Apple iOS 4.2 - you won't come a moment too soon!

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Saturday, 20 November 2010 22:46

Your IT - Mobility

Every .0 release of a new OS is always fraught with difficulty - bugs, bugs and more bugs needing further point releases to fix, with iOS 4.x users still suffering issues that iOS 4.2 - or is it iOS 4.2.1 - is meant to fix, while hoping Apple gets it right this time!

If only point releases weren't necessary. We'd live in a perfect world where getting it right the first time would be a matter of pride, where 'AS IS' provisions in legal software contracts simply wouldn't need to exist.

But that's some utopian fantasy world where iOS 4.2 never existed, because it didn't need to.

Sadly, or happily, depending on how you look at it, that utopian fantasy world is just that: science fiction. In the real world, bugs exist, and they do get squashed.

That's the promise for iPhone 3G and some 3GS users who say iOS 4.0 and 4.1 don't give the same performance iOS 3.x delivered, while iPad users are still a whole iOS generation behind, unable to savour the seductive sophistication of sweet, sweet multitasking, or faster browsing, or folder organisation.

With Apple's strict timetable to meet, and with bugs able to be fixed 'after the fact', getting the job 100% done in the world of software, on time, seems an impossibility.

But clearly, despite the pain of delay, we are lucky that iOS 4.2 hasn't already been released.

If so, a litany of complaints would have erupted across the web - "my Wi-Fi doesn't work", they'd say, "my VoIP phone rings, I answer, but it never stops ringing!".

Apple's customers wouldn't have been amused, and presumably, neither would have Steve Jobs.

But the bugs were caught in time, and while they've led to the very delays we've been living through these last few days, a short delay in a gadget operating system is hardly the trauma and troubles that our forefathers and foremothers went through during the Great Depression or the Second World War - today's troubles seem almost like a trip through Disneyland by comparison.

So, the bugs were caught, and even before release, iOS has already received its 4.2.1 designation, stretching into the three digits and doing away with the buggy iOS 4.2.

Continued on page two, please read on!