iPhone 3.0 observations

I installed the latest iPhone OS (3.0) on my iPhone 3G the other day. Yeah, yeah, why do I even bother with such an old phone, why not upgrade.. I'm cheap, that's why :) Sure, I'd like to have all of the cool new features that the "3G S" includes, but I can't see paying $500-$600 for them, so for the time being, I'll live without the ability to record videos and a compass.

But I digress, this is about the OS, not the phone. Like I said, I upgraded to 3.0 the other day. The upgrade went well for the most part. There was an issue with iTunes and the phone talking after the installation/reboots, but those were related to iTunes on Vista I think.

Way back when the first announcements were made, I thought I would see these features:

• Cut/Copy/Paste
• MMS
• Stereo Bluetooth (aka A2DP)
• Ability to send multiple pictures in a single email

But, of course, AT&T said no to MMS (sure, they didn't say "no", they said "it'll take us time." - might as well have said "no").

I "found" cut/copy/paste accidentally. It wasn't quite as nice as I would have liked - but in truth, I'm not sure what I'd like - ideally, I could make some sort of swiping gesture to select text and then the next tap would make the little popup guy appear. Maybe it works like that and I'm doing something wrong, but mostly it works.

Stereo Bluetooth I've not seen though. Perhaps because I don't own a pair of stereo bluetooth headphones - that's a combination of "what's the point?" and "I'm cheap" and "oh, is it supported now?" - but I saw nothing in the Bluetooth configuration that looked any different than it did before. Maybe I'll pick something up at Frys just to test this.

This leaves emailing multiple pictures at one time. It took me a while to figure out how this worked. I usually select a picture and then while looking at it, click the "email" application. With 3.0, tapping on the "email" button while looking at the Camera Roll lets me select any number of pictures that I can then "share" (which means email). Pretty cool, but as with earlier versions, a scaled down (800x600) picture gets sent rather than the native resolution (1600x1200).

But here's something cool I noticed - if you select a bunch of pictures using the email button from the camera roll and then "Copy" them, you can open up the email application and paste them into the body of a new email and magically, they get sent in the native resolution, and even have "real" filenames (if you consider "IMG_0102.JPG" and such a real name anyway).