Apple Thoughts: A First Look at OS 3.0 by Geek.com

"Yesterday Apple showed the world what's coming soon in iPhone OS 3.0. Some of the features demoed included copy and paste, landscape keyboard, Spotlight (search across all apps), and push notification. Last night I downloaded the 3.0 beta for iPod touch (first generation) and put it through its paces."

Joel Evans over at Geek.com posted a first look at the OS 3.0 Beta for iPod Touch, and it sounds like it is almost all that it should be. Well, once he got past the initial problems of installation with Xcode. Had a bit of trouble the first time, had to reset and seems like it is running fine now. According to Joel he has been running it (as of the writing of the article) for about 3 hours and says that "for a beta it is relatively stable." One of the issues was refreshing, which caused an overlapping of a keyboard on top of another keyboard when in landscape mode in the native apps. Once he reset the iPod Touch those seemed to go away, although I'm not sure if that was permanent or temporary fix for him. He attributes it to a memory issue, which is odd since its not on added apps but the native ones. I'm sure they are still working the kinks out of it and you can expect some problems in beta, but I was more interested in how some of the new features worked anyway.

Landscape seemed to work in a number of applications (other than the overlap issue that temporarily cropped up), such as Notes, Stocks and thankfully Mail. Stocks looks so much better in landscape mode.

There are several screenshots of the cut/copy/paste functionality within several of the apps and it seems to work pretty slick. You can cut and paste inside the same application or between applications, copy urls and it works in landscape mode as well. I've been waiting for this. I'm not as rabid as some, but i can certainly put this to good use and it is a welcome addition.

Search/Spotlight is on the screen as a separate app but it is also imbedded in some of the apps, such as Mail.

Joel has several screenshots of the new OS in action so if you are interested, hop on over and check it out. It is going to be a long few months while I wait for this update to come out.