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