Jace Cole (dot) com

So I’ve got the new 2.1 iPhone 3G firmware installed and immediately there is a noticeable difference in the 3G reception in my condo.   Pre 2.1 I would be very lucky to get more than 1 bar of 3G signal strength in my condo.  With the new firmware I’m now getting full bars.  I think to throw some “lip stick on the pig” Apple also changed the 3G signal strength logo ,  it’s no longer in a white box, now just pretty letters.  There is also noticeable improvement in the speed of navigation between SMS messages, contacts, and your e-mail.

It’s a wait and see now on battery life improvement.  My hope are up.  I want this thing to work like I’d expect of an Apple product.

It’s good to see lot’s of other Chicagoians are seeing the same improvements based on the comments from Scott’s iPTIB blog at the RedEye.

Update: According to Engadget Poll it looks like I’m not alone in seeing remarkable better reception / fewer dropped calls.  One of two of my biggest peeves with the new iPhone 3G.   According to the poll over 13,000 are claiming better reception and fewer dropped calls.

It’s too early tell on battery life,  it appears to be better , but won’t really be able to tell until I have a full week of normal use under my belt.

Amazingly and as promised, Apple has released the iPhone 2.1 firmware through iTunes this morning. The iPhone 2.1 contains the following updates as listed by Apple:

• Decrease in call set-up failures and call drops
• Significantly improve battery life for most users
• Dramatically reduced time to backup to iTunes
• Improve email reliability, notable fetching email from POP and Exchange accounts
• Faster installation of 3rd party applications
• Fixed bugs causing hangs and crashes if you have lots of 3rd party applications
• Improved performance of 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’s even more amazing is they actually call out all the flaws I’ve been seeing,  rather than the standard line of “Bug Fixes”.

I’m installing now … I’ll give a full report after a few days on the new firmware.

After a long stint of working various sales and business development activities (aka the beach) I am finally moving back into a consulting and delivery role.  Starting next week I’ll be working for a client in North Carolina where our team will be augmenting and helping transform the client’s IT business analysts.

A bit of a stretch from the user centered design arena but still in the heart of my core competency area of design and analysis phase of Systems Development Life Cycle SDLC.  I’ll be working with this client through the end of March and what promises to be at least 4 days of better winter weather than the chi-town.  We’ll see what type of havoc mother nature will bring this winter with the travel in out of our favorite airport: ORD.

So I need some help from the tech world of my 22 average monthly blog readers.  We are trying to transform this team of sharp industry BAs and I’m just the person to help do that.   Do of any of you have any good suggestions for methods or traning that you’ve built or that can help ramp up a code junky turned BA?   I’m looking for things to build and strengthen typical BA skill sets.   I’m going to be creating training modules for requirements gathering, analysis, and management,  best practices for use case development,  tips on how to collaborate and work with offshore development teams,  unit and user acceptance testing methods, process mapping, and any other key components that make up a truly rock star BA.   Please, if you have any good suggestions, visions, materials, tips, shoot me an e-mail or leave a comment.