The iPhone 3GS is Apple’s current mobile flagship, but most of us using iPhone 3Gs won’t be paying for the upgrade. So instead, we get the new 3.0 firmware not such a bad deal. The free 3.0 upgrade ($10 for iPod touch users) is now available. Indeed, some of you have probably already downloaded it.
It’s sort of like the iPhone was always a pretty good looking guy, but then all these other good looking guys came around so the iPhone had to beef up a bit to keep his thousands of rich girlfriends paying too much at AT&T every month. We’re just going to walk through the new OS’s features point by point rather than boring you with technological soliloquies. Here are the benefits and liabilities of iPhone 3.0.
Spotlight Search: From the mainscreen, a simple swipe to the left brings you to the new Spotlight Search. You see a searchbar on top and the keyboard automatically pops up so there’s no waiting. Its speed? Fast. A few letters gets you a slew of results instantly that pair down as you type. It digs through emails, apps, contacts and music/movies, then click any option and you’re linked right to it. (For instance, click a song and you start playing that song). Limitations? It won’t look through the contents of third party apps, like your individual Tweets, nor will it search Maps, Weather or SMS. But even with a few limitations, Spotlight has far more breadth than the searches available on the Pre or Android. It’s impressive.
Camera: There’s no updating the low megapixel count of old iPhone camera hardware, but the new firmware has undoubtedly improved the experience of taking photos. While you still won’t be taking shots in the dark, general lowlight performance feels greatly improved.
Video: Good news for photos, but what about video? Sadly, Apple has chosen to save video functionality for the iPhone 3GS even though jailbreaking the iPhone can provide existing users with video.
Stereo Bluetooth: The new A2DP stereo Bluetooth profile syncs easily and works without issues. We paired it with this iHome dock and cranked it up. It sounded fine. And even if someone calls during streaming, no problem. It’s just as smooth as when someone interrupts any iPod function.
Mail: Finally, users can not just download but search their email over IMAP. In practical terms, that means you can search for a keyword in your Gmail without opening Gmail in Safari—the old workaround if you couldn’t find an email. On paper, that sounds perfect. In practice, it can lag a bit (mostly when over 3G), but it’s functionally adequate.
Safari Autofill: The new Safari gets a small but convenient upgrade with Autofill, the ability to enter address/contact info into fields automatically. When facing one of those dreaded pages full of contact info, you click the first field, click the “autofill” button on the keyboard and presto, the fields fill in like magic. However, if you’re using it to pay for something online, you’ll be on your own for credit card information.
Push Notifications: Maybe the biggest new feature in iPhone 3.0 is that apps can utilize push notifications. In other words, an app like AIM could pop up an instant message even if you weren’t in that application. As you can imagine, there isn’t a lot of third-party push content to test at the moment possibly because Apple isn’t approving background notification equipped apps until after 3.0 rolls out. So while we couldn’t stack push apps to the sky to see how the iPhone could handle them, we did try Tap Tap Revenge 2. But Tapulous, makers of the game, clearly has some profile syncing issues as we found in testing and documented within forums online. That leaves us with developer clips that have leaked of the AIM beta, which can give you a look at how Push notifications should work. We’ll update this post with more push notification impressions as they are available, and will be discussing it further in our iPhone 3.0 applications roundup.
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