After much speculation, iPhone 1.1.2 has been released—sort of. While it’s not yet appearing for everyone who runs the iPhone software update check in iTunes, you can snag the rather hefty 160MB file directly from Apple. To install, you’ll need to drop the ZIP file in your ~/Library/iTunes/iPhone Software Updates folder and then connect your iPhone and option-click the “Check for Updates” button; iTunes will give you a dialog box from which you can select the ZIP file and it’ll carry out the update as normal. Or you could just wait until it shows up in iTunes. Any moment now.

I’ve only been running 1.1.2 for a matter of minutes, but there are already a few new features. The biggest change, as predicted, is the International support, which you’ll finder under Settings -> General -> International. You can change the language of the entire phone into French, German, or Italian (wait, when is Italy getting the iPhone?); I changed it into French for kicks, so I could check my courriel. You can also enable four additional keyboard layouts: English (UK), French, German, and again the mysterious Italian; doing so puts a little globe icon next to the spacebar whenever the keyboard comes up. Tapping it will cycle through the keyboard layouts you’ve enabled. One nice touch I discovered was that if you toggle into the number/punctuation mode, it replaces the $ key with the appropriate currency symbol for your layout: £ for the UK, € for French, German, and Italian.

The International section also contains an “Asian Font” setting, in which you can pick either Chinese or Japanese (what, no Thai? Korean?). And “Region Format” lets you control how information like date, time, and phone numbers are formatted. You can choose from a bunch of different locales for each language. There’s still no built-in support for Arabic and Hebrew in Safari, though. Apparently some regions get more loving than others.

1.1.2 brings a couple of other small additions as well. The phone’s battery charge now shows up in iTunes, next to your phone icon under Deviccies (pictured above). And your custom ringtones—both those purchased through iTunes and those you transfer with software like Ambrosia’s iToner—now appear in their own “Custom” section of Settings -> Sounds -> Ringtones, above the “System” tones (and all of my iToner ringtones remained intact through the update).

The one downside to the update—which, in and of itself is actually a good thing—is that Apple has patched the TIFF exploit that could be used to jailbreak the phone and install third-party apps. All third-party apps disappeared along with the update. The good news is that iPhone hackers have already apparently cracked 1.1.2, so look for a new jailbreak procedure shortly.

The biggest question for me, which I’ve yet to answer, is whether 1.1.2 does anything about the much-discussed battery draining problems which seem to have plagued many an iPhone user. I’ll be checking it out in the next few days, and shall not rest (or recharge) until I’ve discovered the truth.

[via MacNN]

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This entry was posted on Saturday, November 10th, 2007 at 1:18 pm and is filed under iPhone News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.