iPhone 3.0 Beta Hands-On : Copy and Paste,Push Notification, and More

On March 17, Apple unveiled details about iPhone OS 3.0 software and released the new iPhone Software Development Kit for developers.

Fortunately CrunchGear had hands-on experience and here are the reports,
Getting the iPhone OS 3.0 beta was only a slightly better experience than the Windows 7 beta’s first day of existence.

The first thing that caught my eye is that they changed a couple of icons. Otherwise the home screen is the same as it was before. Accessing the search screen feels just right. You swipe the screen to the right and it’s there. You can search contacts, music and mail. Photos and text messages don’t seem to show up for me.

The email screen looks like the same as it was before but if you swipe down you’ll notice the new search bar. If your search has no results in your inbox you can expand your query to your original Gmail account.

Browsing seems a bit faster too; it took about 10 seconds to load crunchgear.com. Maybe they put some of Safari 4’s performance tweaks into the iPhone browser.

The iPhone gets copy/paste! Everyone go crazy!

So this is where I double tap. Now I can choose to select a region specified by me or to select the whole text. The following is pretty self-explanatory.

The undo function works like a charm. Shake to undo and shake again to redo. This is not instant, though, so you don’t have to be afraid that you’ll accidentally undo or redo something if you put the phone down or something.

The Voice Memos app has a sweet built-in decibel meter. After you record your stuff you can share it. I’m not sure if I’ll ever use this application but it’s fun.