After a couple of weeks of iPhone use, trying out a bunch of different apps and finding out where the holes in the iPhone OS lie I've come to the conclusion that the iPhone might be a hit in some areas but it's a miss in others.

Until the 250MB that came yesterday, stability was a miss - a big enough one for one pundit to call iPhone 2.0 a beta release. Strong words but given that i could crash Safari almost at will it wasn't far off the mark. Thankfully the update seems to have fixed whatever bug that was.

The update has supposedly made the iPhone faster but I think what's really happened is that Apple has sped up some of the OS animations to give the illusion of speed. For example, the zoom in and out effects when you launch apps and navigate to the home screen are faster. However, I'm not convinced that actual app performance is faster.

On the upside, I'm really enjoying trolling through the App Store. I've downloaded a few free apps and purchased a few commercial apps. One of my faves is FileMagnet. This program overcomes one of the iPhone's biggest shortcomings - the lack of an accessible file system. Thanks to a reader of last week's post for pointing this out to me.

FileMagnet allows you to copy files to your iPhone over WiFi. As long as you Mac (there's no PC version yet) is on the same WiFi network as the iPhone you can push files to it. It even works if you create an ad hoc network between the iPhone and Mac.