Apple today made a series of important announcements at the World Wide Developers conference in San Francisco. One of the most important of these was the release of iPhone OS 3.0.

Apple’s  senior vice president of iPhone software Scott Forstall did the honors, introducing the new operating system with a video montage of users and developers singing the praises of the new mobile operating system. OS 3.0 will be available for free on June 17 for the iPhone. Touch Users will pay $9.99. Here are some of the new features of OS 3.0 as they were highlighted by Forstall during his presentation:

• Cut/copy/paste/undo (works across all apps), is finally available
• Landscape mode now featured in Mail/Notes/Messages
• MMS support, so users can send and receive photos, contacts, audio files, and locations in the standard
• Messages app. (caution: 29 carriers in 76 countries will support MMS at launch, but not on AT&T in the US until later this summer)
• Vastly improved search in more apps  – mail (even mail on a server), calendars, media, notes, etc.
• Spotlight  will let you search for everything in one place, right from the first page of the home screen
• An improved iTunes will allow you to purchase movies, television shows, music and ebooks right from your iPhone or Touch.
• Safari on the iPhone brings almost all of the improvements of Mac Safari to the iPhone platform
  Increased HTML support, including more languages and easier language switching
• New theft-related features allow you to send a stolen phone a message that will wipe your data off the phone, although it can of course be put back by iTunes if your phone is recovered.
• iPhone accessories will be able to work through either the Dock connector or Bluetooth
• The iPhone will finally finally support Google maps with GPS features, including full turn-by-turn directions.
• Push notifications now allow for background pop-up alerts, sounds, and App icon badges.

Forstall brought up a number of developers to give the audience a taste of what the new operating system can do. A new high-level auto racing game was introduced by its developer, who sang the praises of the new OS for developers. A medical app named Airstrip was demoed, showing how the new push notification feature will allow vital signs to be monitored remotely by doctors in emergency situations.

An ebook application, Scrollmotion, was introduced, allowing for purchase of items directly from the app, including 50 magazines, 70 newspapers and over 1 million books. Scrollmotions also has book publishing features. Perhaps the most exciting of he featured apps is a new TomTom GPS app, expected out this summer, with turn-by-turn directions and all of the other features of TomTom hardware, including a kit to allow safe installation of the iPhone in your car.

Also demoed were a head-to-head gaming network, a remote sensing science education app, an app which allows the user to locate and reserve a nearby Zipcar from your phone, and an app to control your guitar and your amp from your iPhone. There were several problems with the apps during the demos, but those problems will certainly be ironed out before they become downloadable.

This is the OS that will put the iPhone at the top of the enterprise smartphone heap. Especially when taken together with the new iPhone 3GS, it silences the critics that said that the iPhone was lacking enterprise features. That is no longer true, if it ever was. This new OS makes the iPhone as comfortable in the board room as it is in the rec room.

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Entry was posted on Monday, June 8th, 2009 at 5:35 pm under Commercial Software, Firmware, iPhone, iPod Touch.  Print This Post

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