I acquired the ipsw file last night, it’s important you get the right version for a first generation phone, it’s different to the one available for 3g phones. You need iPhone1,1_3.0_7A341_Restore.ipsw for 1st generation non 3g iPhones. I updated the iPhone this morning and it all went without a hitch.
All my settings were restored along with all the purchased apps. It’s worth mentioning here that the iPhone was Jailbroken although still on the o2 network. This update has restored the iPhone and I will do without all the apps only available on Jailbroken phones for the time being.
OK so what’s it like?
Well to be honest not a lot different to the previous OS. Yes cut and paste is useful and about time. Find my iPhone is fun and potentially useful if you lose it. I can see a use for voice memos and the ability to select multiple images from the photo library for pasting into emails is another ‘about time too’ improvement.
I still don’t have MMS but I’m not sure if that’s due to it being a 1st generation iPhone or down to a restriction by o2. I’m using an iPhone PAYG SIM card. I don’t understand why that should be, MMS works perfectly well over EDGE with other phones including my Blackberry.
Despite there being no GPS on the iPhone the location aware apps including Twitterific, Google Maps, Vicinity and of course the camera, have no problems locating me to within an acceptably small area using celltower triangulation and I suspect WiFi access points via Skyhook. Google Maps also seems to be a lot slicker updating even over EDGE.
And finally search. Accessed by swiping a finger across the touch screen to the right. Very nice, very quick and accurate searches across all apps. That will be useful.

One notable oddity relates to the current Skype app. On first launch it throws up an error message suggesting it’s not compatible, but clicking through that launches the app and logs in to Skype. It does work, and the error message does not appear on subsequent launches.

That’s it so far, I’ve used the iPhone all day without a hitch, a crash or any other malfunction.