All the rumours and guesses are over. Apple’s next generation iPhone 3G[S] is announced officially. Apple is not removing their old iPhone 3G at this time. They’ll start selling iPhone 3G for 99$ in US and new iPhone 3G[S] will be sold for 199$ and 299$ for 16 and 32 GB respectively.

iPhone 3G and iPhone 3G[S] both are loaded with iPhone 3.0. So from software point of view both are same. The difference in iPhone 3G[S] is hardware. iPhone 3G[S] has better processor, additional ram, good camera and compass.

Main highlights of iPhone 3G[S]

1. Better processing power. Almost everything is 2 times faster than iPhone 3G
2. 3 Mega pixel auto focus camera for great picture quality. By tapping on image you can set your focus point.
3. It can record 30FPS high quality VGA video in landscape and portrait mode.
4. Voice controls for calling your contacts or playing your song lists. It allows you to query information regarding a playing song.
5. Build in digital Compass, which reorients maps in the direction you are facing. Also it is a new technology for developers. I am sure that we’ll see some great application and games by using compass.
6. Cut, Copy and paste across applications.
7. Landscape keyboard layout for messaging and emailing.
8. Send text, pic, video, location or contact to anyone. You can even forward messages to others.
9. Spotlight search. One search for all your contacts, emails, calendars, notes, songs and videos.
10. Surf the web from practically anywhere. Now you can share the 3G connection on your iPhone with your Mac notebook or PC laptop.
11. Store voice recording of your notes and meetings.
12. Nike Application
13. and many more….

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hClipboard is another copy paste application in jailbroken iPhones. To install this application, go to
1. Cydia installer (Make sure that you have 2.2 firmware)
2. Search for “hclipboard”
3. You’ll see it listed in the search result.
4. Install the application.

To enable hClipboard, Go to Settings > General > Keyboard > International > Enable hClipboard.
After enabling hClipboard, you’ll find a globe symbol in keyboard window. Tap on it and start playing with it. It stores text in two forms. One as clipboard and another in the form of template. You can store up to 10 clipboards and deleted the unwanted in iPhone’s native way of deleting a text. Though you don’t have any limitation in templates. You can store as many as you wants, this can be used in storing email, mobile number or user name for some sites which you use very frequently.

There is no doubt that in terms of functionality it is the most advance application present so far but I didn’t like the technique it used to select text. Its doesn’t meet iPhone standards. Clippy is another copy/paste application which uses better technique to select text.

If you have updated your 2G iPhone to firmware 2.0 or later then you would have noticed that there is no Edge setting present and you can’t use Edge on such iPhone. Specially in case of jail broken iPhone, you might want to use edge connection to access internet. To enable edge, follow the instruction set
1. Make sure that you are able to connect your iPhone to WinSCP. Click here to know more.
2. Go to /private/var/mobile/Library . Now click on Carrier Bundle.bundle.
3. You’ll see carrier.plist file. Copy this file to your computer.
4. You need to edit carrier.plist file. In case if you are using Mac then it’s very easy as there are many editors available which can open .plist binary files in text format. If you are using windows then you may use http://iphoneinterest.com/view-plist-files link to see the content of the file.
5. Upload the file to above link (Mac users too).
6. You’ll see that you file is converted to xml format. Now you need to copy the converted content and save this content to carrier.plist file into your computer.
7. Open saved file in text editor.
8. Add following entries just below tag as shown in image. Save the files.

<key>AllowEDGEEditing</key>
		<true/>

9. Replace carrier.plist file in your iPhone from this newly created carrier.plist file.
10. Reboot iPhone and now go to Settings-> General -> Network. You’ll see Cellular Data Network in this page.
11. Provide network detail and enjoy edge.

