Apple finally invents copy/paste and MMS; iPhone 3.0 gets official

We all know as soon as a feature comes to the iPhone, Apple invented it right? Perfect examples are the full touchscreen form factor, mobile apps, visual voicemail and the accelerometer — all brought to market by Cupertino. But none of those things are Apple inventions, you say? Pfff, clearly you’ve never met an Apple fanboy. So let’s take a look at a few of Apple’s latest mobile inventions fresh from today’s town hall:

• Push notifications for apps. Finally. As you well know, this will allow the iPhone/iPod Touch to be notified (via a badge, text pop up and/or audio alert) in near real-time of a new server-side event associated with a specific app. Think of it as a poor man’s answer to background processes. Background processes, by the way, are not an addition to version 3.0. Apple’s excuses: Battery performance and memory strain.
• Updated media player adjusts streaming video quality according to current bandwidth.
• Cut, copy and paste. That’s right folks, Apple’s polio vaccine. Double-tap to select text, drag start/end points and do your thang. You can even shake to undo/redo edits.
• Send multiple images at once. Joy.
• Wider landscape keyboard availability. Apple finally tossed the landscape keyboard into all native apps, including Mail. Thank you.
• MMS! Hooray for decade-old tech! SMS and MMS are now lumped into a Messages app. It won’t be available on 2G (1st gen) iPhones.
• New calendar features. CalDAV allows for sharing across a bunch of services such as Google and Yahoo and .ics subscription support.
• Flushed out Stocks app.
• Extended search. Users can now search in all key apps including Calendar, iPod, Notes and Mail.
• Spotlight for iPhone. A “search homescreen”. It’s like Spotlight for Mac and it only searches native Apple apps.
• Bluetooth A2DP support (stereo Bluetooth) — but it won’t be available on 2G (1st gen) iPhones.
• Tethering.

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