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Features of the upcoming iPhone OS 3.0 are starting to leak out as developers play with the system, although many are also complaining that downloading the beta release compels them to give up on OS 2.x, since Apple is holding back compatibility with apps for the current release until a later update.

According to Network World, there is no going back to version 2.x once a developer has downloaded the 3.0 OS and software development kit, so two development machines (and two iPhones) will be needed to continue to work on existing 2.x apps while also developing for 3.0.

However, many features of the new release look positive. For instance, users will be able to close out of the Safari browser and clear all open windows without having to open a new page to get rid of the last window. And iPhone 3.0 will offer a numerical percentage for remaining battery life, as well as an icon.

Another enhancement is a push notifications preference pane for users to enable or disable sounds, alerts and/or badges, the main alerts that third party apps can push to the handset. This would save battery power.

Also, AppleInsider speculates that the iPhone will soon gain a voice control interface, via 3.0 features codenamed 'Jibbler', which should support voice recognition and voice synthesis. Jibbler, sources say, would be an enhancement to the SpringBoard program, which launches applications from the homescreen, and could be controlled from the headset. The reason for the confidence about new voice activated features comes from the recent introduction of similar improvements to the iPod Shuffle.

In some areas, though, outsiders are delivering much coveted features before Apple itself, notably cut and paste, which has just appeared in the first iPhone version of the Quickoffice productivity software, already available for Symbian and BlackBerry handsets. QuickOffice for iPhone allows full editing of Microsoft Office documents and includes cut and paste, which will not be supported on the iPhone until the summer.

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