Apple’s iPhone 3.0 Event: Ten Cool Features Revealed

4. Push notifications. Apple will finally give applications such as instant messaging clients the ability to communicate with remote servers even when they’re not running through push notifications–a feature it started promising last summer, and which it says was a lot harder to implement than it expected. This falls short of real multitasking–Apple says that would have killed battery life and overall performance. But it should be a boon for communications-related apps of many kinds: We saw the Meebo universal IM client deliver incoming IMs when another application was running. Meebo’s CEO told the crowd it wasn’t even worth building a Meebo iPhone client until push notifications allowed the app to work in the background this way.

We also saw a preview of a slick ESPN application that uses notifications to alert sports fans of game scores–and which also uses improved support for video streaming to provide full-screen, full-motion video that knows what kind of connection you have and delivers the best possible quality it can.

5. Peer-to-peer communications. iPhones will be able to communicate with each other over Bluetooth, permitting both practical applications (such as exchange of business data) and fun stuff (like Ngmoco’s upcoming Nintendogs-like game that lets your pooch go on playdates with dogs owned by nearby iPhone users).

6. Cut and paste! Finally! It looks slick and simple, too, with an interface that lets you select a little text or whole blocks of it (or photos, including multiple ones) and paste them into other apps. And if you paste something and change your mind, you shake the phone to undo. It’s supported by all of Apple’s own relevant applications, and the company says that it’ll involve little-to-no work for third-party programs to support it, too.

7. Landscape in more places. The iPhone’s Safari browser is smart enough to notice when you rotate your iPhone into landscape mode, whereupon it adjusts the display accordingly and gives you a wider, more comfortable keyboard. Now all major built-in iPhone apps do the same, such as the Notes application (which, incidentally, can now sync notes with a PC or Mac).

8. MMS. Until now, the iPhone messaging app has only let you send plain-text SMS messages to your pals. With version 3.0 of the OS, you’ll be able to send photos, audio, and even your location as identified by the phone’s geolocating feature. (This feature doesn’t work in first-generation iPhones, however–it’s a hardware limitation.)

9. Spotlight search. Apple saved this for nearly the end of the presentation, but it’s among the biggest improvements. Swipe the phone’s home screen to the left, and you’ll get a version of OS X’s Spotlight universal search that lets you find stuff across multiple applications–e-mail, calendar, music, notes, and more. The individual apps now have search features, too, and the e-mail application can even find text in messages that are on the server and haven’t been downloaded to the phone.

10. Better audio features. The iPhone will finally do stereo Bluetooth, allowing for wireless headphones and cable-free speaker setups. And it will add an audio note-taking app that will work with both the internal microphone and external ones.

That’s ten significant features, but Apple is saying there are a hundred new items in iPhone 3.0. It briefly mentioned a number of others, including the ability to log into your YouTube account, automatic Wi-Fi logins,  shuffling music in the iPod app by shaking the phone, parental controls, anti-phishing features, automatic form filling in Safari, and more. Even during the Q&A at the end, new stuff came up: Apple says that the OS will support using the phone as a tethered modem for laptops, once carriers roll out such service.

For all we learned today that’s new and exciting, there are some features which still haven’t shown up, unless they’re in 3.0 but Apple didn’t deem them worthy of mention. I’m still waiting for a way to sync to-do items from a PC or Mac, for instance, and I’d like to see third-party applications such as office suites have a way to detach file attachments such as word-processing documents and get access to them for editing.

And there are plenty of really interesting iPhone questions that didn’t get answered at all today. We didn’t hear a thing, for instance, about iPhone hardware, and any new versions of it that might be in the wings. That was no surprise: Apple doesn’t want to kill interest in the current iPhones by pre-announcing any new models any earlier than it has to.

But with the new OS targeted for release sometime around the middle of the year, it should show up around the first anniversary of the iPhone 3G’s release and the second anniversary of the first-generation model’s debut. You don’t need to be Nostradamus to figure out that there’s a decent chance, at least, that the iPhone 3.0 software may show up not only as an upgrade but also as the OS for a new iPhone model. Which gives us all plenty to speculate about over the next few months while we wait for Apple to wrap its work up and get the update onto millions of iPhones.