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The long-awaited iPhone OS 3.0 is finally here. While it is certainly less momentous than the launch of the original iPhone, it is still a solid OS upgrade in terms of performance and additional features. If you can’t afford to upgrade your iPhone early (a hotly debated issue), this update will be more than enough to tide you over until December 31, 2009 (all those whose calendars have a big red ‘X’, smiley face, or circle on that date, please raise your hands). Assuming you’ve upgraded succesfully (and not everybody can say the same), you will soon notice a few minor enhancements that, while not bullet-pointed in a Keynote, certainly raise the bar in terms of usability. Here are a few that have been discovered in just a couple hours of testing:

• Pinstripes are back! Anybody nostalgic for the OS X v10.2 days can turn their heads 45º and revel in the awesome pinstripey-goodness of the new icons.  All icons that used to have a glossy single-color background are now on diagonally-striped single-color backgrounds (think iPod, Phone, and the newly-renamed Messages). This background is also present on the Apple website anywhere that iPhone OS 3.0 is mentioned:

• Who’s got the time? One of the truly irritating features of the previous iPhone OS was the fact that call times were only visible during the call. The call screen stayed on long enough for you to just barely see it when you pulled it away from your ear, but if you wanted to see how long you had been talking, that information was nowhere to be found. Now, it is available in the recent calls list, along with some other tidbits, such as an incoming vs. outgoing call indicator:

• What’s shakin’? Save yourself the trouble of looking like a complete fool; in order to shuffle songs by shaking, you must have the iPod as the currently-running app. Otherwise, you just look moronic shaking your phone around while nothing happens…trust me on this one.

• Copy-and-Paste can be challenging when browsing: This isn’t really Apple’s fault, nor is it a problem, per se.  But some sites contain text that is either a) dynamically formatted, or b) actually presented as a picture (think scrolling Flash animations). Obviously, Flash isn’t an issue for the iPhone, but copying text from some pages happens in blocks (much the same way that you can zoom in on a particular column of text), rather than word-by-word. This one definitely needs a picture explanation. The first screen capture shows the smallest block of text that could be highlighted in one part of the article, while the second shows a comment which can be highlighted word-by-word:

• There’s no place like home! The new OS offers more options for double-tapping the home button. Previously, it would take you to the favorites screen of your contacts, or give you iPod controls if music were playing. Now, you can choose to jump to the Home Screen, Spotlight (which is oddly debranded in iPhone OS, and known simply as “Search”), Camera (woohoo!), or iPod (the default behavior on the iPod Touch):

All in all, iPhone OS 3.0 is a solid improvement. While the features aren’t all showstoppers, their combined effect once again has taken the iPhone to a whole new level. Competitors, take note: Apple gets it right by making the iPhone continually better, not just by adding boatloads of new features with every release.