David R Storms.com

The iPad has arrived. It has a name, it has been shown, now we wait and see what the world makes of it. The press event that Apple held today (Wednesday January 27th) was almost entirely focused on this new device. Many of the features and speculation about this iPad (right down to the name) had already been guessed and now that we know for sure what this thing is, it’s time decide if this is a worthwhile product.

Here is my take on some of more important aspects of this product to me.

Hardware

When I first saw the iPad, the first thing I noticed is that it seems like an over sized iPhone. Maybe that is what Apple wanted us to feel, since they are clearly trying to leverage all the knowledge people have over iPhone OS and the iPod Touch on this new platform. They want you to be able to pick this thing up, and know exactly what to do with it.

That being said, the iPad itself rotates and orients itself to the way you are holding it, portrait or landscape, which is expected. You can turn this thing around and around and it will keep adapting the display. One neat trick is that you could flip the iPad end over end to face someone in front of you to show a picture and it will orient itself to show them.

I had a bit of trouble dealing with the rather thick border around the iPad. It seemed distracting and out of place but I see the reason. If you think of how you are going to hold this thing, your thumbs are going to have to use the sides so they are going to need to rest somewhere. This is a minor point and is probably just a shock factor more than anything and really it’s the screen you should be focused on.

That brings me to the screen. So now we have an LED back lit display. I am eager to see how bring and vibrant this is. The iPad has a large 9.7 ” screen which sounds like a good size to me, more than a lot of the netbooks out there. It’s about a half-inch thick so it’s basically the thickness of an iPhone. It weights a pound and a half which from what I’ve read already feels solid and weighty in your hands.

There is a few choices for storage capacity. I like this because it offers more price points (more on price later). You can get 16, 32 and 64 GB sizes.  For me the iPhone I have at 16 GB is sufficient, but I can really see me putting hundreds of songs on this, some video, my picture collections and maybe some documents so I feel that 16 just won’t be big enough and I kind of feel that 64 GB will be the flexibility I need. Chances are I will settle with 32 GB to save the $100.

It’s nice to see an Apple device that supports wireless-N networks. The iPad itself has 2 models, wi-fi only and wi-fi / 3G hybrid. I already pay for data with my iPhone so even if up here in Canada we can get the no-contract prepaid plans for data access, I really feel that wi-fi is all I need since I can picture this as being our home device, and if I travel with it I will likely have what I need right on the iPad. What I would really love to hear is that the iPad can connect via Bluetooth to an iPhone for tethering your 3G connection. I doubt this will happen, but it would go a long way to sell the iPad for me. On Bluetooth, it will pair up with my wireless keyboard for the iMac which I was glad to hear.

There is no camera on the iPad at all. I found this a little disappointing. I never imagined I would be taking photos or video with this, but a front facing camera made sense to me so that you could do video calls with people. Perhaps because of VOIP calls requiring net access, the lack of them currently on the App Store, and the fact you can rotate the iPad however you want were enough for Apple to not put a camera in. We can always hope the next iPhone will have one!

Software

It looks like Apple has built either iPhone OS 4.0 or just iPad OS which is an off shoot of iPhone OS. It’s still unclear on this point. At the presentation nothing was revealed in this regard and we likely won’t hear anything until the Apple developer conference in a couple months.

The built in apps get an iPad refresh here and I must say for the better.

Mail

I like the mail app on the iPhone, and I use it with Google and ActiveSync in order to get push email just like Exchange. This works great and I expect that this will still be supported. This wouldn’t be a deal breaker because I could use Gmail online, but even though they didn’t say anything I don’t think they would leave this out.

In landscape mode you can see your inbox on the left and message on the right, this is my preferred way to view email and is pretty standard in Outlook and Thunderbird, and even Mac OS X’s mail app. It is a nice touch that you can rotate to portrait and then get a full screen view of the message, useful when you get email newsletters or large images.

