Submitted by Today, Apple officially released version 3.0 of its iPhone operating system, a Mac OS X derivative for the iPhone and iPod Touch. It comes packed with a whole boatload of improvements and changes, so it’s sure worth it to upgrade your iPhone or Touch.
iPhone OS 3.0 finally brings cut/copy/paste to the iPhone and Touch, a feature many had been asking for. Another feature that everyone had been asking for – and you ask yourself, why wasn’t it in there in the first place – is the landscape keyboard. When you rotate your device, the on-screen keyboard will flip accordingly.
Moving on to features that are actually cool, it also brings Spotlight to the iPhone and Touch, making it possible to quickly find stuff on your device. Another very cool addition is Find my iPhone, which uses MobileMe to find your phone on a map in case you lost it – it also comes with remote wipe in case you won’t be able to retrieve it. I also like the shake to undo feature, which means you can shake your device to undo any action.
The operating system has also been optimised across the board, meaning better overall performance, as well as a smoother browsing experience in Safari. You can update your iPhone via iTunes for free; Touch owners will have to pay 9.95 USD.
Installing as we speak. Wish there were bg apps though.
I’ve had 3.0 installed since Saturday, and so far I’m quite impressed with it on my 3G, it is a bit laggy in some places, and iStat shows far higher memory usage, with quite a few page-in and page-out’s going on.
landscape SMS is a god send, it’s a shame that the 3G didn’t get Voice Control but can’t have it all ways I guess.
It´s really disappointingly laggy and glitchy. Any scrolling except in Contacts is stuttery stutters like it´s jailbroken with tons of background daemons. I was hoping for performance increase, butthis is a major letdown. Hopefully will be fixed by a .1 update. New features are cool, though.
Sorry, but it’s spiffier here. Might be something wrong with your installation.
When I first restart my iPhone, either forced restart or turning off and then back on it is super fast, but after a day with 3.0 is does begin to lag, I have iStat on my iPhone 3G and it shows a hell of a lot of Pagein’s and Outs and not much free RAM.
So I can see what they means about it being laggy in some areas, looking at the RAM usage between 2.X and 3.0 is quiet large after a days usage, 2.X about half the RAM was being used, usually 80% of the used RAM being “Wired”, but with 3.0 only 40% is used as “Wired” RAM but far more RAM is “Active” than in 2.X
It can be laggy, but it’s absolutely less laggy that the final BETA 5 build. Mind you, I’m still on the GM firmware they released after WWDC (ah, the benefits of slapping down my $99)
The GM version is identical to the released version, same build number, same md5.
Love the trolling. How’s the biting today?
I’ve installed it and it looks about the same, besides the few mentioned new features.
I’m I missing something, or is this just a minor update?
I’m debating whether to get the update for my touch (and I’m running a 1st gen still). There’s a few things but most are for the new iPhone or even older iPhones. Sure, there are a few big things (Spotlight, Copy and Paste) but I feel most of the improvements don’t really apply to us…
Does the 1st Gen have Bluetooth? I can’t recall if it has, as all I can see as a bonus for touch users is the Bluetooth stuff, but not sure if it’s only the 2G thats got bluetooth
Nope, doesn’t even have bluetooth
Hmm http://www.hara.ipwn.me/blog/?p=246 has a run down of the features Touch 1G users get, it does seem a bit spatial, doesn’t seem very inspiring to warrant the upgrade cost for you guys.
Don’t get me wrong – I love my iPod Touch. I guess I was just expecting some obvious, amazing new features.
Bluetooth headset is pretty nice as I use Skype, but now Skype doesn’t work at all
Guess Skype needs to update their app.
Performance seems about the same.
Edited 2009-06-17 19:26 UTC
Skype works on my iPhone 3G with the 3.0 GM release, it’s the same build as the public release… hmm… I did get an error yesterday when using it about an API call, but today it’s been fine
Well, you are missing about 10$ in your wallet.
