I spent Thursday, July 10, installing the pre-released version of the iPhone 2.0 firmware on my first generation iPhone. I couldn't wait to start playing with the native iPhone apps I saw in the iTunes App Store. The journey was the reward in terms of getting the firmware update done ahead of time. By doing so I avoided the congestion of Friday and could focus on the real fun and excitement.

Did the App Store and the apps that were in it at launch time live up to my expectations? In many ways yes, in a few ways no.

I think some of the native iPhone apps are home runs because they enable new classes of users to join the iPhone community. A great example is Epocrates Rx.

My wife Kathleen is a pediatrician and currently a Treo 650 user because until that Friday, she couldn't run Epocrates on an iPhone. When I showed her Epocrates Rx running on my iPhone, she was sold. In every way it's better than the PalmOS version of the application.

Kathleen and I are planning to buy her an iPhone 3G, but we haven't found the right opportunity due to the limited availability of the 8-Gigabyte version (which is what she wants). I lined up for an iPhone at the Apple Store in King Of Prussia, PA last Friday, but they were going to run out of 8-Gigabyte devices before they got to me, so I bailed out.

One native iPhone app that totally surprised me is Shazam. This is a program you can use to identify music that you hear playing nearby but don't recognize. I downloaded Shazam the moment I heard about it, and it perfoms surprisingly well. About the only music it hasn't identified for me was some stuff I heard streamed on CBC Radio 3, which doesn't surprise me because it's local Canadian content.

In terms of disappointments, I think the development team at IconFactory (privately) has to be less than thrilled with the functionality of Twitterific for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Twitterific absolutely works, and it brings a few new features to the table that Hahlo currently doesn't have (such as Twitpic integration). However, I think Twitterific desperately needs the Push Notification Service announced at WWDC.

The Push Notification Service is not available yet and will not be for a while. So native apps like Twitterific are less differentiated from iPhone web apps than they should be.

There's no doubt that a lot of attention is being paid to Omni Group's entry in the App Store. I am a huge fan of OmniFocus for the "Getting Things Done" approach to managing myself. OmniFocus for iPhone and iPod Touch is the most complex and nuanced native app I've seen for the iPhone. I really want it to work.

I looked at the requirements for syncing, saw that Omni Group claimed that it worked with iDisk from MobileMe or WebDAV, and concluded that I had what I needed to start using it right away. So I went ahead and paid my $20.

In fact, WebDAV isn't working yet in a number of cases, and that includes my case. I upgraded my company's server so it includes properly signed digital certificates issued by a third party, and that didn't solve my WebDAV problem. So now I'm out even more than the $20 for OmniFocus for the iPhone.

Omni Group was going to get $20 from me one way or the other, but if they had said that WebDAV support was immature or if they required MobileMe, I wouldn't have bought OmniFocus for iPhone on the day the App Store went live.

I ask experienced iPhone users who have tried OmniFocus: Won't many iPhone users be totally bewildered by OmniFocus syncing unless they use MobileMe? How many previously satisfied OmniFocus desktop customers will become somewhat disgruntled by an experience like mine?

Omni Group is doing everything they can to get the bugs out of WebDAV syncing. They are churning out "Sneaky Peek" updates to the OmniFocus desktop app. Rate of change on the iPhone app has apparently been limited by the approval process that Apple is using.

The longer people pound on the iPhone 2.0 Firmware, the more problems they are experiencing. I realize that a lot of these problems are magnified by stability issues with some popular iPhone native apps. However, my sense is that Apple rushed this firmware into production to make the iPhone 3G release date.

I think they could have done better on stability if they had been more realistic on the core software feature set. Remember from iPhone Version 1, we waited months for some features that we have come to take for granted. I'm thinking of things like Core Location which didn't make it into the firmware until January 2008.

Now that we've seen some of the stability issues that remain in Firmware 2.0, I think most of us would agree that we could do with one or two fewer features and a more incremental upgrade.