Apple finally invents copy/paste and MMS; iPhone 3.0 gets official
We all know as soon as a feature comes to the iPhone, Apple invented it right? Perfect examples are the full touchscreen form factor, mobile apps, visual voicemail and the accelerometer β all brought to market by Cupertino. But none of those things are Apple inventions, you say? Pfff, clearly youβve never met an Apple fanboy. So letβs take a look at a few of Appleβs latest mobile inventions fresh from todayβs town hall:
- Push notifications for apps. Finally. As you well know, this will allow the iPhone/iPod Touch to be notified (via a badge, text pop up and/or audio alert) in near real-time of a new server-side event associated with a specific app. Think of it as a poor manβs answer to background processes. Background processes, by the way, are not an addition to version 3.0. Appleβs excuses: Battery performance and memory strain.
- Updated media player adjusts streaming video quality according to current bandwidth.
- Cut, copy and paste. Thatβs right folks, Appleβs polio vaccine. Double-tap to select text, drag start/end points and do your thang. You can even shake to undo/redo edits.
- Send multiple images at once. Joy.
- Wider landscape keyboard availability. Apple finally tossed the landscape keyboard into all native apps, including Mail. Thank you.
- MMS! Hooray for decade-old tech! SMS and MMS are now lumped into a Messages app. It wonβt be available on 2G (1st gen) iPhones.
- New calendar features. CalDAV allows for sharing across a bunch of services such as Google and Yahoo and .ics subscription support.
- Flushed out Stocks app.
- Extended search. Users can now search in all key apps including Calendar, iPod, Notes and Mail.
- Spotlight for iPhone. A βsearch homescreenβ. Itβs like Spotlight for Mac and it only searches native Apple apps.
- Bluetooth A2DP support (stereo Bluetooth) β but it wonβt be available on 2G (1st gen) iPhones.
- Tethering.