I guess I’ll start off by talking about the features I thought were pretty cool. I always ran into situations where I wanted to copy a website url and text it to someone, or copy and paste a message to someone else. So, the first thing I checked out was the “copy and paste” feature. I was impressed with how easy it was to use. You press and hold on the screen until the magnifying glass shows up, let go then a menu pops up asking what you want to do, “select” or “select all”. Choose one and then it says “copy”. Press and hold again. When you let go, it gives you the option to “paste”. Easy enough.

Next thing I checked out was the landscape keyboard. I know a lot of people have been waiting for this and it’s pretty cool. I personally don’t like the landscape keyboard because I feel that I have to reach my thumbs out too far to press the middle keys, but maybe I just have to get used to it. I can see this causing less typos though because the keys are larger and more spread out.

Spotlight Search. When you flick the home page all the way to the left, Spotlight Search comes up and it searches pretty much everywhere on your iPhone for things. You can search for apps installed on your iPhone, contacts, emails, songs, etc. I can see this being very useful when searching for an app I have lost somewhere on the 9 or so pages.

Shake to Shuffle. Not highly impressive, but works. Shake your iPhone when you’re listening to your iPod and it randomly shuffles to another song. yay…ZzZzzZ…

Now on to some of the features I was disappointed about. I’ll just list them quickly and briefly explain why.

1. MMS. Won’t be available until end of summer.
2. Tethering (connecting your phone to your laptop as a modem). Won’t be available for AT&T.
3. Sync Notes. Requires that you have Mac OS 10.5.7 or above. I am still using Tiger at home, which is 10.4
4. Stereo Bluetooth. I have old bluetooth headphones that I used to use for my iPod. I was able to pair it to my iPhone and the sound transmits to the headphones, but the button controls located on the headphones do not function (previous, next, play, pause, volume). LAME! They probably plan on come out with “iPhone compatible” bluetooth headphones. Great, more money.
5. Folders for apps was probably just a rumor as I haven’t seen anything on it yet.
6. Video only available for the new iPhone 3G S.
7. Voice control only available for the new iPhone 3G S.
8. Compass only available for the new iPhone 3G S.

As you can see, I have a larger list of disappointments. I think the only real thing in the 3.0 update that I will be making use of is the “copy and paste” feature. But I really can’t say this update was completely disappointing just yet. There are actually a couple features that we have to wait and see what happens with, like Push. Supposedly the “Push” feature was added with this update. But I have yet to see an app utilize this feature. For those of you that don’t know what it is, Push will allow an app to send a notification to your phone even while the app isn’t running. An example would be an instant messaging app notifying you that someone just sent you a message.

So, I guess it’s just a waiting game then. As with the previous iPhone 2.0 software, we have to wait until developers come out with some cool apps that utilize some of the other new features. We also have to wait until all the bugs are found and fixed. Ok, and I guess I would just be a lot happier if I just give in and bought the new iPhone 3G S. We’ll see… o_O