Hi, I’m Jay Goldman. You’re watching Mr. Mobile on Butterscotch.com. Today, I’ll look at the iPhone 3.0 upgrade. Now, this upgrade is actually free for everybody who has an iPhone that includes the original iPhone, the 3G, or the new 3GS. Of course you don’t need to upgrade the 3GS if you just bought one because it comes with a software 3.0 preloaded on it. You can also upgrade your iPod touch although there is a charge for that and all of that is done through iTunes on your computer.

So connect your device to your computer through USB. Pop open your iTunes software if it doesn’t open automatically and click the check for updates button and it will walk you through the process, very seamless. You shouldn’t have any problems doing an upgrade on your existing phone and of course on a 3GS. You just take it out of the box and you are running 3.0 already.

A quick look of some of the things that are new. Now, some of these features are limited to the 3GS because they are hardware based but for the most part, they work across the board. You are probably most excited about copy and paste of all the things that are on the phone and in fact, about all the complaints that were out there around the original iPhone and even the 3G. Everybody said, “I can't believe Apple didn’t put copy and paste in.” Well, you’d be very happy to know that they put in copy and paste on the 3.0 software and not only that, it works extremely well.

Basically, anywhere you have a text field and that includes things like the address bar in Safari to the notes in notepad right through your email. You can double tap on the display to select a word. You can then drag the little blue selection toggles backwards or forwards to increase or decrease the size of that selection range and then you can tap on one of the actions from cut, copy, and paste right through to select and select all if you want to select a whole bunch of text and you can also just select and text and start typing over it and work exactly like on your desktop computer and will in fact just replace that text or delete if you hit the backspace key.

To paste text that you have copied into another text area, just double tap to put the insertion point in and get the little menu of commands, tap on paste and your text will appear exactly the way it was in the previous application. You can get it to copy some other stuff as well. Some people have reported some success of getting things like images copied but the ability to copy text is really important to the way we use modern computing devices like iPhones so it’s a very, very welcome addition to the phone.

If you often find yourself trying to find things on your iPhone and I know that I certainly do, you’ll be very, very excited to know that Spotlight, Apple’s search technology that made its grand debut in Mac OS has made its way down to the phone level. You can actually find it in four places in the phone. One of them is really obvious and the one that Apple shows in all of their commercials and that kind of stuff which is straight from the home screen. If you're on the first page of your home screen, you actually can drag over one page to the left and you’ll now get a search page which includes a search bar on the top.

If you start typing into that, it behaves most like Spot Light does on the desktop which is to say that it actually search across most of the application on your phone. If for example I start typing in Sean, it will turn up anything that matches my producer Sean but also iPod tracks that might be say by Sean Paul and so you’ll actually find things come back from Calendar, Mail, your iPod, any podcasts that are included in there and those will all put together in the same page and you can just kind of scroll down through them.

Individually, a lot of those applications also now supports search. Probably most exciting is actually mail itself. There was no search previously for email messages which is a real pain if you’d lost any email that you needed to find. So now you can actually go into any of your inboxes and do a search directly from there. If you don’t see the search field when you go in the inbox, just pull down and it will appear at the top of the page and then you can just type directly in there and it will do the search for you.

If you’re an iMap server that supports search on the server site you’ll see at the bottom a little button that says continue the search on the server, you can tap on that and your iPhone will actually go up to your server, look for any more messages that might not have been downloaded yet and pull those down into your iPhone and display them there.

Likewise, search now makes and appearance inside of the Calendar application. If you're in the list view so there is a search box at the top of the page there and the search inside of the iPod applications so you can dig up your music. Those three applications are limited in scope, so if you want to do a general search, make sure that you do it from the home screen Spotlight and you’ll find things that match across the board.

Third party developers apparently will have the ability to plug their content into that. They don’t yet, so right now you’ll be returning Apple’s applications data but in some point in the future, you will apparently also be able to pull in data that comes from third party applications.

A really handy tip, if you want to be able to configure the home button to take you to search, so if you do a lot of searching for example, you can change what the double tap on the home button does. If you go into the general setting area of your settings application, you’ll see a home button section which allows you to do. There’s actually a bunch of options there which you may have not known about. So you can for example have it pop up iPod controls if there’s music playing, you can just have it jump directly to the iPod at all times.