The compose box is like a smaller new window that appears and a virtual keyboard slides underneath it. When I see this window it is clearly a recycle of the current iPhone compose window, but with a bigger box to type your message. I almost expected the whole screen to be used here for mail composition.

Calendar and Contacts

Amazing! I love the rewrite here. They have a lot more room to play with and they take advantage of it using a full size calendar, and a side bar with current day details. It really looks like a day planner in that regard and it kind of makes me jealous that the OS X iCal doesn’t look this good. For busy and full calendars this looks like it will handle them no problem. Again I hope Exchange support is present here.

The Contacts app looks more like an address book now with a page on the left and contact details on the right. I do like the extra room here to see all the contact details without any scrolling.

Maps

Still using Google maps which is awesome to begin with. On my iPhone I use maps all the time for directions, street view, GPS, etc. What I like here is you can take those maps and see more of them at once, including the satellite pictures. The street view will look amazing as well on a big display. The specs don’t list a GPS chip so I suppose it could use 3G and wi-fi to pin point your location, but really if I can plan my trip at home with wi-fi, and then cache those results when I go on the road, my navigator can easily use the maps there to get us to our destination. Sounds like for this purpose getting the 3G model is the way to go, or simply stick with my iPhone for directions.

iTunes, YouTube, Video, iPod

All of these apps have been designed to take advantage of the bounty of real estate there is to offer. This is great because I find myself always moving through menus and scrolling on the iPhone. When going through the music collection especially this is the case. So iPod having more navigation options up front with little to no page transitions is a plus for me. It seems that the iTunes and App Store interfaces also follow this design. With YouTube it feels more like the YouTube website, where you have the video up front and alternate video and selections all around you.

The video app appears to be the one you see on iPod Touch devices. Not much to say here other than video looked great on my iPhone so having it a higher resolution will be awesome. I did read that the aspect ration was 4:3 so that will mean letterbox and no full wide screen. Not much of a choice I suppose when you can still rotate from portrait to landscape.

Photos

I really like iPhoto on the Mac, and it seems that Apple has taken the best to offer there and put it on the tablet. I can see myself moving over all my photos so that I can have them handy at all times. You can toss up a slideshow to music as easy as you can in iPhoto which is great for showing off. Having all the Faces information come over is cool to. What I’d like to know is if you can do Faces management here, tagging people in photos and having all that sync with iPhoto on the Mac.

iWork

I was hoping something would be announced about the Apple productivity suite and there was: iWork will be on the iPad! This is great, editing documents and spreadsheets on this will be a great feature. Having those sync to your Mac or some online storage will be even better. These are standalone apps for the iPad only it seems at about $10 per app which is something I would pay for Pages and Numbers.

iBooks

As many suspected, the iPad will now have eBooks. This was a logical move for Apple and I can see them dominating this market. Having the colour display of the iPad behind the books and the ease to get at their iBookstore and get new material will be a good sell, it worked for the Kindle and other devices so the advantages here will be the hardware and software powering this.

The page turning effects look great and work as you would think, just swipe to turn the page. What I didn’t see is if the pages can go landscape and show 2 at a time like reading a normal book. I like that you can on the fly (and rather smoothly it seemed) change the font and font size. I’m sure there must be some provision for bookmarking as well.

Like how I don’t buy music anymore, I can see myself taking the iPad, finding on the store the new release on the day it comes out, downloading it and reading the first few pages in a couple minutes. I would actually prefer this over the bookstore when I know what I want to buy, I’ll just buy it online and get it now without traveling.

Apps

It appears as though all iPhone OS built apps will work on the iPad. When I first saw this it was a tiny box in the middle of this big display which I had a bad feeling about. Adding the X2 button to double the size was a good idea, but I would have to see how well it does on some apps. The advantage is with the development kit (SDK) going out to developers today they can rewrite their apps to work with the native screen of the iPad. I suppose then they would be filtered out of the App Store that iPhone and iPod Touch owners would see.

