling our business to grow and become more successful.

In fairness, their business models do dictate what is expected of their sales force in order to achieve their massive million pound targets. However, it can be clearly noted that too much is expected in terms of people achieving targets and this leads to attrition, which in turn leads to new Account Management. It is at this point that a valued customer could potentially fall prey to not being valued and past relationships not recognized.

The basics are no longer available, like getting a quote in two hours, asking for a call back or responding to a tender within a given timeframe. When was the last time you had a call from your supplier wishing you a Happy Birthday? I for one understand how difficult it is to win new accounts and maintain them. Maybe, the aggressive approach of winning as many new accounts as possible, instead of nurturing, retaining and maintaining their existing ones has impacted greatly on individuals or companies and this has ultimately led to losing them.

In simple terms, the relationship is partly owned by the person who looks after your company’s needs and not the supplier itself. Of course, each organization procures differently and listening to what their daily operation does will ultimately help in the sales function and this will bridge the gap between the two.

The good news is that monopolies do exist, but they have been reduced in size due to the fierce competition in the marketplace today, so as a buyer there is plenty to choose from. On that note, the importance of a clear customer experience, selection of the correct people and the building of continuous improvement are just a few things that I live by.

Increasingly, the major anti-virus companies are using dubious semantics to justify why their products are simply not able to catch the latest breed of viruses, trojans and worms doing the rounds.

We currently have a problem with a piece of ‘Malware’ called AntiVirus XP 2008. This is simply a program wrapped up in a collection of trojans that usually arrives as an e-mail attachment and it has caught out a number of our clients.

It generates a fake pop-up screen and attempts to trick users into purchasing their own product. It can also lead to the ‘Blue screen of death’ and will copy itself onto any attached media. In our case, it left one particular PC completely unbootable.

Not only does the latest copy of McAfee VirusScan not catch it, it falls over like a granny on roller skates under its onslaught.

Surely a multi-million pound company such as this is capable of producing a signature for detecting and cleaning such a prevalent and harmful program? Or can even, perhaps, manage to stop itself being disabled in the process?

When asked why their latest products don’t detect it, a spokesmen for McAfee stated:

“Anti-viruses do a good job but can’t catch everything that’s out there, especially stuff masquerading as protection software as they fall between the cracks. It’s up to the user to exercise care. They are neither viruses, nor trojans, nor worms. That’s why we always recommend that users keep some spare anti-spyware application on hand and updated.”

I beg to differ: AntiVirus XP 2008 is riddled with Trojans, including zlob.trojan, trojan.vundo and Trojan.Downloader. Yes, the user should be careful before opening attachments, but surely that’s precisely what anti-virus software is there for?

I also checked McAfee’s site and although they admit to knowing about it, they simply recommend that your definitions are up to date, which they were. Made not a jot of difference.

McAfee are not alone in this shrugging-of-shoulders attitude. Other leading anti-virus companies give a similar excuse and advise to look elsewhere to fix malware that don’t neatly fit into their own pigeon-holed ideal of a virus, trojan or worm.

I did just that and managed to find a very capable product that I can highly recommend to detect and clean it. It’s called Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware and can be downloaded from: http://www.malwarebytes.org.

Malwarebytes Anti-Malware is free to use. If you want on-access protection, automatic updates, and scheduled scans you need to buy their full version.

It’s time the large anti-virus companies stopped passing the buck and face up to the fact that they exist to protect us from malicious software. Whatever they choose to label them.

By Martin Pollard

Further to my previous post, I would like to share with you the results of some further testing I have completed this week.

If I turn off 3G altogether then the iPhone behaves perfectly. I thought the plus side in doing this would be greater battery life, but it really makes little difference! Apple must have done a good job with the 3G power management, as doing the same thing on my Nokia N95 extends battery life by a good couple of hours.

Previously, when I have had little problems with my iPods or iPhone, a full reset has ironed them out, so I decided to give this a try. As all of my Contacts, Calendar and Emails were stored on my Exchange Server, I decided not to restore my previous backup as normal. I just configured the Exchange email account again and iTunes then synced back all my Apps, Music and Photos.

Interestingly, since carrying out this procedure, I have not had one dropped call and the iPhone seems to be more reliable when swapping between 3G and GPRS. Signal strength is still poor in a good 3G area, but at least my calls are now more reliable.

If this procedure has worked for you too, then please post your comments here.

Something is wrong. My iPhone 3G, perfect in every other way, has started to leave a bad taste. Yes, I too have started to suffer from the dropped call syndrome that appears to be gathering pace around the Internet. This despite applying the latest 2.0.2 update from Apple.

On Friday my iPhone 3G dropped at least half a dozen calls. At one point I strayed into a No Service area and despite returning to a strong signal my iPhone never recovered the connection. I didn’t even realise until at least half an hour had passed and I had not received one email or phone call. A quick switch to Airplane Mode and back resolved the problem, but if I cannot even rely on a basic phone function then the device is of little use to me. Ouch! and that hurt to say.

Just sitting still in a room and watching the signal strength indicator doing an impression of a spectrum analyser tells me that something is wrong.

Whether the problem is chipset related, or just the O2 3G network struggling to cope with the extra demand, I do not know. However, I do know that Apple and O2 need to address this problem quickly otherwise monthly subscription customers are going to start asking for a refund.

If you are having similar problems with your iPhone 3G, then please post your comments here. I would be very interested to hear your experiences.

