Apple (AAPL) isn't scheduled to release the iPhone 3.0 until Wednesday, but like a lot of Apple watchers, I've been living with the Gold Master version for the past week. (It's available on the Web if you know where to look.)

The new firmware is a significant improvement over the old, but not in the ways I had expected. Cut & paste – the feature I'd lobbied for most heavily — can be a lifesaver, but it's not something I've used a lot so far. Ditto for landscape e-mail.

On the other hand, I find myself depending heavily on features I'd never thought much about — like Safari's new password autofill.

Apple's list of the top 20 new features of the iPhone 3.0 — starting with Cut, Copy & Paste and Landscape Keyboard — are listed on its website.

These, however, are the features that have been getting the heaviest use around my house:

1. E-mail search. Spotlight search, which lets you search the entire contents of your iPhone, has been getting the most attention. But what I've been using most is the search bar that appears at the top of my e-mail inbox. If what I want to find isn't among the 50 e-mails stored on my iPhone, the search engine digs into the thousands of stored on my server and starts working its way through those.
2. Safari autofill. Any browser worth its salt ought to be smart enough to remember the name and password you use on the sites you go to most often. I don't know why this wasn't available on the iPhone from Day 1, but now that it is I find myself visiting sites I had avoided because I was either too lazy to enter the password or too absent-minded to remember it.
3. Automatic Wi-Fi login. This is a real timesaver if you spend a lot of your life in airports, Starbucks (SBUX) and other places with Wi-Fi hotspots that refuse to remember your mobile device from one location to another.
4. Find My iPhone. I haven't really needed this yet — I'm pretty good about keeping my cellphone close at hand — but this is the feature I demonstrate the most because it's just so cool. If you have a Mobile Me account and you misplace your iPhone, you can see the phone's location on a Google (GOOG) map and send it a pinging noise and a "please return me" message. If it's lost or stolen for good, you can hit a kill button and remotely wipe all your data — passwords, secret phone numbers, embarrassing photos, etc. If the iPhone comes back home, just plug it into your computer and all your data will be restored.

I have two complaints with Find My iPhone, however: 1) it's turned off by default, something a lot of users probably won't discover until they've lost their phones and it's too late to turn it on, and 2) for reasons I don't understand, it only displays the iPhone's location within a one-block radius. See below:

Between Wi-Fi triangulation and GPS, Mobile Me ought to be able to locate the device to within a few yards. Seems like an easy fix. I'll be watching for it when iPhone 3.0 goes live officially on Wednesday June 17. The new iPhone 3G S arrives two days later.

This is the spot for our live coverage of Apple's (AAPL) World Wide Developers Conference.

The keynote started at 1 p.m EDT (10 a.m. PDT). All times below are EDT unless otherwise indicated.

3:05 And that's a wrap.

There is a new iPhone, coming June 19, about a month earlier than expected. There is a $99 iPhone, available now, which is not good news for Palm (PALM). There are new MacBook Pros and price cuts on the 17-inch MacBook and MacBook Air. And we have ship dates for iPhone 3.0 (June 17) and Snow Leopard (September, a month before Microsoft's Windows 7).

But there is nothing from Apple to compete with those hot-selling $300 netbooks.

And there is no Steve Jobs.

His name never came up and there was no news about his condition or his plans to return to Apple.

I would expect that to get a mixed reaction from Wall Street, and as the keynote ended the stock was trading at $141, down about 3.6 points (2.5%). (It recovered somewhat later in the day to close at $143.85, down 0.82 points, and climbed o.1 points in after hours trading.)

Below the fold: The rest of the keynote.

More

For those who couldn't make it to Cupertino, Calif., Tuesday, Apple (AAPL) has posted a Quicktime video of its iPhone OS 3.0 special event.

Click here or on the image at right to view it.

These recordings are always useful to pick up nuances and details  — including, in this case, a live duet on leaf trombones and a terrifying three-person shoot-out — that don't make it into the live blogs and press reports.

But this one is especially interesting because it's the first of these Cupertino special events that was not moderated by CEO Steve Jobs, currently on medical leave.

This time, Greg Joswiak, VP of iPhone and iPod product marketing, handled the introduction and wrap-up, and Scott Forstall, senior VP of iPhone software, did the bulk of the presentation.

So how did the new team do? Let us know what you think.

See also:

• Major iPhone upgrade coming this summer
• What to expect from iPhone 3.0
• What’s on your iPhone wish list?
• How iPhone Copy + Paste will work

Apple (AAPL) unveiled a slew of new features — more than 100 in all — in the third major revision of the iPhone's basic operating system. Among the enhancements demonstrated at a special media event at the company's Cupertino headquarters on Tuesday were many of the functions users had been clamoring for — in some cases for nearly two years. Among the highlights:

• Cut, copy and paste across applications
• So-called "push notification" — for example, of breaking news or sports results
• Multimedia messaging service (MMS) for sending pictures or voice memos in instant messages
• Landscape viewing when the iPhone is turned sideways in the major applications, including Mail
• The ability to search Mail, Calendar and other Apple applications for key words
• Improved calendar functions
• Stereo Bluetooth for wireless earphones

And much more. At the end of the 90 minute presentation, senior vice president Scott Forstall (who stood in for the ailing Steve Jobs) was rattling off features faster than reporters could type: Notes Sync, audio/video tags, live streaming, shake to shuffle, Wi-Fi auto login, Stereo Bluetooth, LDAP, iTunes account creation, YouTube ratings, anti-phishing, call log, parental controls, media ccrubber, OTA profiles, VPN on demand, languages, YouTube subscriptions, YouTube accounts, encrypted profiles, auto-fills…

"Many minor features add up to a major change," was Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster's take-away message.