Price and Availability

Apple has broken the iPad into 2 groups, those with wi-fi only and those that are hybrid with optional 3G connectivity.

The wi-fi only ones, which I suspect will be the most popular and replace a lot of those iPod Touch devices out there, are priced at $499, $599 and $699 for 16, 32 and 64 GB sizes respectively.

The hybrid ones come in the same sizes, but priced at $629, $729 and $829.

I think the $599 wi-fi only version will be pretty popular and I think it is the choice I would go with. Of course these prices are in US dollars, and I am hoping that here in Canada we will get the same price but with consumer electronics we always end up paying more. Since this won’t be sold by carriers it’s hard to say. I don’t know how the 3G versions will work, they take the micro SIM cards so maybe you can buy it from the telco or Apple and then get a chip from the telco? It sounded like the devices are sold unlocked so you can take them where you want to. It’s unclear how the arrangement is going to work outside of the US.

In the US, the data plans for 3G is going to be handled by AT&T and as an interesting note they are offering a contract free prepaid usage of either $15 for up to 250 MB in a month or $30 for unlimited use, you can cancel when you want and activate it right from the iPad! Now if only phone where that easy!

The wi-fi only versions were said to be shipped in 60 days worldwide, so likely by April. The 3G models in 90 days.  Until 3G deals are worked out it is hard to say when anyone outside the US will get those models, but for me looking at the wi-fi only model I could be visiting an Apple store this spring to play!

Conclusion

Apple was very eager to share their new creation, and the industry demanded that they give up something. I get the feeling that there may be more to the iPad experience coming as Apple has more time to work on the final version of the OS and finalize a possible iPhone 4.0.

It seems like all the core functionality is there and the hardware is nailed down so its just a matter of working out any kinks, finishing whatever needs to be finished, making deals with more publishers, phone companies, etc.

I have been debating on a laptop for a while now to supplement our computer compliment at the house. I have tried to take stock of what I think the laptop would do for me, and I find I’m answering more and more internet based apps and activities. traveling with movies, sharing pictures, etc. All of these things as Steve Jobs put it today the iPad does extremely well. So it’s cheaper than the laptop, does the things I want to do, and is in a form factor I prefer.

I really need to sit with the news and wait over the coming months but I feel that when I’m ready for that laptop, the iPad may make more sense then shelling out money for a generic PC or even a MacBook.

My how the apple has fallen! If you are anything like me, you use Google’s search engine a lot. I rely on it heavily and it is the first site I turn to when searching because I trust the results and I can somehow find what I want almost every time. Being that I use the site every day, it is set as my default home page so I get to see the new graphic as they come out.

Today they were celebrating Sir Isaac Newton’s birthday. That’s great. And for the first time that I can recall, the logo is a bit animated in that a small apple falls from the logo.

When I saw this I had to laugh. I can’t help but think that this is some kind of inside joke about Google dropping Apple due to the recent turmoil each of them have been in. There must be a bit of bad blood between the two what with the Google Voice app denied from the iPhone AppStore, plus Google competing in the smart phone OS space.

You could also read this not only as Google dropping Apple, but maybe pointing out how far Apple has fallen from the proverbial tree. Perhaps saying something about recent animosity regarding the AppStore approval process.

Something to think about, either way it’s very very clever, even if it wasn’t meant to be!

Decision to Switch

I made the decision quite easily to switch to the Mac. I am a web development and programming professional, and I was already using Linux at work and I wanted the tools and ecosystem of the Mac OS environment. Obviously the tools available cannot be the only reason, since many (and more) exist on the Windows PC ecosystem.  For me there was a number of other factors that made sense for me personally, and even though I could have stayed in Windows, I felt the Mac platform was where I wanted to be.

