Finally. Thank you, Apple, for fixing my iPhone. Today the company made the 2.1 firmware update available for the iPhone. The new firmware makes a multitude of improvements on the device and even adds a couple of new features. So far, I have noticed drastic improvements in performance of my iPhone. Apple has also improved the security of the iPhone.Two months and one day after the 3G iPhone's release, Apple took steps to fix a number of problems that the device has suffered in the first two months it has been on the market.

The firmware update fixes the following:

• Decrease in call setup failures and dropped calls
• Significantly better battery life for most users
• Dramatically reduced time to backup to iTunes
• Improved e-mail reliability, notably fetching e-mail from POP and Exchange accounts
• Faster installation of third-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 (in case you missed the beep the first time)
• Option to wipe data after 10 failed passcode attempts
• Genius playlist creation

In the hour or so that I've been playing with the iPhone since updating it, I've definitely witnessed some of these fixes. The contacts application performs much faster, the text messaging application loads conversations faster and is more responsive, and the time to back up has been cut down buy at least half.

These issues aren't all that firmware 2.1 offers. It also makes a number of security fixes as well. MacWorld reports that, "Changes have been made to improve security with the iPhone's network connectivity. mDNSResponder has been updated to reduce susceptibility to DNS cache poisoning. TCP initial sequence numbers are now randomly generated, to thwart remote attackers from spoofing TCP connections. The Passcode Lock feature is used to keep users from making accessing the iPhone without entering a multi-digit code. That feature could be thwarted thanks to an exploit involving the handling of emergency calls; that has been corrected. WebKit on the iPhone has also been updated to address an issue associated with the handling of Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) import statements. Document reference handling has been improved to prevent this problem from occurring."

All of the above makes for a much more stable and usable phone.

So far.