All of the beta releases of the iPhone 2.1 firmware have included versions of their Push Notification service, due to release in September. However, beta 4 of the firmware has now removed it, with a note that it is “for futher development”.

We’re not sure if it’s still going to make it out by September, but it certainly doesn’t look good. I hope we see it soon, because it promises to make a lot of applications much more useful.

Just a few weeks after its first update, the Samsung Instinct has received its second major firmware update.

They’ve chosen to roll out this update in an interesting fashion. Rather than pushing out one big update for the phone, they’re pushing out a series of updates for each affected feature. The updates include:

• Picture mail (fixed some errors)
• Browser (rendering optimizations)
• Sprint TV/Radio
• Sprint Navigation (better battery usage)
• Sprint E-mail
• Sprint Music Store
• Visual Voicemail

It sounds like a nice collection of updates for an already popular phone.

For those of you having problems with 3G reception and dropped calls, help is apparently on the way. After a few days of bickeringa bout whether it was a hardware or software problem, Apple seems to be working on a firmware update to fix the problems.

According to IntoMobile, this fix will be part of the 2.1 firmware. Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if they bring it out more quickly as a 2.0.2 update, but that remains to be seen.

This could be pretty handy — Google has just created an iPhone optimized version of Google Translate, which could be very useful overseas. As with other iPhone-optimized sites, it probably works quite well on any decent mobile browser.

To use it, simply point your phone to translate.google.com. Also, as their blog points out, you need to be very careful with roaming data usage, as it can add up FAST.

I don’t have any foreign trips planned for the near future, but I’ll certainly keep this in mind next time I do!

It isn’t the 2.1 firmware that we’ve been excited about, but this should be useful nonetheless. All Apple will say is that it contains “bug fixes”. There are plenty of them in 2.0 (random crashes, slowdowns, etc), so hopefully this will clear a lot of that up.

I’m downloading it now, so I’ll post if I find anything good.

More than a year after Apple introduced it with the iPhone, and some months after Sprint lauched it with the Instinct, Verizon has finally brought visual voicemail to one of their phones.

At the current time it only works with the revamped LG Voyager, known as the Voyager Refresh. However, it’s expected to arrive on other phones very soon — maybe the Dare?

The very popular Samsung Instinct has just received a firmware update. To update your phone, go to:

[Menu] –> [Settings] –> [General] and choose “Update phone”.

The update has a few nice tweaks:

• Increased audio volume when using Bluetooth.
• More stable signal and battery bars.
• Allows you to set a saved image as your wallpaper.
• Allows recurring events in the calendar.
• Various improvements to the web browser.

They also announced that a more signficant update was coming later in the year, but they haven’t revealed what that might include.

If you have an Instinct, what do you think of this update? Worth getting?

There were various reports today that Apple is testing their 2.1 firmware for the iPhone, and one major feature will be improved GPS tools. In particular, items such as direction and speed tracking are reported to be in there. While I can see their usefulness, why are they necessary? If you get a mere two points from a GPS, you can very easily determine speed and heading, and theoretically could have a full-featured turn-by-turn system using that info.

I’ll admit I’m not an expert on GPS, but that’s how it looks to me. Am I missing something here?

It appears that the iPhone’s much-heralded background push notification might show up with the version 2.1 firmware. I had assumed that it would be there with 2.0, but that’s not been the case.

Background push notification is a pretty slick concept. It allows applications to receive small updates even when they’re not running. For example, a gmail app could receive updates that tell me how many new messages I have, and a small icon would appear above the gmail icon. You can see how it looks with the Facebook app in the screenshot to the right.

Of course, the Facebook icon can only update after you run the application and it can check your inbox status, which kind of defeats the purpose of it. Hopefully this update gets this feature off the ground, because it will be very useful for a lot of apps.

The WordPress app for the iPhone has finally been released and you can find it in the iTunes app store here. I created a draft of this post using it, and it works pretty well. It certainly won’t be my primary blogging tool, but it’ll be very nice to have when I’m on the road. Give it a shot and let us know what you think of it.

Mickey