Factors included:

1. I use Linux as my primary operation system (OS) at work and the sheer number of tools and ease of use is staggering. Ubuntu is the distribution that I use and it makes programs very easy to install and keep up to date. I think Linux got the label that it was not user friendly, I think depending on what you do this is not the case. It’s true that a lot of the common applications for the typical user are not there, such as running Microsoft Office. You would need to know the open source or commercial alternatives which could be a challenge to some users.
2. I love the integrated terminal. On Windows I used PUTTY, but I really like simply firing up a terminal window and having raw access to the system and remote systems.
3. On the Mac I liked the idea that it was an integrated solution. I already purchased an iPhone, and although it synced and worked fine with iTunes on Windows, I just like the idea of using the same manufacturers equipment to get the whole integrated experience. I would feel the exact same way with say the Zune using the PC software made for it.
4. The hardware was a big seller for me. My PC was aging and I always said that if I was to get another PC I would build it myself. But when I looked at the iMac’s, I fell in love with the large bright screens and the very capable components inside. Everyone trusts the quality and beauty of design of the iMac.
5. The iLife software and elegance of OS X was a draw for me as well. I was really interested in iPhoto and GarageBand.
6. I knew that I could make the switch easily since all the tools I used were available on the Mac platform.
7. Xcode was only on the Mac, I am really interested in iPhone development and I needed the Mac for this (simply put, no Hackintosh for me!)

Another thing I loved is that for $50 I got the wireless mouse and keyboard. That means the only cables I have, is the power cable plus the iPhone charging cable and the external hard disk. But out of the box just having 1 power cable was very nice.

Here is an overview of the applications I switched to and what I was able to still use after switching to the iMac.

iTunes and iPhone Apps

I had all my media on an external drive. Thanks to a tip from LifeHacker, I was able to backup my library (which was already consolidated and organized on the external drive) as an XML file. Then I just edited the XML to change the Windows paths to valid Mac OS X paths after connecting the drive to the iMac.

Using iTunes, I just imported my library XML file and it found and added all my playlists and song collection, just as it was before. I was left with a bunch of duplicate playlists but that was fine.

All my podcasts came over, but all of them were marked as not played. I couldn’t find out how to change this, so I just deleted all the previously listened to ones. I figured I wouldn’t need them again and they were just taking up space anyway.

I was worried when my Apps from my iPhone didn’t come over, but that was easily fixed by clicking on the phone in iTunes under Devices, then in the File menu click the “transfer purchased apps from iPhone” and voila, it started adding them back into iTunes. Perfect.

I didn’t notice that iTunes by default puts all of your music in the users Music folder. I have a Western Digital 1 TB My Book where my music was and I thought it would remain there. But since I didn’t change the folder, all of the Music ended up copying to the hard disk. This actually worked in my favour as you will find out later.

iPhone

No real issues here. I was used to the iPhone under Windows and not much changes here.

Devices

I have a Western Digital 1 TB My Book which I simply unplugged from my PC and plugged into the iMac. It mounted and appeared just fine.

Applications

Support now for the Mac platform is better than ever. I was able to easily get Skype (albeit an older version), FileZilla (FTP client) and Eclipse installed and ready to use. I installed Tweeite (ad supported – since I like the paid iPhone version) for my Twitter fix.  I used JungleDisk (excellent backup solution by the way) on Windows and wasn’t really surprised to find that there is a Mac version.  I purchased iWork 09 to replace Microsoft Office which I was OK with since I didn’t use the plethora of Word features. I do miss Excel and the Ribbon UI, but I’ve heard that Microsoft is going to be offering Office online soon for free. I’ve been getting the hang of the equivalents (Pages for word processing, Numbers for spreadsheets) and I still find them very functional. I haven’t had a reason to use Keynote yet but I am excited to try and use it since I’ve heard presentation software is way better than PowerPoint (as of now, some interesting things are coming down the pike I think for PowerPoint).

I plan on doing some iPhone development, so I installed the 2 GB+ iPhone SDK with Xcode.

