Yes, this release is more of a 1.9 than a 3.0 but what can you do? No one else has a product that's even 1/100th of the iPhone all-around, so it's all moot.

IrDA beaming - tons of phones had this before Palm. You know who else had this? Apple on the Newton.

Guess who had serial communication before Palm? Apple. And everyone else.

Guess who doesn't have a touch-screen product out right now with any features at all? Palm. Reminds me of Apple three years ago.

Anyway, cut and paste is nice to move data between apps, but I would LOVE to see a feature NO ONE ever mentions. Shared datastore. In basic concept, a shared documents folder that can have additional sub-folders created by apps and can be locked with permissions and public/private key system.

This would give applications a good way to share data and a repository for documents other than photos (which is the only other read/write API-accessible universal repository available on the iPhone as far as I know). It would also allow apps to create share spaces to be used by select partner apps. This IMO, would be KILLER, especially for developers wanting to roll out multiple applications that might use the same types of data.

It would also provide the bedrock to considering this system a true computing "platform" given the ability to create and manipulate data within specific document objects. Like PDFs, Word Files, Text Files, etc.. Whatever.

I would have liked to see some type of backgrounding supported, but not so people can stuff arbitrary apps into the background or have all sorts of daemons running. I'd like to be able to have a particular app keep running while running the PHONE in the background. For instance, imagine how well your turn x turn GPS will work when you get a call or quickly need to check something else in another app?

Everyone is harping for full background app support but they don't know what they're talking about. They have yet to see how the Pre will handle any of this, but that's the system everyone's touting. Seems to me like it would be trivial to keep a web page in the background. Seeing as that's what Pre 'apps' are, I won't put much faith in it until I see it running and doing the (big) things that make this type of feature worthwhile.