#FF00AA

Here it is, and it presumably requires updating iTunes first.

• Street View works fine, but I’m not quite sure how usable, or useful, it might be: sure, you can check out what your destination is supposed to look like, but moving along a street yard by yard is so slow and frustrating, you’re not going to do much with it (I guess where it really shines is when streets or roads are not labeled).

• Public transit directions don’t work in Paris (unsurprisingly); walking directions do, but they don’t seem to interact with Street View, which is too bad.

• The new Safari address bar feels awkward just by virtue of being different; more importantly, Google searches still don’t send you to the iPhone-optimized results.

• Downloading podcasts on the iPhone is definitely cool; what’s cooler yet (and couldn’t have been known before iTunes was updated, I guess) is that, when you sync your iPhone back, those podcasts appear in iTunes with a “subscribe” button.

• And, finally, you can disable auto-correction on the keyboard. I’ll have to test it over a longer period of time, but from my first tries it feels like it’s really worth having to type a little more slowly and be spared the obnoxious false corrections (which I think might be more of a problem in French than in English). Disabling auto-correction also seems to disable the magical “I’ve invisibly made this key smaller because I don’t think you wanted to press it, Dave” functionality, which is a relief because I anticipated they might forget to do that.

gizmodo.com

Street View and the other new Maps functionality aren’t included in the iPod touch upgrade, and I’m not surprised at all: that’s perfectly in line with Apple’s idea that the Touch can’t be given new functionality after it’s been sold, for accounting reasons. I’ll just never, ever understand how it made sense for anyone not to use the same accounting rules for the iPod touch as for the iPhone and Apple TV.