Archive for March, 2009

Most of the advance speculation has centered on iPhone 3.0. Among the new features rumored or expected — but, remember, not necessarily available right away — are:

• Copy and paste. Better two years late than never, according to multiple sources. See, for example, here and here.
• Push notification. So Facebook, say, could alert you when you have a new message. This was promised in June 2008, but not yet delivered.
• MMS — Multimedia Messaging Service. So you can forward those pictures sent to you by friends with far less sophisticated cell phones. Maybe yes, maybe no.
• Better mail program. Why can’t you search past messages? Read them in landscape mode? Delete them en masse?
• Internet sharing. For those times when your iPhone has access but your laptop doesn’t. Apple and AT&T have both said so-called “tethering” is coming real soon now.
• Bluetooth support. Currently available only for phone headsets. Could be expanded to support wireless keyboards, speaker systems, file exchanges, syncing etc.
• Flash support. So you’d see videos and dancing advertisements instead of those little blue cubes. Adobe (ADBE) says its Flash Player software is ready and waiting for Apple’s approval.
• Better App management. The current interface is barely capable of organizing 148 applications, never mind 28,000.
• Voice dialing and turn-by-turn directions. Quick, before iPhone users cause any more traffic accidents.
• Video capture. It can be done without modifying the built-in camera as iPhone Video Recorder, an application available only for jailbroken iPhones, has shown.
• A new browser. The current version of iPhone Safari is nearly two years old and starting to get a little long in the tooth.
• Better syncing between apps. So those 28,000 applications could share data among themselves.
• Better calendar and t0-do list support. So an e-mail invitation could be automatically added to your iCal.
• More background operation. So you could check your e-mail, for example, without interrupting that Internet radio show you were listening to.
• Projector. So you could project on a wall, screen or another surface.   This makes the ultimate tool even more entertaining.  Micro-vision already has a prototype.   This is probably 4.0.

With all these options and applications, the iPhone has become the ultimate tool for just about everything.

Information gathered at Fortune.CNN.Com.