The news are out: Apple on Tuesday released the second beta of its much acclaimed iPhone OS 3.0. I’m running it for some 10 hours on two iPhones now – both not jailbroken and not unlocked – and my overall first impression is extremely positive.
While the first beta had severe quirks, the biggest one being it extremely slow which even rendered it useless for some folks, this second beta performs even better than the current official version 2.2.1. This is not only true for all the built-in applications. Tweetie, Byline, VisualDial and other applications are launching way faster than on 2.2.1.
Another area which seems to have improved a lot is keyboard responsiveness. From a developer’s point of view iPhone OS 3.0 has a ton of new features that I already love. From an enduser’s perspective the landscape-mode-everywhere highly responsive keyboard is the single most important feature for me. (I tend to write a lot.)
Spotlight search has been redesigned slightly and is almost twice as fast as on Beta 1.
MMS and Tethering work just fine with the two German carriers I’m using (T-Mobile and Vodafone).
For a second beta this seems to be a great release and it’s a promising outlook towards the final version which is expected for the June 2009 timeframe.
