phideltacity

Thanks to having had to test and evaluate as well as specify a few iPhone apps, I have a developer account with apple. Today it really paid off as I now have the opportunity to test the beta of the iPhone OS 3.0 recently released by Apple.
Now usually I am very careful about installing beta software on my phone as it is my life-line to the world and breaking it would come close to a catastrophe. But such is my trust in the people in Cupertino that I decided to throw caution to the wind. So far I have not regretted that decision. (I’ll keep you posted if I do)
First off I tried the landscape keyboard in Mail. I have to say that I am a fan, as it makes typing a lot easier. There were a few glitches though that will probably keep me typing in portrait. One of those glitches is that the line wrapping seems to be broken and you cannot scroll all the way to the right. That makes writing mails a pain in landscape mode. It is however something I would expect to see ironed out by the time the software is released to the public at large.
The next thing is cut&paste. It works beautifully and has made my iPhone life so much better, even in the first day. The drawback though is that I have to unlearn my previous behaviour. Before now I would scroll through text, such as web-pages, by holding down my finger while reading and slowly moving it as I read thereby scrolling the text. As it happens that is exactly the gesture that triggers the cut&paste popup. So now I keep getting the menu more often than I would have liked. But as I said, the way I was scrolling is admittedly a bit peculiar. On the bright side cut&paste also works with apps that were written with the 2.0 API such as BlogPress which I am using to write this.
And last but not least I had a surprise a few minutes ago. Usually when I leave home fully charged in the morning, I hit the 20% juice warning sometime in the afternoon. That is why I have depended heavily on a mophie juice pack to keep my phone alive. Yet just a few minutes ago, at almost 6pm, I noticed my battery indicator show a 3/4 charge. Now either Apple managed to break the indicator and my phone will die just before I publish this post or they have really gotten a major improvement in battery usage out of their new software.
Well so much for this first review. I will keep you all posted on my experiences as I fiddle with iPhone OS 3.0 some more.