I already knew how to use iTunes and Safari so I was happy there. I think I want to get back to World of Warcraft, and luckily enough the Mac version is right on the install discs, getting up and running was very easy. Ventrillo was also available for the Mac which I will use for voice chatting while playing WoW.

iLife 09

This suite is amazing! The first app I started to play with is iPhoto. I started by importing my 3-disc wedding photos. I started first by playing with faces. This is truly an amazing feature! The software recognizes where faces are in photographs, and since I was doing my wedding album there was a lot of faces so an excellent test! All you have to do is give names to the faces it recognizes, or you can help it find faces by drawing a little box around it. After you do your first photos, iPhoto immediately sets to work looking for those faces. The more you tag the smarter it gets.

When you go to the faces view, you are presented with a grid of the people you tagged. You can then double click them to see the full photos with them in it. iPhoto then below those gives you a big grid of possible pictures with those people in it, all you have to do is click the image if its correct. It zooms into the part of the image with the face so you can see.

This feature alone I think makes this product shine, I haven’t seen any free with Windows solution for that. I recognize that Windows Live Photo Gallery does do face recognition and I remember using it, but it just seemed to work much nicer on iPhoto, could that just be a perception thing? Going deeper I found that you can make really cool slideshows out of your events (aka photo albums) using built in templates that look remarkable. Also creating slideshows was equally impressive with amazing transition effect templates and even great stock music choices (of course you can use your iTunes library).

GarageBand I had a lot of fun with. I couldn’t believe how easy it was to create new music by taking the sample loops provided and just dragging and dropping drums, guitars, piano, sound effects and more! Podcasting is something I think I would like to play around with, and with all of the power of GarageBand, adding music and production value to the podcast just gets that much more easier and fun!

I haven’t played with iMovie or iDVD yet but the getting started videos (that you are directed to when you open the apps) make it look very easy to use.

New Apps

Growl is a tray notification system that many Mac apps can natively talk to. It gives you a customizable popup in the top right. It notifies me when Skype events occur, when TimeMachine starts working, when my JungleDisk backup starts uploading to S3, when I get new Gmail messages and more. So far this is a great update.

As I mentioned earlier all my music from the My Book was moved to my hard disk. So all I did was copy the rest of the data I had to the hard disk, and then setup the whole drive as my TimeMachine drive. This feature is great. I didn’t like always using files off of the My Book since it would always have to spin up. Now with it being for TimeMachine I just access my files locally and my entire Mac is backed up to the My Book. TimeMachine does hourly backups for the last 24 hours, then daily for the last month and then monthly until it runs out of disk space, then it just deletes the oldest. That is great. Plush the interface allows you to visually flow back through file versions in time. The entire desktop disappears and you are floating in space with the active folder in front of you and my more stacked behind it. You then move through those stacks and each one represents a different hour in history for the folder and the files in it. Very cool. My backup solution is now the entire Mac to the My Book, and then my special documents and pictures up to Amazon S3 via JungleDisk. I feel well protected. Especially with my contacts, calendar and email in the cloud.

Xcode I’m just getting started in. Learning Objective-C and the iPhone SDK is a bit of challenge but I am slowing with the help of the Apple developer library and the online community I am starting to build simple apps using the iPhone simulator. I still need to get my $99 developer certificate so that I can install apps on my iPhone and eventually publish to the App Store!

MAMP is Mac + Apache + MySQL + PHP. I have a few secret projects underway that require PHP and MySQL, and as a web developer this is one of the best turn key solutions. You simply install it, then it configures and sets up all the aforementioned packages so that you are ready to create databases and PHP applications. It amazes me how fast this worked, but I’ve used WAMP and LAMP previously and they are just as simple, so I suppose I shouldn’t be that surprised.

GmailStatus is what I use to get the email notifications from Gmail. I have setup the Mail client in Mac OS X to work with Gmail, but I really do like the Gmail interface. This notifier app works with Growl so I get the same consistent action message when I get new mail.

