Note: I’ll be posting a more in depth overview soon, this post is still very correct(little have changed, mostly aditions)

This post is also featured at iModZone and LovingTech

So I got a good friend who asked me if i wanted to test out the iphone 3.0 firmware beta, so i said why the heck not? and now here i am, after roughly 2 weeks of active use, happy as ever, and relying 100% on the features it provides.

there isn’t as many new features in the iPod as in the iPhone version, I’m only stuck with iPod cause that’s what i got (:()
The home screen looks the same, with some tiny differences(one not shown in the screenshot, but the app is shown later)

Springboard

mainly the only difference is that you got a tiny spotlight icon on the bottom page indicator, if you slide to the left you get access to spotlight:

Spotlight

this thing searches everything by default. Mail, contacts, sms(if your on a iphone), music, bookmarks, and history.

Now the seccond bigest new thing for iPod users is Voice Memos(dunno if iphone had this, but i think it had)

Voice Memo

It do require a iPhone headset or the new Shuffle headset(with the controls), and works quite simply just press the red button and record, press the listing and you can view the recordings you’ve done.

now, back to spotlight a bit:

Spotlight

as you can see, it’s available practically everywhere you’d need to search

Here’s a few more features podcast related:

Podcasts

from left to right, first is mail-to, this links to the itunes page of the podcast you’re listening to, use this to for example tell friends about how awesome Eddie Izzard is , second is used to jump 30 secs back, which is pretty nice, instead of the 10 sec it sort of dose at random where you got no control, last is podcast speed, this setting allow you to speed up a bit(twice as fast, or half speed), useful if you can’t be bothered to use the next function:

Scrubbing

Scrubbing, you could do this before too, but only at real-time speed, which made it hard to fine scrub to the place you wanted to listen/watch from, so by sliding your finger down from the bar you can control the scrubbing speed.

last screenshot:

Bluetooth

Bluetooth! I haven’t gotten it to work properly yet, but I’m not even sure if it’s supposed to work yet(kind of like MMS in beta 1-2 for iphone)

now there is a new feature on the main settings menu, called store, this is ment to let you get a quick overview of your itunes account, not that good looking yet(just a badly formatted embedded webkit view) and not functional.

have any of you guys tested it? what are your thoughts?

I love it