By Mike Kirkland

I have recently returned from a business trip to Florence to install a Polycom Video Conference solution for one of my very good clients. This was the first time that I had taken an iPhone with me, as the new Exchange features enabled me to stay in touch with the office. I was looking forward to watching a episode of ‘Spooks’ that I had previously purchased and downloaded from the iTunes store.

All began well as I switched the iPhone into Airplane Mode to disable the wireless capability in the departure lounge, effectively turning my iPhone into an iPod Touch. Thirty minutes into the flight and ‘Adam Carter and Co’ were about to save the country from certain destruction and I was tapped on the shoulder by a flight attendant. “Is that an iPhone or a Touch sir?” I knew what was coming and momentarily thought about telling a little white lie, but as the flight attendant was obviously technically savvy I quickly decided against it. “It is an iPhone in Airplane Mode” I replied. I think that you can guess what happened next, and rest assured I had to wait to find out whether the country was safe from attack again.

Upon returning to the UK, I started reading up on a few Blogs to see whether this was a common problem. It turns out that some poor chap in America decided to push this point to the end and was promptly arrested on his arrival!

This got me wondering about how Steve Jobs copes with this predicament when travelling around the world. You can just imagine the scene in the flight cabin. “Is that an iPhone Mr Jobs?”

Surely this problem could be resolved very easily with a dialog between Apple and the Airlines? If Airplane Mode does not make the iPhone safe for Air Travel then really what is the point in having it?

CRM is an indstry acronym for “Customer Relationship Management”.

Put simply, a CRM package is used for keeping your customers happy and at the same time increasing sales.

The current market leader for CRM software is currently ACT! This was our first experience of using CRM.

We very quickly realised the limitations and frustrations in using this product: It did not integrate well with Exchange Server and although customisable was unnecessarily complex. It ended up being almost a separate system to Outlook rather than complementing it and double-entry was a huge problem.

After evaluating numerous packages, we found that Gold-Vision met all of our requirements. This was mainly due to the the product’s excellent integration with Microsoft Exchange Server and Outlook.

Other key features include:

• Centralised account and contact information
• Tracking of all e-mail communication for customers and suppliers
• Full integration with Microsoft Outlook for appointments, tasks and contact information
• Ability to assign customers to account teams
• Targeted mail campaigns based on multiple criteria
• Highly configurable to fit your organisation’s own terminology
• Project & Event Management
• Remote access from web browser and mobile phone

We were so impressed with this product and what it has done for our business, we have now become a Gold-Vision Consulting Partner. This enables us to implement Gold-Vision solutions, tailored to your business.

Please contact us to arrange a demonstration of this class-leading product.

Further to my previous blog, iPhone Gets Pushy, we have an update from the Apple WWDC 08.

Can you imagine as a child coming down on Christmas morning only to find that Santa has not left any presents under the tree? Well I guess a lot of people will be feeling like this after listening to the Keynote presentation from Apple CEO Steve Jobs on Monday.

I was planning to spend Tuesday morning downloading version 2.0 of the iPhone software from iTunes and setting up Exchange ActiveSync with my server. After this, I was going buy Sega Monkey Ball from the App store and spend the afternoon twisting and turning my iPhone and guiding that cute little monkey around an impossible track. This closely followed by a trip to my local O2 store to pickup a new 3G iPhone!

The good news is that the 2.0 update will be free for iPhone users and the price of the new 3G iPhone is £0 – £159, depending on the model chosen and tariff selected. It is also very evident that Apple want this phase of the iPhone evolution to be absolutely perfect before releasing to a worldwide market.

So roll on July 11 then. I think it will be well worth the wait.

Breaking News on Wednesday 11:

Apple has announced full support for the iPhone in the next major release of OS X Server codenamed Snow Leopard.

As an early adopter of technology products I have been using an 8GB iPhone since it was released in the UK back in November last year.

Apart from the well-documented lack of a decent camera and 3G, the iPhone continues to provide a very pleasurable user experience indeed.

Various software updates from Apple have added new functionality and this has gone some way towards justifying the initial high purchase price.

I still get a buzz from standing in an unknown location and the iPhone locating my exact position in seconds on the excellent Maps application, even indoors.

Try doing this with a GPS enabled handset if your battery lasts long enough! This said, the iPhone is still very much a consumer product and try as I might it just does not hack it in my business life.

Whether you have followed the crowd and carry a Blackberry or use a Microsoft ActiveSync device, we have all come to rely on over-the-air email, contacts and calendar pushed from our Exchange Servers.

It was therefore of great interest to me on March 6th 2008 to watch Apple CEO Steve Jobs telling us about plans for iPhone in the Enterprise. The licensing of ActiveSync from Microsoft is a very interesting development and one that the industry has been crying out for since the iPhone was first released.

Although I believe this strategy will enable Apple to start making major ground into the RIM Blackberry market share, could it also prove to have a knock on effect on the potential sales of Leopard Server? As an IT Consultancy operating in the SME market place, Coverpoint sell and implement a great many Microsoft Small Business Servers.

We are therefore very interested in the potential of Leopard Server and have indeed received several enquiries from our clients this year. Amazingly, what is missing from this offering is any real support for the iPhone or any other mobile device for that matter.

Yes you can have IMAP mail, but haven’t people come to expect so much more these days?

So onto the annual Worldwide Developers Conference starting next week in Moscone West, California kicking off with a Keynote speech on Monday 9th June 2008 at 10:00.

We expect to hear about the Enterprise features in iPhone 2.0, but will Leopard Server be invited to the party?