iPhone software 3.0 Beta 1 is now available to developers, and as we couldn’t wait to get our hands on it, we asked our guest reviewer Darryl Mitchell to have a play with the new software and let us know what’s new and if it’s any good. This is his review:
I’m going to start with the Home screen and work my way through. The new things about the home screen that are noticeable so far is there are a few new icons. Its not all that noticeable, but the phone icon, the ipod icon and the messages icon have changed, and now have a more contemporary brushed effect. You’ve also got the new spotlight feature which is really helpful if you want to search for songs, emails or contacts, it searches everything. You just swipe to the right and it brings up the spotlight search screen. Its a really good feature and is surprisingly fast, I thought it was going to lag for quite some time, but it’s quick and snappy. That is it for the new home screen.
Moving on to the phone features, there’s not much added to the this bit, however, when you get a missed call or it shows you your recent calls, it now shows you what they called you from, for example if you called them on their mobile, or work phone you can now see this in the Recent calls screen. So that’s a really easy way of showing where they called you from.
Landscape Typing:
The best bit you’ll probably find in iPhone 3.0 is that it now has landscape typing. So now when you’re in your inbox, you can view it in landscape, and you can create a new email in landscape too. The only thing I’ve found that I don’t like about this new firmware is that you still can’t delete messages in bulk, you still have to individually select them, which is really annoying. If you have a ton of emails coming through every day, you have to scroll through and it just takes forever. I just want a delete all button, which will just make it all so much quicker and easier.
Onto Safari then, not much new in here, although you have got auto-fill, so when you are on a web page with an address field, once you click in the text box, you now have this new option auto fill which will fill in all your address details for you. The only other feature I’ve noticed, is more of an enhancement than a feature is that safari seems to be a bit faster, not particularly for browsing, but for launching, rotating the screen and launching bookmarks for example. It can be a bit laggy at times, but then this is the Beta version, but I find it does seem to be a bit more nippy when rotating the screen.
Improved Messaging:
Now the messages application is really, really good. There are a lot more new features in here, however they’re not all in the Beta, MMS is not yet supported. You can now view your messages in landscape and not only that, you can type in landscape. I didn’t think I’d like typing in landscape, but it’s so much easier and I’m finding that I’m only using the landscape keyboard all the time now. I was expecting it to be extremely glitchy but it’s surprisingly fast to switch between the two views. Also, you can now delete individual messages, previously you could only delete the whole conversation. Now you can click on edit, select the messages you want to remove and press delete.
iPod & YouTube:
Going on to the iPod then, not much new in here, the only thing I can see is a search function, which is really fast and works in the same way as spotlight on the home screen. Also, when you go on now playing it’s got the new shake to shuffle shuffle feature. It’s quite hard to use, because you have to shake it quite a bit, and if you use it when you’re out running, it can sometimes go off which can be a bit annoying, it’s like the new Nano which has the shuffle, but I’m not too keen on it.
I’m going to move on to the new YouTube function, which I love. The real let down of the previous application was that you could only view videos, you couldn’t really do much else with it. You couldn’t log on, you couldn’t comment, view subscriptions, or rate videos. with this one you can see your subscriptions and all the new videos. I do still feel that there is still a lot more that can be done with this application. For example, I wish you could reply to comments and messages you can do what ever you can on your desktop, as it’s easier when you’re on the go. I’m always checking emails when I’m out and about and I think that if you add those features to this app it would be lots better.
Notes & Settings:
Notes have been improved too, you can now create a new note in landscape mode. The new copy and past feature is really good. All you have to do is double tap it, and then press select, select all or paste. You can then either select it all or use the blue markers to select the text that you want. Once you’ve chosen your text, press copy, go to where to where you want the text, double tap and press paste. Now this will work everywhere you go, so you can copy text from notes and paste into email. Its that easy. I really don’t understand why it took them this long to introduce this feature.
The settings screen on the phone have changed slightly, the fetch settings has moved to the mail settings, which I don’t like because I like to quickly change it through the main screen and you now have to go through more screens to get to it and it is a bit laggy. In the general settings there are more options for the home button. For example you can now set it to launch iPod, Camera or Search, also on the search settings, when you go to spotlight you can turn off certain search areas, for example I don’t want spotlight to search my Video’s, Podcasts or Notes. That’s about it as far as I can see on the iPhone 3.0 software at the moment, but this is only the first Beta, so hopefully more features will be added soon.
