Minority Report: iPhone 3.0 promises geek nirvana

What will Apple's new mobile phone software offer? Seb Janacek places his bets.

Later today, Apple will offer a sneak preview of the next major iteration of the iPhone's software.

iPhone 3.0 is exciting because it promises to offer iPhone owners the prospect of an entirely new user experience.

It should address a whole raft of 'missing' features and could potentially give the interface an overhaul, essentially creating a whole new phone.

And, if the rumours are to be believed, the 3.0 release will reach iPhone nirvana through the addition of copy-and-paste functionality.

Big deal? Apparently so.

Of all the missing features of the iPhone, the lack of copy-and-paste is the most bemoaned. To some it is a fundamental missing interface feature and appears on many, many wish lists.

The software update isn't available straight away - this is just a preview. It may be ready for release around the time of the Developer Conference in June.

The timing of the announcement is interesting.

As the iPhone comes under pressure from a number of competitors, most notably Google's Android platform and shortly Palm's Pre device, Apple needs to stay ahead of its opposition with temptations for new and existing customers.

The June release, if it arrives then, would coincide with the end of the two-year contracts with US carrier AT&T which the first American iPhone customers signed up to.

Both Apple and AT&T will be keen to re-sign customers coming to the end of their contracts who chose not to upgrade to the 3G iPhone last July.

Apple has a distinct advantage with its product strategy for phones. It has long resisted demands for 'iPhone nanos' and other form factor changes such as physical keyboards. The design of the iPhone has remained largely the same since Steve Jobs unveiled the device in January 2007.

Where Apple can provide a whole new experience for customers is with the user interface and operating system - just as the Mac differentiates itself from PCs through the Mac operating system.

So what can we expect from the iPhone 3.0 release?

Back in December I listed the top 10 features I'd like to see come to the iPhone.

Of those 10, I bet only a handful will appear in the new release.

Flash support seems unlikely - Adobe and Apple seem a world away in their view of Flash on the iPhone.

A mobile version of iWork also seems unlikely, although the iPhone may get some integration with the office suite's cloud collaborative service.

A useful Bluetooth service may finally arrive through support for tethering - allowing the phone to be used as a 3G modem for a notebook.

Analysts and Apple watchers are torn over whether iPhone 3.0 will include MMS support. This is the one feature I'd truly love to see, if only so I could stop using O2's painfully clunky web-based MMS alternative. We live in hope.

You'd expect at least marginal improvements to the device's power management technology to eke out a few more hours of life.

And then, of course, there's copy-and-paste.

The consensus is that this functionality will finally come to the iPhone. Digg founder Kevin Rose this week claimed to know how it would work, and while he's been right on a number of occasions with predictions on Apple kit, he's also got a few things wrong in the past.

Copy-and-paste wasn't on my feature wish list and it will genuinely make very little difference to my own use of the iPhone.

But it seems I am alone in this. Apparently it will plug a void in the lives of millions of other iPhone owners and make them very happy campers, which is a good thing.

Even better, it means we can all stop talking about it.