iPhone OS 3.0 – One Week Later
// June 22nd, 2009 // No Comments » // iPhone
I’ve been using the latest iPhone OS for just over a week now, and have now had time to give it a thorough going over to see how the new features fit in with my overall iPhone use. That said, I’ve been very disappointed with the lack of applications using the new push functionality – I was expecting Apple to have approved a bunch of push-enabled applications for the launch in order to show off one of their prime features of this new release.
Barring the push functionality, the main features I was interested in was MMS support – not everyone I know has an iPhone to receive email photos, but can receive MMS messages – and the much-requested cut and paste functionality.
MMS messages now exist as part of the new Messages application – what was originally the SMS application. Sending an MMS message is as simple as a normal text message, with the addition of attaching a photo from your image library. The images appear in the iChat-style bubbles of the Messages application, and selecting the photo shows the full-size photo. It’s a great way of sending something a little more immediate than an email, and doesn’t seem like the functionality was just shoved in.
The Internet Massive kept blabbering on about cut-and-paste ever since the iPhone was released, and I never considered it to be a must have feature. I found it difficult to imagine times where I would need it. However, as I’ve been using the iPhone as a business phone there have been many times where it would have saved quite a bit of hassle. Apple’s implementation of cut-and-paste works very well, and the UI is as slick as one would expect: simply select where you want to start cutting, and select the area you want to copy:
Once you’ve copied the the text (or image) you repeat the process to paste. You can now also paste up to 5 images into an email.
Minor enhancements I’ve also found useful include multiple-speed scrubbing in the iPod application, Spotlight support for searching emails, and a much enhanced Application Store.
There’s a few other enhancements which lots of people were requesting, but I’ve not found so useful – landscape email support (I can type perfectly well in portrait mode), voice memos, and internet tethering. I’m also confused by the new Note synchronisation support: it only syncs when tethered to iTunes, but doesn’t sync over-the-air via MobileMe. This is a disappointing oversight, but overall the 3.0 OS release is decent. I’ve not been blown away by it so far, but hopefully once the push-enabled applications start getting approved I’ll be a little more impressed.
