So we got the beta for the iPhone OS 3.0 and of course I loaded it up despite the warnings from Apple stating that it is only to be installed on development devices. After running it over the weekend I thought I ‘d give a mini review. After all, who doesn’t want to be the cool kid on the bus with the prettiest shiniest toys? As it turns out, in this case I hopped on the short bus. I’ll admit it. Cool technology is my kryptonite, and after a few days I found myself on Bizarro iPhone world. Superman metaphor too much? How about a western one…

The Good

• Landscape Keyboard: For email and notes this was awesome. I know this didn’t bother everyone, but it was a big win for me.
• Bluetooth Stereo: Another win. I have a BT stereo headset, and it’s always bothered me that I couldn’t use it with my iPhone. Now I can, and the sound quality is great. For those of you with BT stereo in your cars I could see this being a big win as well.
• Search: I only used the feature a few times, but when I did it was extremely useful. I was able to search across both contacts and email, and I suspect it would have brought back items form my calendar if there had been a match.
• New Features: There are far too many new features to go into here, but I can see a host of new applications being inspired by them, and a lot of existing applications getting a boost with items such as the notification framework that lets a server send a message to an iPhone application even when the application is shut down.
• Cut and Paste: It’s there. It works. What can I say? It’s cut and paste.

The Bad

• Keyboard Lag: at first everything was great but after a few days I found that the keyboard would freeze while I was typing and it would take several seconds for it to come back. It didn’t matter which orientation I was in and it got so bad that my cool new feature was now the bane of my existence. Even reboots didn’t help.
• Some of my applications didn’t work: Yes a few of my applications didn’t work with the upgrade. The bad part was when one of them froze the screen and after I thought I had gotten out of it it turned out that the application was still running and eating up a lot of battery power. So much so that when I went to check the phone later on it was completely dead and I was sure I had turned my precious into a brick. I recharged it and all was right with the world, but still this had never happened to me before.

The Ugly

• SOME OF MY APPLICATIONS DIDN’T WORK: Ok, so I know I just covered this under “The Bad”, but now I’m not just talking about a few games not working. I lost the use of both Pandora and the edit capabilities in Evernote. Two applications that i live in daily. I mean, come on. I can’t live without tunes and notes.
• Restore: Did I say Restore? I meant to say, “There IS NO restore.” When Apple says only install on a dev device and you can’t restore, they’re not joking. I had read on another dev blog that as long as your phone was registered on a dev program you could restore, but that was crap.

Looking back there are a lot of cool things that this update will bring to the community once it’s released. Until then, be content with what you have. While I’m sure at some point there will be a more stable beta that comes out, don’t be tempted. If you do development and absolutely need to have your code on a device rather than in the simulator, pick up a second iPhone or better yet, if you don’t need the phone functionality, and iPod Touch. As for me I’m currently working on an app that i want to get released prior to the 3.0 upgrade so I can wait for awhile. Hopefully by the time I’m ready to get serious about a project that uses 3.0 the beta will be stable or I’ll pick up a second device. Hmmm I wonder how much a first gen is on eBay…

Note:
So I did finally get my phone back in working order with 2.2.1, but I’m still out of sync just a bit as not everything can be rolled back. Rather than going into what I had to do I’ll simply refer you to the post on BigBoss that got me back to normal.