Updated 22/06/2009

As with most of the rest of the Worlds iPhone owners, I updated my iPhone 3G to the long-awaited OS 3.0 on Wednesday 17th June 2009. Surprisingly, it seemed to take far less time to complete than any of the other software updates I’ve applied to my iPhones. As to be expected from what we already knew though, most of the new features are subtle ones. The most obvious is the Messages app, which has replaced the old SMS app. Other than that, theres nothing remarkably obvious to differentiate it from 2.2.1. Not that thats a bad thing.

I’ve been reading about the 100+ new features, both known and hidden, but I wanted to note down the ones I’ve experienced which I particularly like or dislike. I’ll keep adding to this list as time goes on.

The Good

• SMS Previews can be turned off, regardless of whether you have a passcode lock set or not.
  
• Messages that fail to send get added to the conversation, but are marked with an exclamation, which you tap to resend.
• No more waiting for a message to finish sending before starting another
• You can turn off the multiple message alert sound (this would have been more useful in 2.2.1, as ive become used to it now!)
• MMS (needs no explanation!)
• Spotlight search
• Copy & Paste (Going to take some getting used to though. It pops up a lot when you dont want it)
• The call log has little icons to indicate outgoing or incoming calls
• ‘lol’ no longer autocorrects to ‘LOL’ (that was highly irritating)
• ‘fir’ will most often (but not always) autocorrect to ‘for’ (this was so annoying previously. I rarely want to type ‘fir’, but often type it by mistake when typing ‘for’)
• CalDAV support. I can now sync my Google calendar directly to my iPhone, and it updates in the background.

The Bad (IMHO)

• No Battery % meter on non 3G S phones. Why?
• Still cant watch Movies in portrait
• Still cant assign custom message alert tones
• After sending a message, the keyboard stays on screen (why doesnt it disappear if you tap in the conversation area?)

The Ugly (Things that work, but could be better)

• Messages speech bubbles are unnecessarily narrow(er) – I’ve discovered that this does not occur with iPhone 2G handsets.
• Messages icon doesnt look right with a blank speech bubble