The iPhone OS 4 announcement was monumental. It’s bringing the long-awaited ability to multitask along with some customization options, organization options, and new search and content management features all over the operating system. It’s a fantastic update, but not everyone will be reaping the full benefits. In fact, the majority of the iPhone user base won’t get to all those new goodies.

Apple has only approved the 3GS for a full OS 4 feature rollout. The original iPhone won’t get OS 4, period. The 3G will only get parts. Though it’s probably still worth it to make the upgrade, you’ll be missing the multi-tasking, the custom home screen backgrounds, and potentially some of the other processor intensive features. It’s not that big a surprise (though the wallpaper thing did catch me off guard) – the 3G has some trouble with the current OS – but it still sucks.

It points to a problem that has longed plagued Apple customers – the update cycle. For Apple as a company it’s worked quite well. What better way to stick it to your fanboy friends than getting the newest version of that thing they’ve been hyping to you for six months. Hell hath no fury like a fanboy bested.

The iPhone touched down in China this past Friday night missing one big feature: Wi-Fi. China’s second largest mobile carrier, China Unicom, has an exclusive three-year deal with Apple to sell the phone.

Starting out sales might not be the runaway figures Apple saw in the US. After all, it’s not that tough to get phones from other markets. Phones that include Wi-Fi. There have also been rumors that China Unicom hopes to sell Wi-Fi capable phones within a few months, giving Chinese consumers even more reason to hold off on buying one now.

There was still a modicum of Apple fanaticism to be had, though. The country’s first iPhone owner, Zhi Xianzhong, waited almost eight hours to buy the phone.

This is the month of phone hype, beyond a doubt. We’ve seen the Pre release, Nokia’s super-expensive N97 spot with LL Cool J, iPhone OS 3.0, and now the iPhone 3GS. Of the phone launches, the biggest is certainly the update iPhone, though it may have come more quietly than the world expected.

Lines outside Apple’s flagship store in NY reached several hundred, but amidst some rain, they were all shuffled under Apple’s roof making this the smallest iPhone launch yet. Still, AT&T reports hundreds of thousands of preorders for launch day, which dwarfs Palm’s Pre 50,000 first weekend statistic.

It wasn’t just scale that kept the launch quiet, though. In part, it was a lack of hangups that have plagued Apple’s past launches. Apple announced both iPhone OS 3.0 and the iPhone 3GS at WWDC this year, but the set the launch days two days apart. The staggered launch was presumably to reduce server load so that new owners weren’t trying to activate their 3GS while 20 million others were waiting for OS 3.0 downloads. It was a smart move, and it kept problems with the 3.0 release and problems with the 3GS launch (so far, at least) to a minimum.

Now the focus shifts to AT&T and how their network will handle more users hoping to see the wireless carrier make good on promises of MMS and tethering. Will MMS from iPhone users bring the sole US carrier to its knees later this summer?

We already posted a how-to for enabling tethering on your shiny new OS 3.0. While awesome, it is clunky, slow, requires a mac… yada, yada, yada.

Leave it to iClarified to give us a handy and simple way to enable tethering right from the phone. All you have to do is use Safari from the phone and navigate to a specific website. Click a link here, say yes there, and next thing you know, tethering is enabled on your iPhone.

I know someone, who knows someone, who did it (wink, wink) and it was as easy as pie. Click through and try it for yourself. Let’s just say I know it works.

Most of the bad news coming with the iPhone OS 3.0 release is from AT&T, the iPhone’s sole US carrier. Despite most every other iPhone carrier in the world enabling tethering and MMS today, AT&T did not, much to her users’ chagrin.

The software is there, though, and it’s taken less than a day for someone to figure out a hack (for tethering that is – MMS has been around since the first jailbreak). The guys at MacMegasite have a quick and dirty tutorial to get the thing running. In short, all it requires is that you download a carrier settings file and perform a defaults write command in a Mac terminal. Restore your phone while holding option down and you can add the carrier settings update without messing with the rest of your phone. Head to “Network” under your general settings and you should see tethering, with options for USB and Bluetooth functionality.

