iPhone OS 3.0: hands-on and first impressions

We got our hands on a copy of the iPhone OS 3.0 that was given to developpers attending the WWDC... Here is a quick review of the notable changes from 2.x.

As you can see, the test was done using a 1st generation 8GB iPhone, on a French Mac OSX account, so sorry for the screenshots in French...

Let’s start with iTunes and the sync options.

iTunes on the Mac side

Now, iTunes allow you to encrypt the backup it does of your iPhone whenever you sync it with your computer. It’s optional and, seeing how slow the backups have become (again, like in the first 2.0 release), it might be a good idea to leave that unchecked.

In the Music tab, you can now ask iTunes to sync the Voice Memos, meaning that all the memos you record on your iPhone will be copied to your iTunes Library in a « Voice Memos » playlist (if you delete a memo from iTunes, it will be deleted from the iPhone too.)

You can now also sync notes between your iPhone and your Mac, and they will appear in Mail...

And, allelujah, you can now do over the air (OTA) MobileMe syncing of your contacts and calendars, as well as USB sync to your computer. In 2.0 it was one or the other.  

If you check that in the Calendars tab, then it allows you to synchronise shared calendars, although they don’t get automatic updates, only when you sync again to your Mac... weird...

Nice touch is that on your iPhones the groups and calendars you sync using MobileMe of from your Mac are kepts separate. I couldn’t get OTA syncing of shared calendars, which makes sense since they don’t get sync’d to MobileMe (maybe we have to wait for a server-side update).

The Photos tab allows you to rearrange the order in which the albums are to appear in your iPhone. Sadly, photos are still sorted by filename on the iPhone, rather than by date.

OK, let’s move to the phone...