Seriously, I did expected a fee for upgrading, something like 5$. But 10$ for many features that should have been in the OS a long time ago (landscape keyboard, copy/paste)?
Did Apple charged the same fee for the 1.0 to 2.0 upgrade? I have a 2nd-gen Touch, so it already came with 2.0.
Edited 2009-06-17 20:05 UTC
I think you had to pay $20 for the 2.0 update.
I just tried installing 3.0 and I keep getting the iPhone Activation Server is unavailable error. Went over to MacRumors and other people are getting the same error. Seems like another botched software rollout from Apple.
yeah, i’m getting the same message. The server’s probably being overwhelmed.
I really hate sticking up for Apple but perhaps the problem lies with the phone company? If it’s an activation error, more than likely the servers are swamped with everyone trying to update and reactivate the phone. Happened when v2.0 came out last year.
so is the solution just to wait? I mean i don’t have to call att do i?
Ah, so naive. The software update is downloadable. It just won’t install when trying to connect to Apple’s servers. This occurs over the Internet through Itunes and has nothing to do with the phone company. Apple botches things VERY often, but is just better at covering its tracks than other companies… and better at promoting its image rather than its technical merits.
It was an error though iTunes. After I turned off my airport and tried installing the update it finally went through. It’s Apple’s servers not the phone company.
Ive performed the update without any problems, although one funny quirky thing i found was that the update appeared on my mac laptop before my friends windows version of itunes, i was downloading the update and his machine kept stating that his phone was already up to date with 2.2, apple looking after their own
Ive found the phone is quicker, switching between apps is quicker, typing messages in both mail and sms/mms is quicker with no lag.
Copy and paste works well as does the undo shake
Love the search / spotlight integration, being able to search the whole phone is very handy, ive also noticed that the spotlight search integration also is used when typing names in the to field in mail.
Voice record, cool freebie app, works as advertised, nothing really to add.
Being able to set the home button to other things now is very handy, i have set the home button to the camera.
Finally have the ability to sync notes in Apple mail with the notes on the iphone, big win there. I didn’t really bother with notes on either on the phone or the mac as there was no easy way of syncing, so i used to send myself emails.
Landscape in both mail and sms/mms is pretty cool, although i never really had a problem using portrait, although i can see how this will help other users.
MMS works well, again, i think ill really only notice this for recieving texts as for many of my pictures i send and receive these through email.
Find my phone, remote wipe and being able to send a message to the phone is a really good feature. Just the other day i left my phone at home. I got halfway to work and realised i had left it, however that didn’t stop me becoming paranoid, did i leave it on top of my car and drive off etc.. having find my phone would have been a godsend for my paranoid mind. One cool little feature i didn’t read, was that when you send a message to your phone using the find my phone part of the web site, when the message has been displayed on the phone, you will receive an email confirming the message was delivered.
Overall as you’ll probably gather im very pleased with the update and am still impressed that i can gain this functionality without having to buy another phone or incur any other cost.
I can’t wait to see what the developers will come up with the new api’s in 3.0, such as the peer to peer networking etc..
If you’re getting this error, just wait a while and try again. Apple’s technicians would need to fix the server – probably because they planned the roll out poorly and didn’t anticipate an overloaded server.
In response to someone who didn’t know what was updated, just check out apple’s webpage listing the upgrades. There are a bunch that have resulted from past complaints about major shortcomings of the iphone – meaning that some updates should be very handy (like cut-and-paste).
so all i did was wait a few minutes and then tried again. my phone is updating now…
Just to help those who are confused, I got some kind of error about itunes not being able to connect to the iphone part way through the installation. The iphone just had to restart itself a few times.
Wait out the process and it should update just fine.
