iPhone OS 3.0 Shines

Apple unveiled iPhone OS 3.0 on Tuesday, addressing many of the short-comings iPhone users have had to suffer with in earlier versions of the OS. The most important feature – Cut & Paste – is now there, as is MMS support provided you have a 3G phone.

Apple has also included enhancements that will support the iTunes Store ecosystem including an API that allows developers to handle the purchase of content and services from the iTunes Store. They have scaled up their Push Notification service, allowing an iPhone to receive an application notification even when the application isn’t running. The Push Notification service is centralised meaning that all iPhone applications connect to the same set of notification servers. Apple’s rationale for adopting this architecture is that it eliminates the need to maintain applications running in the background which can significantly reduce standby battery life.

Interestingly, today’s smartphones seem to be just catching up to where the Japanese were with their i-mode service in 2002.

Other iPhone OS 3.0 features include Bluetooth peer-to-peer connectivity to support gaming between phones; inclusion of the Google Mobile Maps service; access to iPod hardware accessories and access to the iPod library.

Many of these feature will also be supported on the iPod Touch.

One of the most import aspects of this OS release is that is will be made available to all existing iPhone customers for free.