Early reports suggest things are a little slow, and I have yet to read of a successful PC mod for this. Still, good work from everyone involved with this (seems like MacMegasite, Gizmodo, and AppleNova for some quick credits). Have you tried this yet? Did it work for you?

Full tutorial here.

As good as their word, Apple released OS 3.0 for the iPhone today. You’ll need to have iTunes 8.2 installed for the update, which is free for iPhone owners, $10 for the iPod Touch.

In case you’ve forgotten, the OS update brings long-awaited features to the iPhone, like copy and paste, push notification, and universal search, among other things. Finally applications will be able to alert you when you receive new messages, and copy and paste, well I think the benefits there are obvious.

Don’t forget to check back on Friday for an unboxing/review of the iPhone 3GS.

We’re just a week from launch day of the newest version of the iPhone, the iPhone 3GS, which brings a whole host of new features and some notable new graphical capabilities. If you want to have a 3GS in your pretty paws on launch day you’re going to need a chair and a decent water supply or a prepaid order.

Apple and AT&T have publicly announced plans for early store opening, though few of the representatives (in the Cleveland area at least) seem to know what’s going on.

I visited two Apple stores in the past week to talk about launch plans. For the most part, the employees didn’t know what was going on, as in, “I don’t know when we’ll open,” or, “I don’t know what the inventory will be like.” Most of them cited a lack of training on the new phone, which seems unrelated to their store scheduling, but who am I to judge. After talking through four different people at the last store (and hearing about one of their new exercise plans – I didn’t ask, she just felt the need to share) I found out they would indeed open at 8am, allowing lines to form at 5am. No one, from the store manager down, seems to know about inventory. It’s not just that they don’t want to say, but rather they get that glazed look whereby you know there is no information they can access on the subject at hand.

A trip to my local AT&T store was worlds more helpful, and they offer the surest route to locking up the phone at launch. I was able to preorder a phone on the spot, which means the phone will ship to the store reserved in my name, available for pickup seven days from the time of arrival. While no one was willing to guarantee I would have the phone (and smartly so), they did say the word from Apple was not to expect inventory problems. For all of their helpful info concerning launch, though, the AT&T folks also could not dig up details on store hours for the day, or whether they would be honoring the 7am preorder line, 8am point-of-purchase line.

If you’re one for lines, Apple stores and AT&T stores will both have that option. If you’re more interested in having the phone in hand, get to an AT&T store and preorder. It’s only so long before you’ll be waitlisted behind droves of preorders from, say, June 8th.

Hailed (by Apple) as the fastest iPhone ever made, a lot of attention has been paid to the new processor and RAM specs in the iPhone 3GS. Those new specs will certainly translate to a faster phone, but most likely marginally so, noticeable only within apps that do a lot of algorithm munching. What’s likely to be truly impressive on the 3GS is the new graphical capabilities that come from the Power-VR SGX GPU inside the phone.

Hubert at Ubergizmo, who used to program for Nvidia, gave a quick breakdown of the improvements we could see in iPhone gaming, and they’re pretty damn impressive. As the article notes, the new GPU offers improvements in two traditional aspects of development. First, it allows more triangle processing per second, and second, it gives a serious boost to the number of pixels that can be modified per second.

More than the hardware, though, is the options the new GPU will offer developers. The new chip gives coders access to some of the same principles used when developing games for the Xbox 360 or the PS3. Haven’t seen many shadows on the iPhone? They’re coming. So is bump mapping, normal mapping, light mapping, and multi-textures, making it possible to render complex 3D environments with an unprecedented sense of realism.

While people complained that this iPhone release was an evolution rather than a revolution, the changes to the GPU will be revolutionary for the hand-held device, making gaming the real breakout feature of the 3GS. I was unimpressed by the game demos at WWDC. Hopefully that wil change when developers have had their new kit for a few months.

Source: Ubergizmo