Tweetie is an easy to use ad supported Twitter app. I like how it remembers where you were scrolled to in your Twitter feed. I really like the iPhone version so I didn’t mind paying for it, but I’m not sure I like the desktop client enough to buy it.

Textwrangler is a text editor recommended to me. The very simple text editor that comes with the OS wasn’t enough for me. This one offers highlighting by language and tabs and much more features than the simple editors.

I haven’t done it yet, but I will likely download Firefox and eventually Google Chrome but right now I’m pretty happy with Safari.

Conclusion

I think the Mac vs PC debate will go on and on with fanboys on either side. Ultimately some online OS where everything is web application based will likely make all of these irrelevant, but in the many years it will take before we get there, I think the real decision will simply be a matter of choice. I feel good about my Mac experience and it seems like a perfect fit for me. I like the idea of the OS vendor and the hardware provider being the same company. I like Apple products and I can be supported just fine on the Mac platform as I could have on Windows.

I am still very interested in Windows 7 and there are parts of me that will miss some of the features there, but I feel much better about joining the Apple camp.

Hopefully some of things I shared here will be useful to people making the decision or who have already made the decision. Please leave a comment if anything needs to be corrected or if you have anything you can add to help me (and ultimately other readers).

Like many millions of people I downloaded on June 17th the highly anticipated 3.0 software update from Apple for the iPhone. Since I’m not even a year into my contract with Rogers, this review will be based on my 3G. I think this will make a more accurate review of the software itself without confusing 3.0 features that work only with the 3GS.

For the most part I will revisit the highlighted items from my post back in March on the iPhone OS 3.0 Update.

Installing

Installation was a breeze. I have to admit that I was caught up in the excitment for this one and got up bright and early and started scanning for updates in iTunes but none were to be had. At work through TweetDeck I setup a search feed to watch Twitter for #iPhone3.0 and saw a lot of people waiting. I checked again at lunch time and nothing (I’m in EST by the way). Around mid afternoon, say around 3-4 pm I saw notes all over the place of people downloading. There was also reports of time outs, iTunes activation problems, delays, peoples phones not coming back, etc. Needless to say I was a bit aprehensive. But I know I would try anyway.

I was home around 5 ish that night and wondered if the servers would still be bogged. I plugged in my iPhone, gave it one last glace at 2.x, then proceeded with the upgrade. The download of a couple hundred megabytes took about 17 minutes or so. The backup of the phone took place, then the firm ware was installed. This was probably about 10 minutes. During installation my phone went black and I saw the normal silver Apple logo with a progress bar underneath. I thought I would see that progress bar each time the phone started as a new feedback feature, but alas not the case.

Before it was done iTunes alerted me that there was a software update from my carrier (Rogers) and if I wanted to download this. I can only assume that it had something to do with the MMS and tethering capabilities. I agreed and it downloaded and installed in no time.

That was it. My iPhone came back all loaded. I normally reseve the home page for the factory apps, and in 2.x I had 1 spare space where I put Tweetie. After 3.0 the Voice Memos app was added which pushed Tweetie to the next page. However what it did was put it on a blank page just to the right of the home screen all by itself. I was startled at first but fine with it. I believe you can go up to 10 pages now and I find that I now want to still reserve factory apps for the home screen, then frequently used ones on a more or less empty page.

Later on I’ll talk about Spotlight which kind of antiquates this.

App Store & iTunes (from iPhone)

I find these 2 apps now slower for me. Maybe I’m crazy but I get the loading screen a bit longer than I normally do. Even slower when not on Wi-fi.

First time I started the App Store I had 2 apps that had updates now that I was on 3.0. However each of them failed repeatedly. They would sit on the waiting stage for a while and then I would try again and from the App Store and I would get 2 failures. Finally I was in either the App Store or iTunes and I got prompted to accept the license agreement.

