Unsung iPhone OS 3.0 Features
If you’ve been following me on Twitter tonight, you’ll know that I’ve been TwitPiccing a few features I found in iPhone OS 3.0 that I’ve not seen mentioned in the press or by Apple. I’ll just present those same tweets here, with some expansion:
When you click the home button to bring up controls on the lock screen, iPhone shows more information. Very helpful!
When you play an audiobook or podcast, iPhone gives two new options. Press the ‘1x,’ and it switches to 2x, and plays at double speed. Press again, it becomes .5x, and plays at half speed. Press again, and it’s back to 1x. The button in the middle quickly skips back 30 seconds, a helpful feature when you’re distracted.
Clicking the mail button currently does nothing. I assume when the final version of 3.0 ships, you’ll be able to send a link to the podcast or audiobook to a friend.
This is not completely unsung, but a little undercovered. You can now have finer control over scrubbing through audio or video files. Press down on the timeline, and then the further your finger is towards the bottom of the screen, the finer is your control.
The new Voice Recorder app (which works fantastically, by the way—here’s my first recording) lets you play back your audio over the speaker, even if you have headphones plugged in, as does the voicemail app.
Not really a feature, but Update has been moved out of the toolbar in the App Store app, in favor of a More button, which brings up a screen with Updates and Redeem on it. Redeem can be used to redeem iTunes gift cards. Update can be moved back into the toolbar with the screen found below, after hitting Edit.
My favorite new feature: clicking the microphone from a dead stop (as when a podcast finishes, or you first unlock your phone, now actives Shuffle play, rather than the horrible practice before of playing Alphabetically from the As. If I’d heard The Abduction of Margaret one more freaking time….
The camera app has been slightly revamped with some different UI. I find the camera much, much faster. It was a little slow when activated from an app such as Tweetie before, but no longer.
This is not a feature at all, but in fact a petty gripe. The Twitter application Tweetie needs to be update to work with OS 3.0. The copy function is quite broken, making it almost impossible to use to select less than an entire tweet. I’m sure this will be fixed, but it goes to show that copy/paste isn’t as easy to implement as you may have assumed.
