A largely anticipated feature, especially in the US of A, was the ability to tether the iPhone's 3G or GPRS data connection to a computer via USB or Bluetooth. Unfortunately, our friends in the states have been restricted by AT&T. I believe the reason for this lies in AT&T's possible plan of charging the customers for the use of tethering.

Anyway, DivergentCloud did our own testing of the iPhone's tethering ability using SingTel's unrivaled 3G network here in our island. The 3.6 Mb/s connection that the iPhone utilized was enough to rapidly load pages when accessed one at a time. However, I would be lying if I did not mention that some degree of lag was observed with the loading of multiple tabs at one go. Furthermore, Flash content to a significantly longer time to load on 3G as opposed to WiFi. Surfing on a GPRS connection was the most painful experience I have had with regards to surfing the net. It kind of reminded me of the days when I used to surf the net on a 56 Kb/s Dial-up connection. Painfully slow is the only way to describe GPRS on a full scale browser like Safari 4.

Setting up USB tethering was very easy. All I had to do was to enable tethering on the iPhone, and I was good to go. Plugging in the iPhone to my MacBook resulted in my Mac asking permission to allow a USB Ethernet connection to occur. After allowing the connection, I was surfing the net with no problems. Setting up tethering over Bluetooth was a lot more trickier than I thought. Firstly, I had to pair my comp with the phone. This step took a few tries, but I finally got it to work. After that, it was just a matter of connecting to my phone and establishing a Bluetooth Personal Area Network. Users should note that Data is continuously sent up and down the stream when connected via Bluetooth even if there is not active connections to the net at any given point in time.

This is what you see when you have tethering on, on the iPhone:

A funny thing that I noted with tethering was that if the iPhone was connected to a WLAN network, it chose that over Cellular data to share over Bluetooth PAN (Personal Area Network) and USB.

MMS was never a feature that I missed whilst using the iPhone. It had never been practical for me to send MMS messages before when I did not have a data plan with my mobile subscription. However, this new feature may prove to be more than useful now that we have it. Just like tethering, SingTel had its MMS server all set up on the SIM after my upgrade to 3.0. Having to only supply my phone number, I was all set to MMS till the cows came home. MMS feels just like text messaging. Besides, the integration of both Text and Multimedia messages in the same app and interface was a good call on Apple's part.

The improvements to the Messages app on the whole is a worth mention as well. Now, with the ability to delete and forward individual messages, I no longer have to keep long conversation history, or fumble to copy info from one message to another. I can just forward the message, or copy the info and send off to another person. Plus, with the support for MMS, I can now just send a contact without all the fuss and hassle.

However, on a real-life scale, I have yet to use MMS as much as I would like to. The fact still remains that some of the MMS features that Apple have included in the update only work with iPhones. As such, it would be impossible for me to share location information with a friend that uses another handset.

Before I go into the details, I would first like to mention Spotlight, and the plethora of functionality it brings to iPhone. Spotlight on the iPhone works pretty much the same way as it does on the Mac. However, the iPhone Spotlight is only limited to looking for apps, contacts, and mentions of the keyword in calendar events, notes, emails and media metadata. It would be a lot more functional if Spotlight could search the history of the Safari browser as well. That would make the feature so unique that it would further blow other mobile operating systems out of the water. The most "Killer" feature that I think Apple should add to Spotlight, would be the ability to search the web right off the application. Typing in a keyword should bring up a "Search on the Web" option as the first result. This would allow for less waiting for apps to open and load up. As it is right now, Safari does take a while longer to load as it has advanced through the many dot-release iterations.

All of the major applications in the iPhone OS have also received Search capabilities of their own. It's just like spotlight, except within the app. The most notable of the lot is with the iPod Application. I can now search for songs using either the title, artiste name, or album name, and immediately tap on it to listen. The search also adds greater functionality to the iPod app. Now, I can make simple "on-the-go" playlists with so much less hassle. Assuming I am in the sudden mood to listen songs sung by Akon, as well as featuring him. Usually, I could look up Artists and select Akon off the list. But that did not allow me to listen to songs that had Akon featuring in them. With the new search ability, I can do a simple search for "Akon" and bring up all the results that have the "Akon" appearing in them. This includes song titles and album names.

Other little things that the OS update brought to us were primarily cosmetic updates to the user interface of the device. The lockscreen of the iPhone now displays artiste and album information whenever a song is playing. The notes application also seems to have a slightly different variation of the Marker Felt font. The new font seems a little more compressed height-wise compared to previous versions of the font.

Within the Phone App, the call log boasts a new feature that shows which phone has made the call. If a contact has more than one phone number attached to their name, the iPhone now displays the name of the phone that made that call. This makes it much easier to return a missed call, since you can ensure that you will get the contact on the right device.

The iPhone OS 3.0 also brought with it the support for A2DP Bluetooth Profile. The addition of the feature is rather late in my opinion. Seeing as to how the iPhone was brithed from the iPod, media compatibility should have been a major concern with regards to both hardware and software. However, even though the feature arrived late, it has proved itself to be very useful. Bluetooth Stereo headphones can now be used with the iPhone, freeing many of us from the tangle and mess of cables.