If you felt left out of the party yesterday, as Apple introduced the next-generation iPhone 3.0 OS, cheer up, the good folks in Cupertino were kind enough to post up a Quicktime video stream of the entire event.
In the presentation, Apple unveiled a few key features in the upcoming iPhone platform that many iPhone die-hards have been complaining about for the past, oh, couple years or so. Apple finally enabled some good, old-fashioned cut-and-paste functionality throughout the entire iPhone OS 3.0 platform. MMS is now a bona fide iPhone feature, as is SMS text message forwarding. And, like any good smartphone, the iPhone has finally caught up to the crowd with a universal “Spotlight Search” that will dig through every piece of data (email, contacts, calendar data, etc.) on your phone for information matching your search query – Mail, Notes, iPod and Calendar have their own integrated search feature.
The iPhone wowed the smartphone masses in 2007 with its automatic screen rotation feature, but has since been critiqued for not allowing landscape view in many Apple-made iPhone applications. So, to appease the throngs of iPhone users looking for a wider-than-tall view of their Mail and Messages applications (among others). Better yet, the landscape view comes with a wide-aspect, landscaped keyboard that may or may not be more comfortable to use (depending on your typing style).
Apple’s long-delayed “Push Background Notifications” system has apparently been polished to the point where the iPhone maker is comfortable going live with the service in iPhone 3.0 OS. Apple explained that they wanted to stay away from backgrounding applications – that is, running applications in the background, even when they’re inactive – in order to cut down on battery drain. Instead, background notifications will “push” updates to certain applications (like Messages and AIM), allowing them to receive messages even when the application is closed.
The presentation covers a lot more. Things like a tweaked iPhone application subscription model and support for turn-by-turn GPS navigation software are included. Hit up Apple’s iPhone 3.0 OS webcast here.