Apple also announced a raft of improvements — including more than 1,000 new APIs (application programming interfaces) — in the so-called SDK (software development kit) that programmers use to create applications for the iPhone and the iPod touch. Chief among them:

• Peer to peer connectivity (through Bluetooth) to allow multiplayer games with people in close proximity
• Support for turn-by-turn navigation and other sophisticated map applications
• A subscription model that allows micropayments by the item ($9.95 for an electronic book, say, or a more $0.99 for a more powerful weapon in a shooting game)
• The ability to interact with hardware accessories such as speakers or glucose monitoring kits

A beta (preliminary) version of new SDK is available to developers for free download today.

iPhone 3.0 with all the added end-user features won't be available until sometime this summer. It will be free to owners of existing iPhones and will cost $9.95 for the iPod touch. Some of the new functions — for example stereo Bluetooth and MMS — won't work on the first generation phones.

Apple also announced some App Store milestones:

• 25,000 apps available for download (the actual figure is now more than 28,000)
• 800 million apps downloaded
• 17 million iPhones sold through Dec. 2008
• 13 million iPod touches (for a total installed base of more than 30 million App Store-ready devices)
• 800,000 downloads of the original SDK
• 50,000 developers — 62% of them new to Apple
• 96% of apps submitted in February were approved — 98% within seven days — but still not fast enough to satisfy some developers

One user request that wasn't addressed was support for Adobe Flash, the widely used standard for online video and other multimedia files. Asked in a Q&A what Apple planned to do about Flash, Forstall ducked the question. "We have no announcements on that topic today," he said, suggesting that there were other ways to send video to mobile devices.

See Jon Fortt's Big Tech here for a live blog of the event. Apple's press release is available here.

Apple closed Tuesday $99.66, up 4.4% for the day. The stock has gained $16.55 a share in just over two weeks.

See also:

• What to expect from iPhone 3.0
• What's on your iPhone wish list?
• How iPhone Copy + Paste will work

Apple (AAPL) unveiled a slew of new features — more than 100 in all — in the third major revision of the iPhone's basic operating system. Among the enhancements demonstrated at a special media event at the company's Cupertino headquarters on Tuesday were many of the functions users had been clamoring for — in some cases for nearly two years. Among the highlights:

• Cut, copy and paste across applications
• So-called "push notification" — for example, of breaking news or sports results
• Multimedia messaging service (MMS) for sending pictures or voice memos in instant messages
• Landscape viewing when the iPhone is turned sideways in the major applications, including Mail
• The ability to search Mail, Calendar and other Apple applications for key words
• Improved calendar functions
• Stereo Bluetooth for wireless earphones

And much more. At the end of the 90 minute presentation, senior vice president Scott Forstall (who stood in for the ailing Steve Jobs) was rattling off features faster than reporters could type: Notes Sync, audio/video tags, live streaming, shake to shuffle, Wi-Fi auto login, Stereo Bluetooth, LDAP, iTunes account creation, YouTube ratings, anti-phishing, call log, parental controls, media ccrubber, OTA profiles, VPN on demand, languages, YouTube subscriptions, YouTube accounts, encrypted profiles, auto-fills…

"Many minor features add up to a major change," was Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster's take-away message.

Apple also announced a raft of improvements — including more than 1,000 new APIs (application programming interfaces) — in the so-called SDK (software development kit) that programmers use to create applications for the iPhone and the iPod touch. Chief among them:

• Peer to peer connectivity (through Bluetooth) to allow multiplayer games with people in close proximity
• Support for turn-by-turn navigation and other sophisticated map applications
• A subscription model that allows micropayments by the item ($9.95 for an electronic book, say, or a more $0.99 for a more powerful weapon in a shooting game)
• The ability to interact with hardware accessories such as speakers or glucose monitoring kits

A beta (preliminary) version of new SDK is available to developers for free download today.

iPhone 3.0 with all the added end-user features won't be available until sometime this summer. It will be free to owners of existing iPhones and will cost $9.95 for the iPod touch. Some of the new functions — for example stereo Bluetooth and MMS — won't work on the first generation phones.

