iPhone OS 3.0 has been a long time in the making, but next Wednesday, iPhone owners will finally get their hands on the update that is suppose to fix many nagging issues with the OS and add many new features that frankly should have been available since the phone’s launch two years ago.

So what does 3.0 come with? Here is a quick rundown of Apple has included. The big ones listed on the page are Cut, copy, paste, landscape keyboard, tethering, MMS, and Safari improvements. But after several days of use, the biggest things I’ve noticed is that the whole system in much faster in everything it does. This is a hugely welcome improvement as many hours have been wasted waiting for the phone to unfreeze and to catch up with what is going on in the programs. Many small UI tweeks have also been included that are not shown on the list on Apple’s site. Small things like the way songs are displayed while the phone is locked, or small text in the contacts list and recent calls list, or even the new battery charge percentage meter.

Cut, Copy & Paste, Landscape keyboard

This should have been on the phone since day one. No longer will only those who have their phone jailbroken and running Clippy be the only chosen few that can enjoy the glorious usage of editing text like the machine gods intended it to be. I was able to write, as well as edit this and several blog posts much easier thanks to the addition of this feature. While I’ve been a fan and a user of Clippy for some months now, Apple’s version is a much better implementation no doubt thanks to their resources they have available to them in coding this.

Landscape keyboard is easily one of my biggest things that I have wanted since day one, even more so than cut, copy, and paste. With my big ass hands, I knew even before I bought the iPhone that they keyboard would be the most painful thing to endure. Thankfully I can now write with relative comfort and at a much faster speed using the landscape keyboard. My only complaint is how much visible space is wasted with the UI bars at the top of the screen. Apple should take a queue from other applications on the App Store and have the top bars minimize in landscape mode to give more viewing room of the text entry area.

MMS

I got nothing to add to this because AT&T blows goats. Sorry but it’s the truth. During the keynote, Apple mentioned that MMS support from AT&T is coming in late summer. MMS messages and include video, photos, audio, and contact info. Even tap to snap a picture or shoot a video right inside Messages. 1st gen iPhones won’t get MMS at all and 3g iPhones can’t send video since they can’t record videos.

Safari Improvements

Apple also updated the built in Safari web browser to the November 2008 version of Webkit, improving the speed of rendering and javascript dramatically. No longer is Gmail, GReader, or just plain text websites a chore to surf. Things render with a snap and lets you get on with your day. A much needed improvement. The best part about the update is that the iPhone can now automatically detect wifi hotspot log in pages in any program. While using the email app to check my email with Wifi at FIU, a Safari page pop-up came up and took me to the Cisco Clean Agent login page. This is a huge improvement on how the iPhone handles authentication on these types of system. Before you used to have to close whatever app you were in, open Safari, log in, then re-open your app to get on the Wifi. Kudos to apple for implementing this surprise.

Those are the big ones that I’ve noticed and liked the most. Once Wednesday rolls around and you have had a chance to get 3.0, drop a comment if you find anything not mentioned.