iPhone 3.1 Emerging As Buggy Upgrade

Since Jobs left the stage and Apple customers began downloading and installing iPhone 3.1, however, attention is beginning to turn to a surprising number of bugs that have begun to emerge in the software. Many of the bugs are thwarting advances the company had been talking up.

In the CRN Test Center, for example, we've found that the Genius Mix feature, which iTunes 9.0 and iPhone 3.1 were supposed to improve, now frequently crashes on the iPhone when different songs are selected to start its playlists of similar songs. Rebooting and starting again doesn't help either but, oddly, we found that not every song selected for a Genius list crashes the application.

In addition, we found that Apple required us to de-authorize and then re-authorize our PC to sync all of our music back to the iPhone -- a task that previous iPhone upgrades did not require. There was no explanation in Apple's documentation as to why the new authorization for the PC is needed when it wasn't needed before.

It wasn't just us.

On Apple's support discussion forum, users have begun complaining about everything from entire music libraries that are lost during the upgrade to iPhone 3.1 to missing Genius Mixes to sound distortion.

There have already been reports, including one from AppleInsider, that iPhone 3.1 has caused problems with support in integration with Microsoft Exchange servers.