By: Michael Boucher

So I found a link on LifeHacker which had a link to MacRumors on where to get the iPhone 2.0 update a day early via download and manual install. Pretty much been playing with it all evening and downloading apps.

The #1 feature by far is mass delete of e-mails. I'm still baffled by the fact this was left out in the original design but I'm very happy to have it now. First order of business was to delete all the SPAM I get and gave up on trying to manage on my iPhone. Success!

**UPDATE** This was a server issue. I tried setting up Exchange Server at work. Not sure if this is an iPhone issue or if it is a server issue but I wasn't able to sync to Exchange. A little disappointing but I'm sure with the number of people at work with an iPhone somebody is bound to figure it out.

**UPDATE** Seems you can enable/disable CAPS Lock in Settings now (or it was just turned off by default on update). Settings >> Keyboard >> Enable Caps Lock. One thing I did notice on the 2.0 upgrade was the CAPS LOCK feature (double tapping the SHIFT key) on the iPhone no longer works. I was able to "hold down" the SHIFT key but that made it very hard to type letter adjacent to the SHIFT key. I hope there is a minor update that fixes this as I did use it quite a bit.

The next feature I have to say is the apps of course. Lots of really cool free apps and others at fairly decent prices. Some are overpriced like the WMATA Metro Map application at either $14.99 or $9.99. I can walk over to a metro map or check out the web site to avoid those costs.

**UPDATE** Took a couple days but it just suddenly started working. Love this app. Facebook App doesn't open for me, I get an error message stating "The application 'Facebook' cannot be opened." No reason as to why and I'm not absolutely sure how to delete and reinstall. Will have to get back to that. Skip it for now, as the Facebook web app works just fine for now anyway.

Next is the Twitterrific iPhone App. This is another free app and as you might have guessed, allows you to view, post and reply to Tweets on Twitter. Posted my first mobile Tweet with it and it works pretty well. Since I'm a fairly new addition to Twitter I'm not really following anybody so I haven't had a chance to check out the reply feature. Also takes advantage of "Current Location" with an option to not allow it. I'm still warming up to the idea of using Twitter to broadcast my daily activities and thoughts. Might be a few weeks before I expose my current location. More on this app as I use it. I'm sure there are additional features.

Downloaded the game "Monkey Ball" which uses the iPhone's accelerometer to control your character — tilting the iPhone to move and turn. Very challenging but fun game and great 3D graphics.

Another App which I have to say is pretty genius (though probably derived from some heavy drinking with friends) is the "PhoneSaber" app. It pretty much has no other use except maybe getting frustration out at the office. Crank it up, choose your saber color and commence some serious shadow Light Saber fighting complete with sounds. Again another app that makes use of the accelerometer in an interesting and creative way. Move the phone slowly and you get the "Weeerrr — weeerrrrnnnn" sound (true SW fans know what I'm talking about) and then attack with rapid movements for the Sabre-to-sabre action, sparks and furry!!! Even more fun when a co-worker has the app to. Launch the app and the sound of your light sabre coming to life will alert all you are ready for battle. Upon victory retract the light sabre and pocket your iPhone. Walk away, head held high.

I've been on a Calc, Trig, Geometry kick lately and as an Actionscript Developer these come in handy at times. I don't quite use them enough to know them by heart and I avoided these classes, though I now regret it, like the plague in school. The "Trigger" app looks promising as it calculates and shows the sin, cos, tan, ctan, sec, csec, radians, degrees and pie values as your move the angles around on the circle. Each value is color coded and has a corresponding line making up the right triangles. This just might be the 21st Century equivalent of the calculator watch. Pure Geekery!

The iPhone AIM app was of course the first app I installed. I was very surprised to find it free in the Apple App Store since it cost $9.99 on my Treo. Very well done app and messages come in near real-time. Very, very nice!

Three other apps I installed but haven't really had a chance to play with yet are "Eventful," "Kyte," and GuitarToolkit so I'll have to post more on those at another time.

I hope everybody is enjoying their 2.0 upgrade or 3G iPhones.