iPhone 3.0: What’s in it?

Although the current #1 “Most Wanted Ever” feature according to PleaseFixTheiPhone.com isn’t addressed in today’s release of the latest iPhone software, at least we’re getting cut, copy and paste. Right? I mean right?

Although it’s a little surprising that the most popular smartphone on the planet had to wait for software version 3.0 before getting one of the oldest tricks in the computing book, that doesn’t mean I’m any less excited than I was when the feature was finally announced last week at WWDC.

So if we’re not getting Multi-tasking (background-running apps) and AT&T won’t allow MMS until “late summer“, what are we getting besides the ability to copy-n-paste? Here’s a few highlights:

Spotlight Search

Mac users already know the beauty of Spotlight Search and now iPhone users get to enjoy it, too. Spotlight lets you search the contents of your entire iPhone including your contacts, songs, email, calendars, etc. and you can do it all from one place. Best of all, in Mail, you can search by subject, sender, recipient, and entire message.

Landscape Keyboard

The iPhone’s tiny keyboard is surprisingly easy to use as it is, but the ability to type in landscape mode in Mail, while texting and in Safari should speed things up quite a bit.

iPod enhancements

Have you ever tried to scrub through a song or podcast only to realize that the time line was a little … well … not-so-precise? This should be finally fixed with the introduction of a more finely tuned scrubbing feature. Couple that with an instant 30-second replay feature (will come in handy after ordering at the drive-thru) and then toss in Shake to Shuffle and we’ve got ourselves a much better iPod experience … on our phones!

Buy Movies, TV Shows, and Audiobooks

Until today, the only thing you could buy directly on your phone was a single song from the iTunes store. Anything more had to be done on your desktop. The only problem: there’s still a 10MB file limit if you’re on a cell network. For bigger files, just connect via wi-fi.

Voice Memos

Journalists rejoice! With the new, built-in Voice Memos app, you can now record something (even in the background while using other apps) and then email it to yourself for later. For everyone else, uh, I guess you could use it to spy on your co-workers by “accidentally” leaving it in their office?

Although there’s a handful of other nifty additions in the iPhone 3.0 software update, these are the ones I’m most excited about. Of course, if I could afford the new iPhone 3Gs right now, I’d have written about how much I’m drooling over the new video camera and the ability to edit video right from the iPhone itself. Since that doesn’t exactly fit into my budget yet, I’ll settle for a software update.

How about you? What features are you psyched about? Or are you too excited about TweetDeck to care?