Steve Jobs had announced during Apple’s special event yesterday that iPhone firmware 2.1 will be released to iPod Touch users on Tuesday and will be available to iPhone users on Friday.

So based on what we have seen in iPhone firmware 2.1 for iPod Touch, here is a glimpse of the iPhone Firmware 2.1 features for iPhone as they are expected to be the same for the iPhone update.

The official list of improvements in iPhone firmware 2.1 are mentioned below:

• Genius playlist creation
• Dramatically reduced time to backup to iTunes
• Improved email reliability, notable 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
• Faster loading and searching of contacts
• Other bug fixes

However, as reported yeaterday Nike + feature will not be available to iPhone users as the receiver (“proprietary low-power 2.4 GHz radio”) that is built-in to the new iPod Touch is not present in the iPhone.

Based on initial reports from iPod Touch users, here are some more changes/improvements that have been observed.

• Faster App updates and installation
• When viewing songs it says Artist And Album underneath the Song title.
• Podcast has more descriptive information
• Can now selectively mute certain sound effects (new mail, key taps)
• More responsive
• Much faster backups

If you have jailbroken and/or unlocked your iPhone then updating your iPhone with the latest firmware is not recommended at least until the iPhone Dev Team have not released the latest version of their Pwnage Tool which can hack iPhone firmware 2.1.

The iPhone Dev Team had reported that thier Pwnage tool worked with iPhone firmware 2.1 (beta 1), however we will need to wait and see if it works with latest iPhone firmware 2.1 version that will be released on Friday.

I am sure iPhone users who have been facing issues such as dropped calls, slow iPhone syncs, iPhone apps crashing issues, 3G reception issues, Apple Logo Screen of Death problem will be happy to see that most of the bugs are being addressed even though in was a little disappointing that the Copy & paste feature did not make it to the feature list of iPhone firmware 2.1.

What do you think? Will you be upgrading to iPhone firmware 2.1 when it is released on Friday?

[via | iPhone Hacks]