It’s not like Steve Jobs to roll with buggy products. That’s Microsoft’s game.

But one can’t help but notice the laundry list of problems Apple’s iPhone has displayed since launch. The Oompa-Loompas at Infinite Loop must have been under serious threat from their own fearless Willy Wonka to deliver on deadline. How else do you explain some of these so-called software updates that fix the most basic of problems, such as dropped calls and super-easy security breaches?

For Apple, this is Steve Jobs’ egg-in-the-face moment in the spotlight. All the years of calling out Bill Gates at Microsoft for bad products is coming back to haunt him. Take the iPhone’s “white screen of death” problem. If you aren’t familiar with this, it works like this: Your iPhone screen goes completely white and there’s no button or way to correct it. If you could, you’d pull the battery out. A person is forced to wait for the battery to die and then restart the phone. Microsoft had a less disturbing but huge media blowup over its Win 95 “blue screen of death” problem. Is Apple the new Microsoft?

Anyhow, here’s what Apple promises iPhone update 2.1 will perform (good luck):

iPhone 2.1 Software Update

iPhone version 2.1 contains many bug fixes and improvements, including the following:

• decrease in call set-up failures and call drops

• significantly improved battery life for most users

• dramatically reduced time to backup to iTunes

• improved email reliability, notably fetching email from POP and Exchange accounts

• faster installation of 3rd party applications

• fixed bugs causing hangs and crashes if you have lots of 3rd party applications

• improved performance in text messaging

• faster loading and searching of contacts

• improved accuracy of the 3G signal strength display

• repeat alert up to two additional times for incoming text messages

• option to wipe data after ten failed passcode attempts

• Genius playlist creation

For feature descriptions and complete instructions, see the user guide for your iPhone at:

<http://www.apple.com/support/manuals/iphone>