MPlayer for iPhone supports mpeg4, h.264, wmv, mp3, aac, wma, real media, and t-dmb formats. It is good to have more supported movie formats for iPhone so that you don’t need to convert favorite movies to MP4 format before playing them on iPhone. To do that, you need to install MPlayer. Below are the steps to install MPlayer in iPhone
1. Make sure that yours is jailbroken iPhone as MPlayer is only available for jailbroken iPhones which have 2.0 or above firmware. So if your iPhone is having lower firmware version you need to update it to 2.0 or above.
2. Open Cydia installer app.
3. Update all the pending updates in Cydia installer.
4. Search MPlayer in search section of Cydia installer.
5. Tap on install button. It’ll install MPlayer in the iPhone
6. Connect iPhone to WinSCP and go to /private/var path
7. Look for media folder and if there is no media folder in this location then create one. This is the folder which will contain all the MPlayer’s playable files.
8. Copy movie files to /private/var/media directory.
9. Open MPlayer in iPhone. It will show you the list of all files present in above folder.
10. Tap on any file you would like to play.

WinSCP provides safe functionality of copying files between local and remote terminals. It supports SFTP and SCP protocols over SSH-1 and SSH-2 and plain old FTP protocol.

To connect iPhone to WinSCP,
1. Install BSD subsystem and OpenSSH on iPhone, these applications are available in Cydia or Installer Apps. (You need a jailbroken iPhone )

2. Connect iPhone to WI-FI.
3. Find out IP address of iPhone. (Settings –> Wi-Fi -> View the details of selected network )
4. Open WinSCP application from your computer.
5. Provide IP address of iPhone. Use user name as root and password alpine or dottie.
6. Click on login.
7. You’ll see iPhone directories and files.

Lots of gossip is going new features on the forth coming iPhone 2.2 upgrade. Will it have some new features or a bug fix patch just like 2.1 upgrade?

Apple has not officially announced any new feature in the release notes sent to the developers who are doing compatibility testing of their applications with 2.2 upgrade.

Developers have found out following new features:
1. Disable/Enable auto-correction: iPhone users will be able to turn on/off auto-correction.

There is no doubt about the iPhone keyboard capability and its auto-correction feature but this feature is frustrating on many occasions when you want to type in local language (e.g. u r an ifone lvr).

2. Google Map Street View: Last week, google announced street view supoort in G1 Mobile Phone. iPhone also came up with the same idea. Let’s see who is in quantity in streets for the street view.

3. Japanese emoji icon: emoji icons are one the important feature in Japanese mobile phones. Including emoji icons might help in increasing sales in Japanese market.

4. Copy/Paste functionality: As discussed in one of the earlier post, it is quite possible that next upgrade will have copy/paste functionality. G1 phone is about to hit the market soon and it has copy/paste functionality in it. This might put some extra pressure to Apple to include Copy/Paste as soon as possible.

An interesting video about running multiple applications simultaneously and copy/paste feature in G1 phone. iPhone lacks these features.

New iPhone software upgrade 2.2 will be rolled out as soon as it becomes stable. In this upgrade
1. Push e-mail to iPhone or iPod touch will be restored.
2. This upgrade will also improve on GPS functionalities.
3. We’ll see new Safari browser having search beside the address bar and it will be always visible.
I wish that we can have Copy and Paste functionality in coming upgrades. I don’t think this is difficult to implement, but still we haven’t have this important feature in it.

There will be some existing bug fixes. I don’t have exact detail as of now. I’ll write it here again as soon as I get some thing new.

Earlier when I was using iPhone 2G, I was quite happy with the results. The touch experience was never so great in phones as it was is in iPhone.

Web Browsing, iPod, and a phone, it is no doubt one of the best phones present in the market. When I shifted to iPhone 3G, I was very excited about it. When you have older version in your hand you start expecting better in newer version.

After buying iPhone 3G, I was disappointed. I found following problems

1. Switching to Edge network while there is strong 3G signal present.

2. Call drop during the conversation.

3. It still has 2 M Pixel camera while there are 4 M Pixel camera mobile phone present in the market.

4. No video recording this time too.

5. No MMS in iPhone 3G.

6. Still there is no way to copy and paste some text so if you want to give some contact information to some colleague, you need to remember the contact information first then type it ?.

7. No second camera for video calls as it makes sense in 3G phones.

After having so much of drawbacks, I still have iPhone 3G and I can’t have another phone as I am used to of some great features it has. Now decision is your whether you want to buy it now or wait for newer version of iPhone.