iPhone OS 3.0: Copy and paste, stereo Bluetooth, Spotlight search

After spending the best part of an hour talking up new stuff on the developer side of the new iPhone OS, Apple has unveiled a pile of new features aimed more at consumers, including copy and paste, and stereo Bluetooth!

Double-tapping a block of text in an email brings up a text selection tool. Drag a cute blue text selection tool over the text you want to copy, then hit either the copy, cut or paste button that magically appears above the text you selected. This will work within email, Safari, SMS and between all three, as well as within any 3rd party applications that want to use it.

MMS is also coming with OS 3.0, as well as a landscape-format keyboard for writing and editing text messages, message forwarding (believe it or not, you've never been able to forward a text message from your iPhone), and the ability to send multiple photos within an email.

Oh, and there's this thing called 'search' which lets you search the content of all your emails, contacts, calendars and anything in your iPod library. You can even search email stored online if you've deleted it from your iPhone, and results should be delivered as if they were stored on the phone. This works with IMAP email accounts such as Gmail, but we'll have to wait and see to find out if it works with Microsoft Exchange email.

Search falls into a new home screen called Spotlight, and it sits in its own screen to the left of the main iPhone home screen (for those not in the know, normally apps sit on screens to the right).

Other new features include the syncing of Notes, iTunes account creation from the iPhone, YouTube accounts and subscriptions in the YouTube app, and of course stereo A2DP Bluetooth! A2DP is only for the iPhone 3G, but hey, pretty cool.

You'll notice there was no mention of Adobe Flash support, better management of content loaded in Safari tabs, syncing over Wi-Fi, or file transfer over Bluetooth.

The new OS will be available "in the summer", and will be free to iPhone 3G and original iPhone owners. There will be a $9.95 cost to iPod touch owners for the software in the US, with UK prices to be announced at the time of release. That'll be £9.95, then.

Copy paste looks really simple to use.

The new Spotlight search screen. This will search all the major Apple iPhone apps from one place.

Voice memos are a small but handy new addition to iPhone OS 3.0.