Review: Apple's iPhone 3.0 Software UpgradeReview: Apple's iPhone 3.0 Software Upgrade

The Apple nerdosphere had a meltdown Wednesday, when Apple released Version 3.0 of its iPhone firmware. Breathless, sweaty fanboys and girls filled Twitter with messages describing in excruciating detail how they were downloading and installing the software.

I know all this because I was one of the nerdiest, most breathless, sweatiest, and overenthusiastic fanboys of all.

The iPhone 3.0 software is a treat, making a good smartphone even better. It delivers some new capabilities, like long-overdue copy/cut/paste support, Spotlight search, and push notifications, as well as small user interface refinements that make the device more pleasant and efficient to use. And the Find Your iPhone and Remote Wipe security services are surprisingly interesting. The upgrade is free to iPhone users, $10 for iPod Touch users.

In The Spotlight
Let's start with my favorite new feature: Spotlight search.

The iPhone runs many applications, and stores a lot of data, and it can be difficult to sort through that much information. I have 65 applications installed on my iPhone. That's not even a lot compared with some people; I know some who have maxed out the full, 148-app capacity of the iPhone. Finding a particular app in that stack can be unwieldy.

Similarly, in previous versions of the iPhone software, searching or browsing through the Contacts list could be slow and frustrating.

Apple has solved this problem by adding Spotlight search to the iPhone. To access Spotlight, go to the first screen of applications on the device, then flick left one more time. That calls up a search box and pops up the onscreen keyboard. Start typing, and the iPhone searches your applications, address book, e-mail, Notes, calendar, and iPod in realtime. Tap on an item to open it. Searches execute nearly instantaneously.

Spotlight will make finding applications and data much easier on the iPhone. Unfortunately, it doesn't index the content of third-party applications -- although it will find the applications themselves. I hope Apple expands Spotlight search soon.

Copy/Cut/Paste
With the addition of copy/cut/paste in Version 3.0, the iPhone catches up with 25-year-old PCs and 10-year-old PDAs.

To select text on the iPhone, double-tap a word, then adjust the beginning and end-point of the selection by tapping and dragging. You can select the entire document as well. Copying, cutting, and pasting is pretty intuitive, although I'm still getting the hang of some of the twists.

Copy/cut/paste works across third-party applications -- for example, I was able to copy a tweet from TweetDeck, and paste it into Evernote. I was also able to easily copy a URL from the Mobile Safari Web browser, paste it into TweetDeck, shorten the URL, add a comment, and then send the result off to my Twitter followers.

Another development that will make it easier to compose documents: You can now tilt the keyboard to landscape mode in the Mail application, and Notes, which makes it easier to type. The iPhone already supported landscape mode typing in other applications, including Mobile Safari.

Voice Memos And Text Notes
Voice memo support lets you record audio from the iPhone's built-in microphone, and share those audio files by e-mailing, or automatically synchronizing to iTunes on the desktop. I found audio quality to be pretty good; my voice was audible and understandable when recorded in a moderately noisy room. I'm looking forward to giving it a good field test.

And you can now sync text Notes between your iPhone and desktop; that was another baffling hole in the earlier iPhone feature set.

Or, rather, Apple says you can sync text Notes to the desktop; I was unable to get that to work. The iPhone syncs notes to Apple Mail on the desktop (that doesn't make any sense to me either). Apple Mail on the desktop kept crashing on me when I tried to start it. I don't usually use Mail.app for e-mail, so it was the first time in months I'd tried to run that particular software.

Find Your iPhone And Remote Wipe
MobileMe includes a new service designed to help if your iPhone is lost or stolen. The Find My iPhone service uses the device's on-board GPS to locate the iPhone anywhere in the world. You access the service from a Web browser (not the browser on your iPhone, of course, because your iPhone is supposedly missing. That's why you're using Find My iPhone), and view the iPhone position on a map.

I was able to use Find My iPhone to locate the device within a few dozen yards. That's still a lot of square footage to search, but at least it'll tell you if you left the iPhone in your office in Milwaukee, or in the hotel on that business trip to Boston.

Find My iPhone can also help you find the iPhone once you've determined its location. It can send a command to your device to emit a loud, piercing tone for up to two minutes, to help you triangulate on the handset's location. You can also set the iPhone to display a message on the main screen, even when it's locked.

Find My iPhone doesn't work if the iPhone is switched off, so it's easy for thieves to thwart it. But it helps honest people do the right thing; you can set up Find Your iPhone to ask people who find your iPhone to contact you to return it.

And, if all else fails, you can use Remote Wipe to erase all data off your device, to prevent the data -- if not the device itself -- from falling into the wrong hands.

Find Your iPhone and Remote Wipe require the MobileMe service, which is priced starting at $99 per year. Find Your iPhone and Remote Wipe are only small parts of MobileMe; the service also enables wireless synching of documents, Safari bookmarks, calendars, and address book entries between the iPhone and Mac, or between multiple Macs, as well as providing Webmail, Web calendar access, photosharing and more.

I've found MobileMe to be a good investment, although it has a bad reputation because of earlier bugginess and unreliability. Until last year, MobileMe was known as .Mac.

