New 3.0 Features

iTunes – You can now rent and purchase movies, TV shows, music videos, audio books, and support for iTunes U has been added.

Parental Controls – Much more support for moderation in parental controls. Now includes settings for allowing of In App Purchase, and playing of music, podcasts, movies, TV shows, and App Store apps based on their rating.

Tethering – If your carrier supports it, you can tether your iPhone’s cell phone internet connection for use on your computer where you don’t have a WiFi connection available. Works with Mac or PC via USB or wirelessly via Bluetooth.

Safari – Speed improvements, speed improvements, speed improvements. Support for HTTP streaming audio and video added, with bandwidth detection and adjusting of quality based on it. You can also now autofill usernames and passwords to websites. Filling in contact information in web forms can also be auto filled using data from your contacts. Also has HTML 5 support.

Languages – Chinese, Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Korean, Thai, and more have been added. Over 30 languages now supported total.

Find My iPhone – If you are a MobileMe customer and have lost your iPhone, you can login to MobileMe and see a map showing the location of your iPhone. You can also optionally send a text alert to the iPhone saying it is missing, and the phone will start beeping (which will still play even if your phone was in silent mode). Or, if your phone was stolen, you can do a remote wipe to remove all data on the device.

No other new features mentioned in the keynote for 3.0. The new iPhone 3G S was also unveiled. Below are the new features that will be on this device only. The S stands for speed, and this iPhone has the same outside design as the iPhone 3G, but much difference hardware on the inside.

iPhone 3G S Features

• Speed improvements! – Launching Messages 2.1x faster, loading SimCity 2.4x faster, viewing Excel attachments are 3.6x faster, and loading NY Times in Safari is 2.9x faster. Note: these are speeds against the 3.0 software, which is already faster than before. On average, the entire phone is 2x faster.
• OpenGL|ES 2.0 – Now support for OpenGL|ES 2.0 for game developers.
• 3G speed improved – Now 7.2 Mbps.
• Camera improvements! – Now 3 megapixel, auto-focus camera! Use tap-to-focus to focus on any object. Also has auto exposure, auto brightness adjusting, and auto white balance adjusting. Nighttime sensitivity for better lighting at night. Take a photo of something as close as 10 centimeters away.
• VIDEO RECORDING! – You can now record 30 fps VGA video with audio which also has auto focus, auto white balance, and auto exposure. You can even edit and trim your video. You can even share the video via email, MMS, MobileMe, or upload it directly to YouTube. App Store apps can also take advantage of this new recording.
• Voice Control – Hold down the home button from any app and a voice control screen appears. Say “Call John Appleseed” to call him. Or “Dial (phone number)”. You can also control your iPod and say something like, “Play songs by the Killers”, or “Play playlist Workout”, or “What’s playing?”, or even tell it to play more songs like this to automatically generate a Genius playlist from that song.
• Compass – Shows you longitude, latitude, and what direction is north. Integrated with Maps app. After finding your location in Maps, tap the screen to adjust the map to the direction you’re facing.
• Accessibility:
  • Voice Over – Reads any selected text aloud.
  • Zoom – You can zoom into the screen/icons to see it better.
  • Invert Screen – Inverts the colors of your iPhone’s screen.
  • Mono Audio – Option to have mono audio come through either side of the headphones.
• Nike+ – Just like iPod Touch 2G’s Nike+. Works with a Nike+ adapter.
• Data Encryption – All data and iTunes sync backups are now encrypted.
• Improved battery life – Internet is now 3 hours more life, 3 hours more video, 6 more hours of audio, 2 hours more 2G talk time, and no improvements on 3G talk time.

The iPhone 3G S is $199 (16GB), and the iPhone 3G S 32 gigabyte will be $299. The original iPhone 3G has been taken down to $99 (8 GB), and this pricing will take affect today. iPhone 3.0 will be released on June 17th, and iPhone 3G S will be on June 19th in the U.S. and a few other countries.

Whoo hoo!

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As the downloads were picking up speed and getting closer to the billion, Apple put up a download counter on their site. They also displayed the counter in the App Store itself; taking place of one of the featured applications’ spots.

On April 23rd at around 5 P.M. EST, the counter reached a billion and the celebration begun. Of course for Apple, celebration means giveaway. So, they gave a $10,000 iTunes gift card, an iPod touch, a Time Capsule and a MacBook Pro to the one billionth downloader, who just happens to be Connor Mulcahey, age 13, of Weston, CT. I could do for just one of those. Congrats, Connor!

And so now Apple “thanks us a billion” from their growing success: the App Store, which in nine months, got over 1 billion application downloads.

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Watch Apple’s Macword 2009 Keynote for the full scoop.

Customers and Users

For customers, the iPhone 3.0 software update has over 100 new features.

Cut, Copy, and Paste
In iPhone 3.0, you can now cut, copy, and paste text, photos, and HTML across all applications, including App Store apps. You double tap on text, and grab points appear. You can drag the blue points around the text, then choose Cut, Copy, or Paste from a bubble that appears. You can also Select All text. In Safari, the page layout is analyzed, and you can copy a paragraph by just tapping it. And, if you want to undo the pasting, just shake your phone. You can then undo or redo. For developers, you guys can even create your own custom things to copy and paste with their new API.

Landscape
You can now rotate Mail, SMS, and Notes to have landscape mode, like in Safari. Landscape keyboards included!