Since a few weeks after I first got my iPhone, it’s been very sluggish. Sometimes, it’ll take 5 to 10 seconds to respond to input. Sometimes it’s a bit faster. I’ve tried rebooting it, and I’ve even tried doing a full restore. When I did the restore, it was faster for maybe a day before it want back to being a snail again. The only thing unusual is that I have about 13GB of movies on it, but just having a lot of files on it would be a stupid reason to be slow.
So I updated to 3.0 today. I too had problems with connecting to the activation server, so I did the trick where I disconnected the network after it started decompressing the image, and then it started updating just fine. I was really hoping the update would have solved some of the responsiveness problems, but no. I notice that Safari seems to be _slightly_ faster, but other than that, it’s still frustratingly slow.
and you didn’t think to take it in to have it worked on? that is not normal behavior.
Well, I just tried an experiment. I freed up a bunch of storage space by deselecting a bunch of movies and then rebooted.
Now it’s snappier than ever and has been ever since.
So I guess a 16GB iPhone is really more like a 10GB iPhone.
I thought that the update would be worth it just for the ability to use my Bluetooth headphones/headset, which seems to work both with videos and music so far.
It doesn’t work with the Voice Memos applications, unfortunately, so I’m guessing that the upgrade doesn’t support headsets on iPod touch.
One of my applications had been crashing and that’s working again, so between that and the Bluetooth enhancement, that’s worth the US$9.95 (same as the 2.0 upgrade) though I wish they’d gone further. Maybe, in a future 3.x they will.
Sad to think that we have to download 252 MB (on mine) to get security updates. I’ll be happy when they figure out how to break down the changes.
If an app uses the keyboard, does that mean the landscape keyboard is automatically available or does the app builder have to change the code to provide the landscape option?
Developer. But it always was down to the developer. The keyboard always worked in landscape if you cared to implement a landscape view – it’s just that Apple didn’t do that with any apps except for Safari in 1.0 -> 2.21.
My iPhone is snappier with this upgrade. Had some trouble with web browsing immediately after the upgrade, but I reset safari and it’s running great now.
You can also run XP apps on your iPhone if you the following software
http://www.iphonewinadmin.com
http://www.aikotech.com/thinserver.htm
No, you can access Windows applications running on a Windows computer. You can’t run Windows applications on the iPhone itself.
This is nothing more than a VNC/RDP client.
I was hoping to be able to tether to my Linux netbook, but it seems you need iTunes for the tethering to work.
A little disappointing, I don’t want to pay for mobile internet *and* a phone with the exact same service.
You don’t need itunes for tethering to work, if your carrier hasn’t enabled tethering then there are hacked carrier files floating around the internet that you can (or at least could up until a late beta) of itunes import which would then enabled tethering on the phone, from then on it is just a normal bluetooth network connection, no itunes required.
As well as using itunes I also believe there is a site which you can visit on your phone which will let you download hacked carrier files.
The alternative it to go through the proper channels with your network to enable tethering (hope they don’t suck like O2)
This morning I got a pop-up error “Baseband core dump in progress”.. which then stopped the phone (calling, texting, data) working for about 2 or 3 minutes. LOL. New one on me. Anyone else seen this one yet?
it has been noted that some non 3.0 compliant apps can cause memory leaks. do some searching someone has compiled a list.
(i would post the link but i’m stuck typing w/ one hand and searching right now is out. torn bicep)
The parent post may be misleading. There isn’t really any such thing as a non compliant app. There are apps in the app store that are listed as 3.0 tested. This does not mean the other apps don’t work or are not compliant in any way at all, only that the apps labels as 3.0 tested have either been updated in the past few days (most likely) or apple have tested those ones themselves and labeled them as such.
I decided to mow the back yard and had my Bluetooth headphones working with the iPod touch and every few seconds while pushing the lawn mower, the songs would change.
Apparently, the shake to shuffle works without much resistance. I found it even more odd that it chose about 5 songs and continued to shuffle them and they were not rated.
I suppose another 252 MB will be coming my way as soon as they do some tuning.