The New iPhone 3.0 Operating System Upgrade

Got your new iPhone 3GS?  Or your iPhone 3G?  Or the original iPhone like I have?

On Wednesday June 17th, Apple released the updated iPhone 3.0 operating system for the iPhone and iPhone 3G.  This is the same OS that's on the iPhone 3GS.  There are a few features that don't work without the 3GS, but most work for the rest of us.  That's enough about the new phone — we've been innundated with articles about the new phone.

Let's think about the new operating system, since Apple has made it a free upgrade for all iPhone versions.  It's also available for the iTouch (which looks like the iPhone, but isn't a phone), but the iTouch update costs $10.

Apple released the OS upgrade two days before they released the new iPhone. They learned.

Last year, when they released the iPhone 3G and the phone OS upgrade on the same day, their customers had severe problems accessing the iTunes store.  Since iTunes is the mechanism for both the upgrade process on the phones and the mechanism for registering new phones, many customers were unable to register their new iPhone 3G's.  That didn't happen this time.

Installing the new operating system on the iPhone is ridiculously easy.  Put your iPhone in its cradle charger, start iTunes, and get a dialog box offering to download and install the upgrade, to download the upgrade for later installation, or the option to cancel (so you can do it later).  I chose to download it first and then installed it as a separate step

The iPhone 3.0 upgrade is an important one.  There some neat new features, and also over 40 security updates to the iPhone operating system.

One of the new features that I've already found helpful is copy-and-paste within applications and across applications. Of course, to be able to paste, you have to be in an application that allows you to input, such as email or a form within an application. There's a new Search feature that searches across almost all files, but it does no search within email contents.

The phone app is more friendly, now indicating which phone number a Contact used to call you. Whether it's the iPhone or iTunes, the new OS and its new iTunes version are more friendly to user-created ringtones.

Speaking of ringtones, everybody knows that you can buy songs from the iTunes store, and that some of them can be converted to ringtones using iTunes (only those marked in iTunes as convertable to ringtones, though). Not too many people know that you can make your own ringtones...

Copyright © 2009 Terry A. Stockdale. All rights reserved.