If you have an Apple iPhone and have upgraded to the new Beta 5 release for OS 3, you’ve doubtless noticed a few changes. The biggest is to MMS. YouTube video streams saw an improvement. For a minute anyway, then they reverted back to the way they were.
According to Gizmodo, the fixes were dramatic. They were most impressed with the YouTube upgrades and most concerned with the locking of MMS so that current iPhone hacks to make it work with localized services are gone.
Winandmac.com was excited about the YouTube improvements and then quickly reported that they were fleeting and are now gone. I’d like to think that Apple was testing the limits of the 3G network regarding video quality, but that’s just my hopeful guess. Many iPhone users complain about the ugly quality of most video streams–especially YouTube–so this would have been a welcome fix.
Meanwhile, over at the iPhone Blog, discussions of the MMS changes are heating up. The beta 5 release apparently shuts down any user control of MMS, effectively blocking tethering, carrier tweaks, etc. The carrier file itself is also closed to editing, giving rise to compatibility concerns for some AT&T affiliate network users.
So, the Apple network has released both Beta 5 and iTunes 8.2 pre-release developer information has been distributed to developers. As MacRumors.com says, this is unusual coming only 8 days after Apple’s last release, deviating from their usual bi-weekly schedule.
It will be interesting to see how these latest upgrades change the iPhone experience for users. I expect there will be a lot of scrambling around by techs at affiliate carriers for AT&T who were reliant on tweaking the MMS to gain compatability. The other day I watched as an associate was unable to watch YouTube videos after the upgrade, so many of the bugs might not be worked out. I will wait until it gets a clean bill of health before downloading this time. Many hack-apps will cease to function as well.
