iPhone 2.1: The iPhone You've Been Waiting For?

If Apple CEO Steve Jobs delivers on his promise, the iPhone firmware update to be released tomorrow will address many of the issues that have been trying the patience of iPhone 3G owners, including the dropped call problem that has plagued many users since July. “iPhone 2.1 is a big update,” Jobs said at Apple’s media event earlier this week. “It fixes lots of bugs. You’ll get fewer call drops. You will get significantly improved battery life, for most customers. We have fixed a lot of bugs where if you have a lot of apps on the phone, you’re not going to get some of the crashes and other things that we’ve seen. Backing up to iTunes is dramatically faster. And so just a lot of bugs have been fixed.”

For Apple’s (AAPL) sake, let’s hope so. The device’s last firmware update, iPhone 2.0.2, didn’t seem to improve its 3G functionality much. And lawsuits over its performance and reliability are mounting.