The release of the iPhone OS 3.0 update in the same week in June that Apple launched the iPhone 3GS created a lot of buzz in the tech media, not to mention mainstream media that cover tech closely. Living and breathing Apple tech as we do, it was a big week, but once the lines at Apple Stores died down, and iPhone OS 3.0 and iPhone 3GS were no longer the most popular Twitter and Digg topics, we wondered if average iPhone users even noticed that their smartphone’s OS had changed. We’re here to tell you that, yes, 3.0 brought changes--most of them positive, some of them puzzling, and others, like multimedia messaging, promising. (Although thanks to AT&T, the feature wasn’t even available for us to test at press time.)
As far as the new iPhone goes, it is the best iPhone yet--and when you factor in the OS 3.0 update, there’s not a single smartphone that can beat it. We conclude our guided tour of OS 3.0 with a review of the 3GS, complete with the scoop on how fast it really is compared to the 3G and the unvarnished truth about whether you really need to upgrade.
Even if you can’t afford it, aren’t yet eligible to upgrade, or simply refuse on principle to buy a new iPhone a mere year after the 3G came out, updating your iPhone OS to 3.0 shouldn’t be a choice--it’s a requirement. All iPhone owners will enjoy the new features the OS update brings, with the one exception of original iPhone owners who want to use MMS (which stands for multimedia messaging service, see below), though at press time AT&T hadn’t rolled out that feature yet anyway. Here, we take you on a rollicking tour of the additions and improvements in iPhone OS 3.0, pointing out highlights--and ticking through our wish list for 3.1--along the way.
Yes, it's here--and it's pretty great--but we have a few key suggestions for how Apple could make it even better.
Since the iPhone’s launch two years ago, BlackBerry users have been gloating about the iPhone’s lack of this functionality. As much as we hated to, we secretly agreed that releasing two iPhone models without one of the most basic functions of the modern GUI seemed like a huge mistake. There were no doubt a few hurdles to jump over to get cut, copy, and paste implemented on a touchscreen device, but we were confident that Apple would eventually give us CC&P, which it finally did in iPhone OS 3.0.
Context-sensitive pop-up menus offer controls for 3.0's new copy and paste functions.
If you haven’t seen it in action yet, the CC&P commands are fairly intuitive. Since they’re baked into the OS, they function similarly in third-party apps. Tapping and holding brings up CC&P controls when you release your finger. In Safari, you’ll end up highlighting a block of text, which you can adjust for accuracy as needed. In Mail and other text-specific apps, the same gesture will highlight a specific word, with movable handles on either side to adjust your selection. A context-sensitive balloon pops up, offering up tappable Copy, Cut, and Paste buttons as appropriate--the phone is smart enough to know that you can’t paste unless you’re in an editable text field. Thankfully, the iPhone’s clipboard maintains formatting when pasting, making it easy to copy part of a webpage into an email with formatting and links intact. The feature also works with images, and copying and pasting multiple images into an email ends up being much faster than adding them one by one the “old-fashioned” way. As a bonus, pasting a photo into an email lets you send a full-resolution copy (1200x1600 on the iPhone 3G, 1536x2048 on the 3GS), rather than the 600x800 version you get if you use the Email Photo option in the Photos app.
So, yes, overall CC&P is a win, but what’s the problem? The way the feature works in some apps is extremely annoying and requires way more taps than it should. Possibly the most common-use case for CC&P is looking up contact information and pasting it into an email. But in Contacts, you cannot simply find a contact and tap-and-hold to select their phone number or email address. Touching either of those will instantly initiate a phone call or create a new email message to that person. So instead of quickly grabbing someone’s contact info, you have to tap Edit, then tap a telephone number or email address, then finally tap and hold in the edit field, just to copy the information. Grabbing a simple email address requires several extra taps, and it puts you into editing mode, making it that much easier to accidentally bork your contact’s information. Trying to copy event info from Calendar also requires entering edit mode--an unnecessary pain when you’re trying to quickly move bits of data from between apps.
Copying and pasting a picture into an email allows you to send it at full resolution.
A better, and far more elegant, solution would have been to use a small icon to the left of contact info, for example, to instantly invoke CC&P controls, similar to the blue arrows in your Recents list that take you to a particular caller’s details. And if Apple didn’t want to clutter up the interface, the OS could be tweaked a bit to differentiate better between a tap and a tap-and-hold. We were also annoyed that in Messages, you can’t select a portion of a text message for copying, it’s all or nothing (and at press time, AT&T still hadn’t activated MMS, so we don’t know how that will come into play with messages that contain media and text content).
