The trip home was much improved, but there was still one drop out point that hadn’t been there prior to 2.0.

So far the lagging that really annoyed me seems gone. This was especially present in the SMS and Contacts applications.

Luckily I’m in a strong signal area – so I have only experienced very limited tower to tower transfer issues (but have seen a few).

This seems to have been an effective bug fix/patch.

I also seem to have tower handoff issues with my 3G. My Tilt seems to handle this better; and carry a better signal. However, since the upgrade, the 3G’s radio and the Tilt’s radio seem to be a little more in sync now. I’m holding 5 bars at my desk at the office, but that’s nothing new. I’ve always been able to do that here. However, on the commute home, my 3G seems to have a harder time with tower handoff’s and the device gets very hot, regardless of if I’m on a call or not.

I’ll be watching this and will report back any reportable results here.

For those keeping score, I’m running an upgraded, first-generation iPhone, where Chris Spera is working with a new 3G iPhone. I have had instability problems with the 2.0 firmware, but not nearly at the level experienced by 3G iPhone owners.

That said, there are a few things I’m watching:

1. Increased overall stability – fewer application crashes/lockups. Better system startup, etc. Fewer resets required.

2. Improved tower handling – The 1.1.4 firmware had fixed a problem I was experiencing where my phone didn’t move between certain towers very well creating false dead spots. Powering off the phone and restarting cleared this up. Unfortunately, the 2.0 software seemed to have re-introduced this phenomena. Hopefully, 2.0.1 will reintroduce the correction. This is a 2.5G – only situation. I have no 3G service here. Things were good this morning, but the afternoon drive home is the real test.

3. Improved handling of the WiFi/Edge switching. 2.0 created a new problem where, when I moved from WiFi to Edge, mail suggently wouldn’t fetch anymore. Even manually pressing the send/receive didn’t work. The work-around was to press and hold the HOME buttone WHILE Mail was open – forcing the app to completely quit. Then restarting Mail allowed it to fetch mail correctly. A complete phone reboot is not necessary here. Unfortunatley, so far, 2.0.1 does NOT seem to fix this problem.

Those are just my top things to watch – there are more. I don’t expect the battery “problem” to be fixed with this release. The battery is really too small to support the additional 3G and GPS services. Having said that, with the modification to the way push services operates expected in the upcoming 2.1 firmware release, I would expect to see some battery life improvements then, not in this release. Again – I don’t view the battery problem as a “bug” as much as I do a bad design decision. They should be able to improve it somewht, but I don’t think it will even be great. I would have preferred a slightly thicker device with a larger battery. Having said that, it should be interesting to see what some of these battery “add-ons” do in the near future.

1. Stability – with at least 1-2 soft resets everyday, my iPhone experience is very much like a WM device, and according to Stevie J., it ain’t supposed to be.

2. Radio Reception – I should be getting the same level of reception with my 3G as I do with my Tilt. I’m tired of seeing 0-1 bar on this thing when my Tilt has 2-3. I’m tired of this thing dropping calls. I’m tired of it over heating because it’s trying to hold on to a specific tower, or having trouble going from one tower to another.

3. Battery Life – I should have better battery life. My 2 hour commute home shouldn’t see me scraping the bottom of a fully charged battery after 1-2 short calls and/or some light ebook reading.

I will be watching this thing like a hawk today and will let everyone know how things go. Stay tuned!