I was flying on three flights today from Missoula back to Philadelphia and had a lot of time on my hands (thanks NWA for putting me on three flights for my reward mileage), so I decided to play around with some of the new features in iPhone 3.0. I had just got a copy the other day and got it activated, but hadn’t really played with it much beside normal usage. I had noticed a bunch of nice new features, but I finally had the time to sit down and write about them.
This is the current home page. It doesn’t look too different, but notice that there is a small magnifying glass to the right of the page dots. If you navigate to the left (drag the screen to the right), you are taken to the new search page.
Very nice, and I really like the ease of being able to get to the search function with one flick of the finger. From this page you can search the entire phone, apps, mail, notes, everything. For example, I enter ‘nwa’ and it shows the following:
It have found an e-mail with nwa in it, which happens to be my confirm for the flight I’m currently on. Pressing the item takes you right to the mail (and I assume any other type of item).
Continuing with the search functions, when you go into mail, things look normal as always:
But if you pull the mail down, you will notice a search box shows up to allow you to search that folder:
This is also the case in your contacts:
A very nice thing that has been added (finally) is landscape mode for mail. I just don’t know why this took so long:
And even better when composing an e-mail:
Cut and paste has arrived. Use the magnifyer to position the cursor around where you want to start your selection:
You’ll then see the cut and paste bar show up:
Now press select, and you see these nice little bars that you can grab and move around to allow you to select the extents of your text to copy:
While dragging those around, you’ll see another type of magnifier (and I think this is real cool) showing the text at the extent of the selection:
Here I’ve selected that whole paragraph and the copy option shows up:
Pressing ‘copy’ does just that. To show that it works, I went into notes and created a new note, and positioned the cursor, which then brought up the paste option (if you have text, you will see select / select all / paste):
Press paste and voila:
(In my best Borat voice: “Niiicccceeee!”)
As for some other features that I’ve noticed, here are a few more. First, let me show some of the item I noticed while playing podcasts. While playing a podcast, you will notice some new controls available:
Notice the envelope, 30 second rewind, and speed control options. I haven’t been able to get the envelope to do anything yet. I’m going to assume it must be to mail the link to the podcast to someone, but we’ll see.
I really like the 30 second rewind option. I cant count how many times I’m listening to a podcast or audio book and want to just go back a little to hear something again. The old way was to drag the progress bar, which for me always took me back many minutes instead of just a few seconds. This is a really nice feature.
The speed option is also really nice. This was currently available on a global level for audible books, and I almost always listened to them at 2x. This lets you select this on the current podcast, and offers 1/2x, 1z and 2x. This will really help me get through the mass of podcasts I follow weekly!
Now for some things I really like with the phone functions. Previously, your list of recent calls would show you the name of who called, but there was a problem. Suppose my wife called me, once on the landline, and another from her iPhone. I would only see her name, and now which phone she called from, so I would not know which was the most recent and therefore the most likely for me to reach her on by calling back. That is now fixed:
Also really cool, is that incoming calls not in your address book show you the city associated with the area code!
This is so nice. I can’t tell you how many times I let calls that aren’t in my contacts roll to voice mail because I want to first google the area code to see where the call was coming from before answering. So very nice!
Also added is a voice recorder app. You’ll notice the icon for it on the main page (the first image in this post). I had gotten along without this, but welcome it as it is more useful than typing in a note.
When opening that app, you see a big art-deco microphone:
Pressing the record button of course starts recording:
When done, press pause / stop, and you get into the screen for managing recordings:
You can play them back, but I also really like the share option, which right now lets you e-mail the recording:
Pressing that then takes you into e-mail with the recording as an m4a attachment:
Great for sending some notes to myself, sweet nothings to the wife, or orders to the minions!
I know they added multimedia to SMS, but I didn’t investigate it yet. Not a big deal for me as I mostly send them in e-mails anyway, but I know the younger set likes that feature.
I did look into tethering for Internet access. Apparently it is not enabled by default in the beta, and there are many posts that discuss how to hack it to get it working. The caveat I think is that if you are on AT&T (as all US based iPhone users are), even doing that doesn’t work as AT&T will not allow it. Maybe it works, but I won’t try for right now as I don’t want to get busted on that.
However, this does bring me to one of my major peeves about AT&T. I want to use my iPhone as an Internet access device. I used to do this with my Blackjack on AT&T prior to having an iPhone, and I got 3G with it too. When I moved to an iPhone, I had to go and get Sprint CDMA service, which works quite nicely, but I have to carry around another doodad as well as pay Sprint $60-$70 / month for the service.
I just don’t get AT&T with this. I know they are worried about tethering killing their 3G network, but I could do it with my previous phone! And now they make me pay money to another carrier, which I would gladly pay to them for the ability to not have to carry around another gadget!
All I have to say is its just stinkin’ thinkin’ by telecommunications carriers that just don’t know how to provide good service to their customers. Well, I hope they take off their dunce hats by the time iPhone 3.0 is actually released as I’ll be right there to give them that money!
Finally, I noticed one app that didn’t work, but I hadn’t tried all of them yet. It was my Galaga app, so it wasn’t a big deal to me. I do know that others that I know that have upgraded have had difficulty with many other apps, enough to roll back to 2.2.x. However, I’m sticking with it for a while as I really do like these features that I’ve just discussed and am already very used to them enough that not having them would be very bothersome.