I’ve actually set mine to go to search so now when I double tap on the home button, no matter where I am on the iPhone, it will take me straight to the Spotlight page and I can do a search from there.

If your carrier supports MMS and most of the carriers out there do, the big one is AT&T and don’t think they’ve got their MMS support in place right now. The phone has just come out but it will be coming a little bit later on. The phone now supports MMS. I wasn’t really sure why this was such a big deal until I had the ability to send them and now I can say that the ability to grab a really quick photograph or something when you’re out somewhere and fire it of to a text message to somebody and know that they get it right away and get an alert in their phone is actually great, you might find it really useful like say for example, you’re at the super market and your wife sends you to buy some things and your not exactly sure which one of the things in the shelf she was looking for, it’s really simple to grab a quick picture, pop it in to an MMS address to the person you’re sending it to, hit the send button and it will send it of to them.

In the MMS application in the iPhone 3.0 and in the Mail application where it’s probably been most requested, you can now compose things in landscape mode which is fantastic because you get a keyboard that’s much better suited to both of your thumbs rather than the single upright keyboard like this. You can also of course read longer lines of text which lands themselves very well to emails. So landscape mode in email is really a welcome edition to the phone. I find that I use it in landscape mode most of the time when I’m composing email. So I’m really, really glad to see that that’s made it in. And of course it still works on applications where it’s always work like Safari so you can just jump into Safari and turn your webpage to side ways and be able to read them in a much easier and wider format.

One of the things that’s new in Safari actually that’s also you know, one of those great editions that you don’t really think about but you’ve sort of rely on it on your desktop software is in fact auto fill so Safari now has the ability to remember what you’ve typed into a form and the next time you come back to that form, you can just tap on the auto fill button and it will complete it for you.

The best part about that is a actually that is remembers usernames and passwords. Typing those on the iPhone especially when if use secure passwords that are a mix of alphanumeric characters and punctuation can really be a real pain, so having it remember those for you and fill them in to a form when you’re logging in, really, really handy, saves a whole bunch of time.

One of the features that is kind of tied to a hardware and I say that because it’s only available in the 3GS even if you upgrade your iPhone 3G to the 3.0 software is voice control. Your 3GS will actually com with actually with a new headset that’s got three buttons on it, the old one only had one which was the sort of answer, call, hang up, skip to next track and stuff, the new one has a 7:24 switch that has volume on either side and a button in the middle. You can trigger voice control either from that button or from the home button on the device itself and it’s actually really easy to use. There are a whole bunch of different commands that you can do on it and won’t go through the whole list of them, you can definitely find them on Apple’s website or in the documentation that come with your phone but some of them are useful ones relate to the phone itself and to the iPod. As an example, if I’m playing some music on my iPod and I want to what it is I;m listening to, I can hold down the middle button, what’s playing? That will play though head phones if you’ve got them on. So if you’re say on the subway for example and you’ve got some music playing, just hold down the button in the middle of your headphone, ask it what it’s playing, of course you kind of look like you’re talking to yourself and it will tell you what’s playing. You can control the iPod that way so you can tell it to play, pause, next song, previous song. You can also trigger genius playlist by saying play more songs like this or you can just say an artist name like play the box of rebellion and it will go and play that music for you.

8:26 works in a similar way so you can say call Sean, it will call my producer Sean and of course your phone probably won’t call my producer Sean but mine will and you can do sort of general phone based things directly from the voice control. So a really handy feature say if you 8:40 to take the phone out of your pocket and that kind of thing and works with the headset or with the home button.

The upgrade is definitely worth doing if you’ve got and iPhone 3G or an iPhone and you can do it for free so go out and upgrade your phones. If you’re an iPod touch user, maybe worth doing, you do get to play around with some of the new stuff, voice control obviously excluded because that’s only on the 3GS but some of the other stuff will appear on your iPod touch and so it’s probably worth doing if you’re a touch user as well though there is of course a charge for doing so.

I’m Jay Goldman. This has been Mr. Mobile. Thanks for watching, check out some of our past episodes at Butterscotch.com. I’ll catch you next time.