I’m not sure I can describe how I felt at the end of Apple’s iPhone event yesterday. Indeed, it was two hours spent talking about what to expect from the next major release of the iPhone OS, and while that actually affects me now (yay), I think I found myself in kind of a neutral state afterwards. I am certainly glad to see progress being made, but the new features and fixes don’t generally hit close to home for me.

Copy and paste is a welcome addition, obviously, as is MMS for those that actually use those. The additional calendar protocols are nice to see, although Google Sync addressed that issue a month ago. I don’t know how useful Spotlight will be, as I don’t think I have a lot of things that I have lost on my phone, but it will be fun to mess with.

But two features stood out and have me eagerly awaiting the magical summer day when I plug my phone into iTunes, and after it stalls and I have to restart it one or two times, I can finally download iPhone OS 3.0:

  • Landscape Mode for Mail, Messaging, and Notes
    Just, seriously, duh. I never really understood why Safari was the only app to make use of the big horizontal keyboard; especially since that is not where a typical person would be doing the brunt of their typing. So I am really glad to see that option proliferate to the other apps that badly need it.
  • Note Syncing
    Assuming this is implemented well, I am excited about it. I don’t use a ton of notes, but I really like the option to sync them from my computer. Now that I think about it though, a wireless sync would be even more useful than having to deal with iTunes just to update my grocery list. Oh well, we’ll see.

All in all, though, I can’t complain too much because it’s all free and it only makes the iPhone better.