Find Your iPhone and Remote Wipe were a bit tricky to configure; the setup is buried on the iPhone Settings under "Mail, Contacts, Calendars." From there you go to your e-mail account for MobileMe, and enable "Find My iPhone." That just makes no sense, it needs to be more obvious, on the top level of the Settings screen.

Find Your iPhone makes searching for your iPhone fun. This is dangerous. I don't need any incentive to lose my iPhone. I'm absent-minded enough already.

iPod Improvements
The new firmware includes a couple of upgrades to the iPod software that will be extremely welcome to people who listen to a lot of spoken-word recordings. I listen to 3-4 hours of podcasts and audiobooks weekly. One of my chief frustrations with earlier versions of the iPod software was that it was very difficult to rewind by a short amount, say just a few seconds or a minute or two to catch up with something you missed because you weren't paying attention.

The new firmware now lets you skip backwards by 30 seconds with the touch of a button. It's not a hardware button, just an icon on a screen, but it's nice and big and easy to find even while walking outdoors in bright sun wearing sunglasses.

Another new feature of the iPod software: You can double the playback speed, or slow it to half-speed, without affecting the tone -- in other words, the speeded-up version won't sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks, and the slowed-down version won't sound unnaturally deep and boozy. I found 2x to be too fast to follow, and couldn't think of a reason why I'd want to listen to something at half-speed, but someone might find that feature useful.

Random Observations About Untested Features
I haven't been able to test out a few of the features of iPhone 3.0, because applications taking advantage of those features aren't yet available, or because they require the iPhone 3G S hardware, released Friday.

The chief untested feature: Push notifications, which allow applications that are shut down to send messages alerting the user about new information. For example, the AIM instant messaging application will let users know about new IMs even when the app is shut down. Push is a workaround to make up for the iPhone's inability to run multiple apps simultaneously.

I haven't been able to locate apps that take advantage of push, but I expect they'll surface soon.

The on-board compass, video camera, and improved still camera with autofocus are only available on the 3G S.

I wasn't able to find any incompatibilities with applications written for older versions of the operating system. I tested the Amazon Kindle app, Evernote, Lose It!, Wikipanion Plus, and TweetDeck; they all worked fine with iPhone 3.0.

On the other hand, I was unable to log in to the Plurk microblogging service using its iPhone app; I don't know if the problem was with the app or some other random bug. Likewise, I was unable to log into one of my home Wi-Fi networks, but I don't know if there was some external problem.

I'm pretty sure the software makes the speaker louder, but I can't swear to it. Likewise, I think the browser was faster too; I tried it on one of my most frequently used slowest-to-load Web pages, the Internet Movie Database, and that page seemed to take less time to load. (Note to the folks at IMDB.com: You're overdue to come up with an iPhone-optimized version. It's been two years already, get a move on!)

The browser supports autofill and remembers passwords, which will be very useful.

The YouTube application now lets you log in to the service, so you can access your subscriptions, playlists and other customization.

I was unable to test multimedia messaging and tethering; AT&T, iPhone's US carrier, doesn't offer those services yet; they say they'll be available at the end of the summer.

Installation
I found installation to be imperfect but acceptable. I tried to download the software as soon as I learned it had become available, at 10 AM Pacific time on Wednesday, but was unable to get to the iPhone configuration screen of iTunes -- iTunes could see my iPhone, and synch with it, but I was unable to get to the screen that showed the "Check For Upgrades" button. I was able to access that screen after 20 minutes, and downloaded the new firmware and completed installation quickly, in about 30 minutes. That resulted in my iPhone being upgraded to Version 3.0, with all its existing data, apps, and customization intact.

After playing with the newly updated iPhone for a few minutes, I reconnected and the iPhone required nearly a full hour to synch. It seemed to be taking a new backup of all my data during most of that time

After that, several additional synchs took only a few minutes.

Later in the day, about 1 PM Pacific time, I began to see messages on Twitter saying that Apple's servers were overwhelmed and people were unable to download the new software. Also, some users reported that their iPhones were bricked by the upgrade -- some of this is inevitable, but it'll be important to watch to see if this is a problem for a significant number of users.

The low price Apple is charging -- free to iPhone users and $10 to iPod Touch users -- is pretty amazing. Version 3.0 is a meaty upgrade, and no reasonable person would have complained or even blinked if Apple had charged users more, or limited the firmware to new hardware. Instead, Apple is giving the software to millions of existing users for nothing (in the case of the iPhone) or nearly nothing (for iPod Touch users).

So what should you do? Should you upgrade right away?

Well, if you're willing to take a little risk, go for it. You might run into some rough edges and incompatibilities, but I don't expect you to see any serious problems.

On the other hand, if you absolutely need rock-solid stability, you should wait for the inevitable patch. I expect we'll see that in days or weeks. Speaking of patches, the 3.0 firmware has a boatload of patches onboard. It fixes 46 security flaws.

Overall, the iPhone Version 3.0 software is a big step forward. It takes a device that was already excellent, and makes it even better.

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