Apple also announced some App Store milestones:

• 25,000 apps available for download (the actual figure is now more than 28,000)
• 800 million apps downloaded
• 17 million iPhones sold through Dec. 2008
• 13 million iPod touches (for a total installed base of more than 30 million App Store-ready devices)
• 800,000 downloads of the original SDK
• 50,000 developers — 62% of them new to Apple
• 96% of apps submitted in February were approved — 98% within seven days — but still not fast enough to satisfy some developers

One user request that wasn't addressed was support for Adobe Flash, the widely used standard for online video and other multimedia files. Asked in a Q&A what Apple planned to do about Flash, Forstall ducked the question. "We have no announcements on that topic today," he said, suggesting that there were other ways to send video to mobile devices.

See Jon Fortt's Big Tech here for a live blog of the event. Apple's press release is available here.

Apple closed Tuesday $99.66, up 4.4% for the day. The stock has gained $16.55 a share in just over two weeks.

See also:

• What to expect from iPhone 3.0
• What's on your iPhone wish list?
• How iPhone Copy + Paste will work

UPDATE: To see what will and won't be in the new iPhone OS when it's released this summer, you can read our summary here or follow our link to the Quicktime video here.

- – - -

The first thing to remember about Apple's (AAPL) iPhone 3.0 special event, announced last Thursday and scheduled for Tuesday at 1 p.m. ET (10 a.m PT), is that it has been billed as "an advance preview."

That means no new software — and certainly no new hardware — is likely to be released to the public today. What Apple is hosting an invitation-only event for developers so they can learn about a new iPhone SDK (software development kit) and get a sneak peek at the third major build of the iPhone's basic operating system.

Steve Jobs hosted a similar event on March 6, 2008 — the "iPhone Software Roadmap" — at which he released a beta version of the first SDK and previewed iPhone 2.0. Both represented major advances over the original iPhone, but end users didn't see the benefits until four months later, with the release of the iPhone 3G and the launch of the App Store on July 11, 2008. iPhone 2.0 introduced dozens of enhancements (and more than a few problems), but the most important advance turned out to be the SDK and the tens of thousands of third-party iPhone applications it has since spawned.

So what can we expect from Tuesday's event?

Most of the advance speculation has centered on iPhone 3.0. Among the new features rumored or expected — but, remember, not necessarily available right away — are:

• Copy and paste. Better two years late than never, according to multiple sources. See, for example, here and here.
• Push notification. So Facebook, say, could alert you when you have a new message. This was promised in June 2008, but not yet delivered.
• MMS — Multimedia Messaging Service. So you can forward those pictures sent to you by friends with far less sophisticated cell phones. Maybe yes, maybe no.
• Better mail program. Why can't you search past messages? Read them in landscape mode? Delete them en masse?
• Internet sharing. For those times when your iPhone has access but your laptop doesn't. Apple and AT&T have both said so-called "tethering" is coming real soon now.
• Bluetooth support. Currently available only for phone headsets. Could be expanded to support wireless keyboards, speaker systems, file exchanges, syncing etc.
• Flash support. So you'd see videos and dancing advertisements instead of those little blue cubes. Adobe (ADBE) says its Flash Player software is ready and waiting for Apple's approval.
• Better App management. The current interface is barely capable of organizing 148 applications, never mind 28,000.
• Voice dialing and turn-by-turn directions. Quick, before iPhone users cause any more traffic accidents.
• Video capture. It can be done without modifying the built-in camera as iPhone Video Recorder, an application available only for jailbroken iPhones, has shown.
• A new browser. The current version of iPhone Safari is nearly two years old and starting to get a little long in the tooth.

Owners of competing smartphones snicker when they read these lists; Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows Mobile and Research in Motion's (RIMM) BlackBerry have had many of these features for years. According to one report, Apple's primary motivation for introducing the improvements now is to head off competition from the forthcoming Palm (PALM) Pre.

But what none of the competing smartphones have is an SDK that's as easy to use as Apple's or an App Store that makes marketing and distributing applications so painless — and profitable.

Which is why the first part of Tuesday's event — the opportunity for developers to learn about the new SDK — may turn out to be the more significant.

As Seth Weintraub notes in his widely circulated Computerworld blog, developers are going to need some lead time if Apple plans to introduce a new piece of mobile hardware — an Apple tablet, as he suggests, or a more advanced iPhone or iPod touch.

Much less has been written about what that new SDK might include (and most of it is pretty technical), but among the improvements developers are looking for are:

• Better syncing between apps. So those 28,000 applications could share data among themselves.
• Better calendar and t0-do list support. So an e-mail invitation could be automatically added to your iCal.
• More background operation. So you could check your e-mail, for example, without interrupting that Internet radio show you were listening to.

After that, the requests quickly go over this reporter's head. Ars Technica contributor Erica Sadun, for example, is asking for improved AVFoundation, CFNetwork frameworks, expanded UIKit objects and an improved Interface Builder (link), but we're at a loss to explain what all that means.

In any event, our questions should be answered soon enough. My colleague Jon Fortt will be live-blogging the show for Fortune.com, as will several other sites. (9to5 Mac says it will be displaying four live-blog feeds at once.)

We'll be monitoring the special event from our leafy backyard in Brooklyn and will post a summary of the key findings as soon as we know what they are.

See also: What's on your iPhone 3.0 wish list?