iPhone OS 3.0

Lots of neat stuff. Standouts includes push notification, cut, copy & paste, tethering, and landscape keyboard in more of the included apps.

Engadget

A developer beta of OS 3.0 is available today, and the 3.0 update will be coming to consumers this summer as a free update to all iPhone 3G customers. It'll also work for 1st gen iPhone owners, though they won't receive A2DP or MMS due to hardware limitations. iPod touch owners will be able to update for $9.95, just like last time.

DVICE

Multiplayer connectivity: The iPhone will automagically discover other iPhones running the same app, and you can play games with them. Welcome to the social.

Accessories communication: Apps will be allowed to communicate with external accessories, such as a blood pressure cuff, FM tuner, or equalization for a docked speaker.

Gizmodo

3G Tethering. This feature will allow you to connect your iPhone 3G to a laptop, to use it as a modem to access the internet. Carriers still have to sign-off on it, and probably charge more for it. None have announced it yet.

Ars Technica

Finally, the push notification feature that was supposed to appear in the iPhone OS 2.0 update will be making its debut in 3.0. Admitting that Apple is "late on this one," Forstall said, "We had to complete rearchitect the server for Push Notifications." Third-party servers can send text or sound notifications to Apple's server, which then pushes them to a user's iPhone.

Forstall said Apple prefers this approach to allowing background processes because of battery life. The company's testing with BlackBerry and Windows Mobile devices showed an 80 percent decrease in standby battery life when using background processes. Push Notifications, on the other hand, only resulted in a 23 percent decrease.

Forstall also briefly mentioned some other API additions, including giving developers access to the iPhone's proximity sensor, a user's iPod library, streaming video and audio via HTTP (even through firewalls), system-wide Data Detectors (rumored to be coming to Snow Leopard as well), and even built-in VoIP APIs. A particularly useful new API allows developers to call up a drop-down sheet for sending an email without having to quit the current app and launch the Mail app.