Thoughts on iPhone OS 3.0
Unless you were living under a rock the past couple days, you probably know that OS 3.0 for the iPhone and iPod touch came out yesterday. There are many new features including copy/cut/paste, MMS (unless you are on AT&T), tethering (again, unless you are on AT&T), voice recording, push notifications, CalDAV support, among others.
After I installed the update and my phone rebooted I was excited to start testing out the new features. There was only one problem. After the update my iPhone was running slow. Very slow. Safari would freeze, applications would crash, and it took forever to find my AT&T signal. After about 15 minutes and multiple restarts, it started behaving again, and in some cases sped things up.
Copy and paste was something that I thought I would never use or if I did use it, it would be on rare occasions. I probably used copy and paste more than anything else yesterday. It is great with the Tweetdeck iPhone app. I wanted to copy a url and paste it in for a tweet and it worked perfectly. The part where it came in handy the most was setting up my Google Calendars.
With OS 3.0, you can finally add Google Calendars using CalDAV. I can’t use Google’s Exchange sync because I have my work’s Exchange account on my phone and you’re only allowed to add one Exchange account. I added my first Google calendar filling out the normal credentials, but it only syncs the main calendar on your Google account. If you have multiple calendars, what do you do? This is where the group calendar comes into play thanks to great instructions here. You add the calendars the same way, but when you are finished you go into advanced options and replace your email address with the randomly generated email address that Google creates. If you have ever seen this email address, it is quite long. Luckily, I could copy the address on my desktop and email it to myself, then open up the mail app and copy it from the email and paste it into the calendar settings. Cross app copy and paste ftw! Also with copy and paste you can also finally email multiple pictures instead of sending a separate email for each image. Awesome.
OS 3.0 is a solid release that brought a lot of long-awaited features. It will be even better once AT&T get their act together. The only thing that I really want to use right now but can’t is MMS. AT&T really dropped the ball on this one. They are trying to hide the fact that their network is not all that great. How can they not be ready for iPhone picture or video messaging when every other phone on their network has the capability to do so already? The only answer is their network can’t handle it. That has to be the same reason tethering isn’t available yet. I’m glad that Apple make the snarky remarks during the WWCD singling out AT&T. This must be a PR nightmare for them. There are a lot of angry customers.
I use Google’s Exchange support to sync my contacts, calendar and (just as soon as they start supporting it) my mail. It would be nice to be able to sync two Exchange accounts (work email, google cloud contacts/calendar) but maybe it’s a blessing that it takes me 5 steps to check my work email. This way it’s one less thing to keep me tied up with work all day long.
I also thought I wouldn’t use Copy/Paste that much but found myself really happy with it, and using it somewhat frequently. My only (lame) gripe is that it sometimes enters select mode too easily on webpages. I tend to tap-and-hold while I’m reading a paragraph in anticipation of scrolling down, but that action now starts the selection caret. You have to drag your finger for a little bit to turn on “scroll mode” before you can just sit there with your finger motionless.