Not long ago, I posted about Tuesday’s iPhone OS 3.0 announcement, and speculated as to what I would like to see included. Well it seems that Apple’s enginers read this blog, and spent the next few days re-working the OS release to meet my requirements. That or they just had these features planned anyway, but I will choose to believe the former if you don’t mind.

Let’s take a look at the major new features, starting with those I was hoping for:

• Cut/Copy/Paste. Finally, after three major releases, the iPhone will get this functionality. Apple have admittedly had a difficult task in integrating this into a multi-touch interface in a intuitive way, but  two years? Better late than never I suppose.
• Background Push notification. The functionality promised to iPhone owners a year ago will finally arrive. According to Apple, developer response to the initial announcement necessitated a complete change in their push server architecture which is now complete.
• MMS. My all-singing all-dancing multimedia smartphone can now send picture messages. I had a phone which could do this in 2002, but again better late than never.
• Spotlight Search. This will live on a screen to the left of the default home screen, and will allow search across all applications in much the same way as spotlight allows in Mac OS X.
• Landscape Keyboard. Always seemed silly to allow this in Safari but not in other apps. Now it will be accessible from any application, which is bound to please heavy email users and annoy the developers of all those landscape mail apps.
• CalDAV support. This is a big one for me, but it has not recieved much attention ((This is also something of a surprise given the money Apple charge for MobileMe)). It will cut out the midle man and allow direct over the air synchronisation with calendars which support the CalDAV protocol (such as Google Calendar).

There are various other features too – turn by turn navigation apps will be allowed, a voice memo app will be included and notes syncing will be enabled. Developers will have access to the dock and bluetooth to allow interfacing with 3rd party add-ons and hundreds of new APIs will all be available.

The only thing I was after which didn’t materialise is better support for ActiveSync. My main reason for this being calendar/contacts syncing issues which have been partially addresses by CalDAV support.

A beta of the new OS is available to developers now, and it is due to be released to the public in the summer (I’d bet at the same time as a new iPhone model). It will be free to iPhone owners (1st and 2nd gen) and will cost iPod touch owners $9.95.