Finally on the App Store, when you look at the details of an app, you no longer have to click through the images, they all load on the detail page and you just swipe left and right to look at them. This is great for me beause I like to see all the screens but I don’t want to have to click one, then go back, click one then go back.

I did that and lo and behold I could update those apps. Only hiccup I’ve had there.

While I haven’t done it, I think it’s neat you can get TV shows and movies from iTunes right on the phone. I beleive you will need Wi-fi to download them because my 1 GB cap just won’t handle it!

Touted Features

Apple says over 100 new features, and I found this site that lists them all. Here is my personal experience with each of them.

Cut, Copy & Paste

Another feature that I think it’s great that it is there and extremely useful, but I just don’t do that much copy pasting on the phone to begin with. When I do use it though, it works as expected. And the shake to undo and redo blows a lot of people away and was a very nice touch on Apple’s part.  I’m used to double tapping to zoom things and often the bubble pops up with text selected but its easily dimissed.

It’s just the way it is, but without a mouse it is a bit slower to narrow down to select the text you want, and I do find that the feature is smart about finding a word, then paragraph and then page.

The fact that the feature works across all apps is expected and works great. Copying images (up to 5 I believe) from the Photos app to an email works well (although you can send via email right from the Photos app), but grabbing an image from a web page and mailing it off is great too.

I don’t use this a lot, but I sure am glad it’s there!

Landscape Keyboard

I sort of got used to typing in portrait mode so it is a conscious reminder to flip to this form. Primarily I would use it in Email and Messages. I don’t take notes very often but I’m sure I would use this there as well.

Text Messaging & MMS

As mentioned above, the landscape keyboard is now in text messages which marginally helps me type. I do find it can take up a lot of room and leave me little area to see what is there:

One of the first things I did was try to send pictures over MMS. This worked like a charm. The small camera next to the text line makes it easy to snap a new shot or choose an existing one. I was told by my friend that pictures with text came out weird on his phone, but I love how they appear in speach bubbles on my end.

Last week though I tried to send him some shots of our basement project and all of them failed. Failed messages have a little red exclamation point beside them that you can click and retry. I did this many times but they still failed and I just gave up.

As I found out tonight (June 24) my friend also sent me pics last Friday (June 19th) and Sunday (June 21) and I didn’t get them until tonight. I then replied back with a picture and it worked. Best guess is that Rogers was overwhelmed or had to work on something last minute to make MMS work better. No idea. Haven’t seen any word on this.

You can now selectively forward and delete individual messages which I like rather than clearing the whole conversation.

Sadly I can’t take video because I don’t have the 3GS so I don’t think I can MMS any either.

A great change to the Messages app is now that when you send you are not locked out of the app while it sends but your message bubble pops up and at the top the app you have the “sending” note with the progress bar. That made a lot of sense to me.

I don’t find the app opens any faster but in fact seems slower to me.

Spotlight

This is a great idea addition to the phone. However I keep forgetting that it is there and often find myself locating apps and contacts the old fashioned pre-3.0 days.

I know its there I just need to remember to use it. The number 1 reason I would use this is quick access to my contacts. I don’t have pages and pages of apps and I organize them a bit so it’s not such a big deal to flip through the pages. I think it’s great that it will look into my email and calendar events, not to mention the iPod library.

Other

I have noticed modest speed boosts in web site rendering but I don’t tax things that greatly. I do know that JavaScript heavy sites like the Google services work quickly. I use the mobile version of Google Reader and its fantastic.

Another feature I use often is the landscape support in Email. Not so much for flipping through the list of messages, but opening emails I find it very useful. I still get the delay while the app tries to adjust the font size so it is readible, but that is mitigated a bit by the landscape support. I find that I type faster in SMS using portrait mode but from time to time I will use the messages app in landscape mode too.

If you want, here is  forum documenting user found features you may not even know about yet!

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=715629