Text Message Enhancements
You can now forward, and delete multiple messages within SMS. And, more importantly, the support for multimedia messaging has been added, allowing you to send and receive photos, contacts, audio files, and location. The only catch for MMS is you need to be using an iPhone 3G, and extra rates may apply.

Voice Memos
You can now create voice memos and then save them, trim them, or send them via MMS. External microphones are also supported.

Calendar Enhancements
There is now support for CalDAV, allowing you to create your own calendar and schedules and share them with other people. Secondly, you can now subscribe to event feeds, to get instant updates on events from other calendars and schedules.

Stocks Enhancements
News headlines now appear at the bottom of Stocks. And landscape support has been added, with new advanced graphing capabilities.

Search
There are now many search capabilities on the iPhone. You can now search through emails to and from, by subjects or headers, and even continue the search on the mail server. You can also now search through Calendar events, songs and videos from the iPod app, or through Notes either by the note content, or the title of the Note. And they are adding Spotlight, which is an extra homescreen page. Just slide to the left of the first page, and a search bar appears, allowing you to search through all applications on your phone.

Shake To Shuffle
Self-explanatory. You can now shake to shuffle to a new song.

Note Syncing
You can now sync notes to your computer through iTunes.

WiFi Auto Login
When you walk into Starbucks or a subscription-based WiFi network, it will automatically login and connect to that network, and then disconnect when you leave.

Safari Remember Username and Password
Do you hate having to login to a website everytime you launch Safari? Safari will now let you save usernames and passwords to automatically login to those sites.

Anti-phishing
Safari now can warn you against malicious sites trying to scam you.

Parental Controls
Parental controls now include limiting App Store apps and TV Shows.

Stereo Bluetooth A2DP Audio
You will be able to pair your iPhone 3.0 with a stereo Bluetooth A2DP device, like headphones or speakers.

More Languages
More languages will be added to the iPhone.

YouTube Enhancements
You can now login to your YouTube account and share your favorites between your iPhone and computer. And you can Subscribe to channels, within the app.

Developers

For developers, 3.0 is a big step for your apps, and the iPhone SDK. With over 1,000 new APIs, the new SDK is better, and easier to develop for than ever.

USB Accessories
You can now interact with USB accessories within your App Store app.

Maps API
You can now have that Google Maps API right in your app. You even get the nice pan and zoom the Maps app has, and you can add your own custom annotations, get the current location of the user, and have geocoding.

Turn-By-Turn
You can now use the Core Location API to have turn-by-turn directions for a GPS application. But, you need to build your own maps to use for this, due to licensing issues.

Push Notifications
You can now send alerts or updates to a user’s iPhone, even when your app isn’t running, through Apple’s Push Notification Server. Apple had to completely re architect their server infrastructure to add this. Apple said they are not going to allow background process due to it decreasing battery life and performance. You will use your server to send updates to Apple Push Notification Server, which then pushes the data to your target user’s iPhone. Alerts can come in the form of app badges, audio alerts, or text alerts (like the ones used when receiving SMS messages).

In-App Purchasing
You can now sell additional add-ons or extra content or subscription services within your app. Fees are charged to your iTunes Store account and payment is done very quickly and seemlessly in your app.

In App Email
Now you can send emails within your application.

Proximity Sensor
You can now access the proximity sensor on the iPhone inside your app.

iPod Library
You can now access the iPhone’s music library within your app.

Streaming Audio & Video
Your application can now stream audio and video.

Shake API
Use this API to detect shaking of the device, from the accelerometer.

Peer to Peer
You can now make multiplayer games and other applications that require multiple iPhones playing together. Through Bluetooth, your apps can now find other iPhones and iPod Touches around you, and let the user play with them. No WiFi or EDGE needed.

In-game Voice
You can now let multiple users talk to each other while playing. Think of it as XBOX live talking for your iPhone app.

3.0’s Release

Apple is opening the 3.0 Developer Beta today, and the 3.0 beta is available to all Apple Developer Program members. Lots of new information about the update is now available on their site. They will be hosting forums to allow you devs to collaborate with the new firmware. So start testing now!

To you users, the firmware will be coming out sometime this summer. It will be a free update to iPhone and iPhone 3G users, but for iPod Touch users it will be $9.95, like the 2.0 update was. Apple says that on iPhone 1G some of the capabilities such as MMS will not be available due to the hardware.

Finally Apple is listening to the calls of their users and developers. This is an awesome update. So Apple, you did do it right, just this once.

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• Copy & Paste
• Tethering (likely for a fee)
• MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service)
• Push Notification and Backgrounding Tasks for App Store applications
• And maybe a new SpringBoard?, According to MacRumors, SpringBoard has been redesigned from the ground up to be easier to organize lots of apps, they even mentioned possible categories!

UPDATE: Looks like the copy and paste will be in 3.0 after all! Here is a video describing how it works:

If Apple decides to deliver a few of these features in 3.0, then maybe we can consider it a useful software update. We’ll let you know what happens tomorrow here on the blog, so make sure you check back later!

Oh, and if you want the latest updates, subscribe to email updates (in the sidebar to the right).

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Nobody knows yet what there is to come, but it has been rumored that they may release true Push Notification for App Store applications. A new version of the SDK is also coming. Apple has left us with no release date, but we can assume it won’t be that long of a wait, or else Apple wouldn’t tease us with a preview.

The event takes place at Apple, Building 4, Town Hall on March 17 at 10:00 a.m.

And of course this will be vulnerable to all Pwning tools, cause, in fact, the exploit is located in the LLB, or Low Level Bootloader. We’ll let you know the news updates as they come!

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