The iPhone 3.0 OS is Unveiled, and the Release Date is ...

And nothing! No "one more thing" today (you know what you were hoping for!). However, on Monday, Apple detailed the upcoming iPhone OS 3.0 software, with Scott Forstall, Senior VP of iPhone Software to giving us a preview.

Naturally they started with the normal recap on stuff:

• The iPhone is now in 80 countries around the world, as of this week.
• Set a goal of 10 million iPhones in first calendar year, 2008, and they ended up selling 13.7 million.
• Including the first-gen iPhone, sales from June 2007 from December 2008, were 17 million iPhones sold. Including the iPod Touch, 30 million iPhone OS devices sold over the same period.
• Some App Store rah-rah: over 25,000 apps are in the App Store today, with Apple approving 96% of them overall, and of those, 98% are approved within a week. They also state that since the launch of the App Store, there 800 million downloads of apps.

Here are highlights from the presentation:

1,000 new APIs have been created. This allows a ton more functionality. Which they demo'ed and demo'ed, and demo'ed. But anyway.

They have added in-app purchase functionality. So now you could have someone say, purchase additional game levels from inside the game.

Peer to Peer connectivity, for games and more. But you can imagine the gaming applications for it: an API lets you find all the other iPhones/iPod touches in the area playing the same game, so now you can play games with your friends over the network locally. It uses Bluetooth, though, not wi-fi.

A good example of a non-gaming application would be beaming contact info (business cards, and the like).

iPhone 3.0 will support the ability of applications that talk directly to accessories. An example (demo'ed): a glucose monitor for diabetics. But it's not just about reading the level, the app would track readings and food and recommend amounts of insulin for injections and the like. Really cool, actually (as someone who knows a diabetic well, this would be quite handy).

You can now embed Google Maps inside the application now. The API is open to 3rd parties applications, but they can't use the iPhone's built-in map tiles for turn-by-turn (because of licesning issues). But a developer can use his own maps.

I don't know why they didn't save this one (oh, I know why, more on that later) but push notifications are finally here. "You know, we're late on this one." Well, yeah.

For those who want to know why push instead of background tasks, they were ready for that one: not good for the customer. You might say, eh?

Well, battery life, right? According to their testing (on other phones), battery life dropped 80% with background processing, but only 23% with push notification.

When an app isn't running, it uses the push notification service, which is persistently connected. Notifications come in via the service, and there are three types of notifications: badges, audio alerts, and text alerts (which appear just like SMS alerts).

At this point there were tons of demos, which I won't go over. Suffice to say they demo'ed games, an ESPN app, Oracle, and more.

But at this point of the preso it got really quiet, as the announcement came that Cut, Copy, and Paste would come with iPhone OS 3.0. People fainted.

The description? Double-tap text and it automatically selects it. A cut, copy, paste bubble pops up above the selection, with tiny bubbles on both sides of the text (the selection points). Double-tap to bring up the paste bubble. If you want to selection a block, drag either of the selection points to adjust the end-point.

My only question is why so long to implement this?

Oh, no! Landscape mode for all apps including SMS and email! They're eliminating all my gripes! Get me this OS, now!

Voice Memos using the built-in microphone or an external microphone; you can edit the memo by trimming it and share it via email or MMS.

Oh, yes, I said MMS. That's something else new.

Calendar: to the iPhone 1.0 personal calendars, synchronized to Mac/PC using iTunes and the iPhone 2.0 Exchange calendar sync using ActiveSync, iPhone 3.0 adds two additional calendar types: CalDAV (used by Yahoo, Google, Oracle, OS X Server, etc.) and support for subscriptions via the .ICS format: movies, sports schedules, etc.

Stock app: considering how things recession-wise are going, they probably should have skipped this. But they have added news headlines, plus details like highs and lows and PE ratios. There’s also landscape view.

Search changes: now you can search not just you contacts but in all key applications, even email. If the query is not found on your device, it will continue the search the server (Exchange, IMAP).

The home screen gets tweaked and adds Spotlight. On the homescreen, flick to the left from the first screen of apps and you'll bring up the new Spotlight search homescreen, from which you can search media, calendars, contacts and mail metadata but not messages themselves (eh?).

Other new features (as we came to a close):

Note sync; shake to shuffle (from the nano); wi-fi auto login; Stereo Bluetooth (A2DP), YouTube accounts, Languages (greatly enhanced support, adding more languages and improving keyboards for languages around the world), auto-fill, anti-phishing, extended Parental Controls, and more.

Availability: for developers, now. For the public, the release date is TBD.

Well, they say "this summer" (WWDC anyone?). Additional info: it will work on both the 3G and EDGE versions of the iPhone, but the first-gen iPhone will not get A2DP or MMS.

I'm trying to figure out why, but I can't think of anything technically that would prevent it, but still ... later in the Q&A, Apple said it was because the radio was different.

Free to iPhones, but available for both generations of iPod Touch users as a $9.95 update.

Finally, in the Q&A, Apple said that for today, no hardware announcements. Yep, no new iPhone, no tablet, no netbook.

On the other hand, that's quite a bit to digest, as I look through the list of changes. It will make both Android and the Palm Pre take some time to think over their roadmaps as the unnamed iPhone 3.0 OS release date approaches, silently.