Although I was less than pleased with the iPhone 3G S, the OS 3.0 has been a bundle of joy so far. The long awaited copy/paste as well as deleting/forwarding individual texts and e-mail multiple pictures at once.
I’ll just go through the top 5 that I thought they were most important and you can view the gallery of photos at the end of the post of some of the other features.
1. Copy and Paste
It is about time that OS update 3.0 finally gives you the ability to copy, cut and paste text. If you double tap on a white space, then Select and Select All appear but if you do it on given word, it is highlighted with the options of copy and cut are displayed. This copy paste works across every app on the phone I tried from Twitterific to Safari to Messages to Mail. It definitely makes things a lot easier when copying a link into Twitterific and then having it use its compress URL feature while using Twitter.
2. Deleting / Forwarding Individual Text Messages
This is probably one of the hit or miss things depending on how much you use the forwarding text message feature. I often get a lot of news or sports update that I want to send over to a friend out of state or even just update my brother, but that was a very tedious task before where you just had to type everything over again.
The way to use it is by going into the messages window, selecting Edit on the top right part of the window. This brings you to an edit screen where you can select a single or multiple messages that you either want to delete or forward on.
3. Undo Feature
If you accidentally delete some text, one that you accidentally cut instead of copying or you pasted something that you didn’t want to, you can just simply shake your iPhone and a pop up appears asking if you want to undo your action. Clever move by Apple, very useful.
4. Landscape Texting / E-mail
Another one of the features that is not for everyone but landscape texting is definitely a good option. If you’re trying to read a long e-mail, it definitely is very useful but for texting or writing an e-mail, there just isn’t enough room for me to use it consistently. The landscape keyboard takes up a lot of real estate of the screen but it’s useful for a long text message… but not necessarily for a long e-mail.
5. Spotlight / E-mail Search
The ability to search across the entire phone is very useful. It searches contacts, calendars as well as the body of e-mail messages amongst others. I don’t see myself using the search feature very often but I can see it being quite useful for others. In the past few days though, I have used it to find an old email and even once for an old calendar event. I guess it is a little efficient if you have a lot of pages of apps and you would rather search for it instead of scrolling to the last page to find it.