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In our morning readings today, we found a few sites mentioning some information that would be beneficial to pass on.  So we’ve taken everything iPhone that we’ve found today and condensed it into one article for your reading pleasure.  After the break we’ll be talking about iPhone OS 2.0.1, iPhone OS 2.1, App Store Updates, Disabling iPhone backups, and Installer 2.0 news.

Let’s first talk about iPhone OS 2.0.1 — while this is a rumored update, pretty much everyone who is running firmware 2.0 on their mobile device has a desperate need for this update. This new firmware seems to be even more buggy than the original 1.0 firmware of which the first gen iPhones shipped.  All of us are happy that we have third party applications on our phones, but many of us wish that Apple would have spent more time preparing for the new OS, much like their horrible rollout of MobileMe.  Rumor has it that there will be a maintenance update for the iPhone OS before we see iPhone OS 2.1.  This is largely due to random crashes, freezes, bricking — all of which we’ve personally experienced at one point in time.  We welcome this update but hope that iPhone OS 2.1 isn’t too far behind.

In the last day or so, Apple has seeded the iPhone 2.1 SDK to developers so that they can improve their applications’ compatibility with a myriad of new features.  One of these new features looks to be an improved Core Location service.  It’s rumored that this will actually be able to track your direction and speed through the iPhone’s built-in GPS.  This easily ties into the rumors that Apple is internally developing Turn-by-Turn navigation software for the iPhone and could explain why there has been no commitment from Garmin or other Nav companies to the iPhone OS.

Will it really happen?!?  This morning, MacNN went on record saying that they have found references to cut, copy, and paste functionality in the framework of iPhone OS 2.1.  What does that mean?  Well, nothing currently.  No one has been able to verify how long those strings have been in the framework as of yet.  They could exist only as placeholders and be activated eventually, or we could easily see the functionality in iPhone OS 2.1.  Apple’s Greg Joswiak has, unfortunately, gone on record saying that cut/copy/paste functionality just isn’t high enough on Apple’s list yet, but he said that it would be possible to include in future firmwares.  Here’s hoping for cut/copy/paste in OS 2.1.

Another interesting piece of news floating around the rumor streams today is a pretty big issue with application updates from the iTunes App Store.  It seems that some application updates don’t have the ability to save your user information when updating.  We’ve only tried this with a few applications since finding out about the issues.  We know for a fact that Tap Tap Revolution does not retain your Tapulous Profile after being updated.  With this app, that’s not a big deal because you can just sign back in, and you’re good to go.  We couldn’t verify issues with other apps as our user information transferred just fine between updates. There’s talk about the problem being a case-by-case situation, but it still needs to be addressed by both the developers and Apple for quick resolution.  If you’ve had trouble, let us know in the comments.

Who hates the unbelievably long, full-image backups that iTunes takes of your iPhone or iPod Touch?  We do!  We ran across an article this morning, originally posted by Zero Logic, that details a Terminal procedure that will disable the iTunes backup of your iPhone/iPod Touch. WARNING: this will disable all backups of any device you use with iTunes.  We don’t recommend this, but for those of you who don’t need frequent backups of your information, this will be tremendously helpful.  Excerpt from Zero Logic below:

I found a way (using the strings command in the terminal) to disable the backup function. This means that YOUR PHONE IS NOT GOING TO GET BACKED UP. Let me repeat that. If you do what I list below,YOUR PHONE WILL NOT GET BACKED UP.

This command will change a hidden setting in the iTunes preferences that will force it to skip the backup process.

1. - Quit iTunes.
2. - Open Terminal.app
3. - Copy and paste this in, then hit return:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes DeviceBackupsDisabled -bool true

4. - Open iTunes
5. - Plug in your iPhone (2.0 or 3G) and sync.

It will take a few seconds, assuming you don’t have a ton of music or podcasts.

Changing the ‘true’ in step 3 to ‘false’ will re-enable the backup feature.

Again, please use this with caution.  Especially with the current firmware, we recommend frequent backup because, from our experience, it’s not if you’ll have to restore, it’s when.

And last but not least, the news that many of you have been waiting for: Installer.app on iPhone OS 2.0!  Rip Dev Blog updates the progress of Installer.app version 4.0 and says that it’s nearing completion.  They’re currently tying the visuals to the “backend” as they call it and will be running beta tests with the Repo owners shortly.  As Cydia’s documentation points out, life with each installer is relatively the same.  Just because Installer.app is coming out soon doesn’t mean that we’re going to see a whole slew of jailbreak apps available in its initial release.  As long as a developer’s apps fit Apple’s requirements, there is really no reason that they wouldn’t distribute their apps through the iTunes App Store–that is as long as they were accepted into the developer program.  Nonetheless, Installer.app is coming.  We’re ready.

Just one other thing we wanted to mention… for those of you who have been using our Cydia installer list, that’s actually our most popular post at the moment, we’ll create a separate list of Installer.app programs as soon as we see it become available.

Hit the comment link and leave us any suggestions you might have… or even different areas you would like to see us go with the site.  As soon as we see a need and find jailbreaking a worthwhile process, we’ll post a full walkthrough, but, until then, we recommend just holding out for a little while longer.