For those who haven’t been living under a HTC Brick the last couple of weeks, you’ve gotta have noticed that the iPhone OS 3.0 presentation was today. Here’s the list of what Apple chose to include this time around, and let me say it straight; I’m not dissapointed.
- MMS. Finally, Swirly get’s knocked off it’s feet. MMS will be integrated from 3.0, and it will, opposed to swirly, be free.
- Local Maps. Apps will now be able to store maps locally instead of downloading instances of the locations you’re viewing all the time, so now, the GPS will actually be useful.
- Landscape keyboard. It’s about time. The landscape keyboard will be available in all the framework apps.
- Cut/Copy/Paste. Yeah, it took you long enough! It’s said to work on all apps, hands down.
- Push notifications. This means, to you non-techies out there, that all apps will be able to push updates to you like the mobileme mail already does. For example, instant messages and notifications in the facebook app will be pushed to your home screen so you won’t have to open the app. Great.
- iPhone Dock and accessories. I won’t go into much detail here, but the bottom line is you can connect the iPhone to a LOT of stuff, with apps communicating to whatever you’re connecting it to. Awesome.
- Spotlight. Wow. To the far left of your home screen(Springboard), a new page will be added; Spotlight. It searches the entire unit for whatever you’re typing.
- Search. Spotlight is now present within apps, so you can search the mail, text messages, iPod(!) and whatnot. Sah-weet.
- CalDAV. No idea what this is, but I hear it’s great for enterprise calendars. That’s obviously a good thing.
- Voice memos. Well, it’s also about time you can record your own genious inputs without having to download an app for $0.99.
- Stocks. Although I’ve never used the stock app, it’s now getting updates that will give way more info, and keep you better up to date.
- In-app purchases. This one’s interesting. Think of it like Live! or Playstation Network. You buy a game, and now you can buy expansions for it, or even subscribe(think WoW). That’s great news for non-jailbreakers, at least.
- Peer-to-Peer. Now you can swap info via bluetooth(like vCards), and play together via the bt-network. That’s pretty cool
So, that’s about it. Still no video-recording, but there’s always jailbreaking for that. No biggie.
The SDK ships today for developers, and the iPhone OS 3.0 will be available this summer for free for iPhone users(even the first generation, bar some features), and will only be $9,95 for you iPod Touch users out there.
