#FF00AA

Well, that was boring. Not much of a surprise; I guess Apple doesn’t want to make a whole keynote about “iPhone OS 2.2,” so they’re padding the numbers like everybody else.

Kevin Rose was right on that one (except for the fact that everybody said not to expect MMS; I don’t know if he was the source for that, as I didn’t watch the video). The interface for copy-and-paste works, mostly; it’s a little annoying that you double-tap in text fields and tap-hold in web views, but I guess there’s little they could do about that. If you were still wondering, the fact that there wasn’t an identical tap-shortcut left available for both types of content views is evidence that they didn’t plan that from the start, and originally intended never to have copy and paste.

I’m waiting to see videos of the new Spotlight that “lives on the far side of all your apps” or whatever that was; the UI concept is scaring me a bit. Oh, right, that was a stupid misunderstanding. It’s funny that the most Pre-like new functionality sports huge rounded corners; not sure if that’s actually inspired by webOS or just the honest evolution of the Mac’s convention that search fields are rounded.

Speaking of Spotlight as an alternative to the Home screen for launching applications is a joke, however, on a device with no hardware keyboard. I can only pray that one of the unmentioned 1,000 new API hooks is the ability to list and launch installed applications, so that developers can finally make their own launchers. And that users can configure their iPhone to replace the Sprinboard with a custom app. Huh. Yeah, I don’t see that happening.

(I’m not sure if I — and all other Cocoa Touch bloggers — will be allowed to blog about the new API once the SDK is available for download; I think betas are still under NDA.)

Miscellaneous:

• Actually, from a technical standpoint, you could argue that enabling access to third-party hardware accessories is almost big enough a change for the update to be worth the 3.0 moniker.

• In-app downloads are a very good idea, but they won’t work if the minimum stays at $0.99, as it seems to on the examples.

• I don’t particularly mind their excuse for not having enabled push notifications yet. It’s important, and you might as well wait to get it right from the start.

• I’m not sure if citing the existing AIM client as an example of a background app draining the battery is disingenuous or just extreme.

• Peer-to-peer (which is a rather misleading choice of a name) is a nice gimmick but won’t be that useful in real life, beyond exchanging electronic business cards.

• Can’t imagine a reason why they’d enable all sorts of Bluetooth communication, but still offer no system-level keyboard support. At this point it’s a bit psychotic.

• I wish they had announced some kind of revamping of the approval process. Even just symbolically.