Apple released a third iPhone OS 3.0 beta to developers last week, and already interested parties have been investigating the new software to see if they can tease out any clues as to Apple’s future plans for its popular smartphone.

AppleInsider has a complete rundown, including extensive screenshots. Some of the highlights:

• Safari will allow you to close out and clear all of open browser windows, even the last active one. Currently, users need to create a new, blank window in order to close out their final lone browser window. In beta 3, even the final window displays a red X button in the top left corner; clicking in causes the window to be quickly replaced with a fresh, blank one.

• Users will have the option to display the phone’s remaining batter life as numerals, rather than a tiny battery icon. A set of .png resources in the new beta’s Springboard application show each of the numerals in both black and red; it is assumed that the red numerals will be used once battery life drops below a certain threshold. According to rumors, users will also be able to choose whether they want their remaining battery life to be displayed as an icon, numerals, or both — just as they can choose with the battery life on the desktop version of OS X.

• A new preference pane allows users to disable any of the three types of push notifications (text alerts, sounds, and app icon badges) or turn the alerts off entirely to get a little extra juice out of the iPhone’s batteries.

• Data Detectors — bits of smart code that auto detect things like street addresses or dates and let users do things with them — appear to be enabled as well, at least in the Notes application. Data Detectors are already part of the desktop Mac OS X and let users, for example, click on a street address in Mail.app and be taken to a Google map of the location in Safari.

• More precise song scrubbing is coming to the iPod app. Currently, tap-and-drag scrubbing can’t match the precise scrubbing that physical iPod touch wheel makes possible. Apple is attempting to address this issue by letting different finger positions dictate different scrubbing speeds.

This is likely to be the final beta released by Apple to developers before the company unveils new hardware in June. Even though a few new features have been revealed here and there, Apple probably has a few big surprises up its sleeves as well that it’s keeping out of these developer releases.

Posted in iPhone |