Firmware 2.1 to be available on Friday

iPhone firmware update version 2.1 was announced today by Steve Jobs at Apple's "Let's Rock" event.  He claims it will address:

• Fewer dropped calls
• Big battery life improvements
• No crashes with Apps
• Backing up is faster

I'm all about a faster backup process.  Syncing my iPhone takes waaaay too long as is.  Hopefully it'll live up to the promises.

Here are some more details on the release:

• Decrease in call set-up failures and dropped calls
• Significantly better battery life for most users
• Dramatically reduced time to backup to iTunes
• Improved email reliability, notably fetching email from POP and Exchange accounts
• Faster installation of 3rd party applications
• Fixed bugs causing hangs and crashes for users with lots of third party applications
• 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
• Genius playlist creation

What happened with it Teej?

Has anyone noticed any differences after upgrading?  The backup definitely runs a TON faster...but besides that...nothing has really changed for me.

I don't have an iPhone, sadly, but TidBits did a report on it, and they're reporting that a lot of annoying little stuff has gotten fixed. For example, apparently the iPhone used to scramble your icons when you installed a new app, and now it doesn't. And as Teej said, the backup is faster. 

I'm really curious about the call quality issues though... hopefully that is better, and Tidbits didn't really say.

BTW, the download is supposedly 231MB... what on earth is in there? I guess the 2.0 OS takes up 208MB, so it stands that this one would be a bit bigger, but still...