With iPhone 3.0 under Apple’s belt, you might find yourself wondering where the company will go next. The answer might surprise you: iPhone 3.1. That’s right—didn’t see that coming, did you?
Reports from around the Web say that Apple is already hard at work on the first update to its 3.0 software, which was released last month. The 3.1 beta and accompanying SDK are said to be already available for developers to download.
Point updates are always an opportunity to fix bugs and tweak performance, but word on the virtual streets also indicates that a few new features will likely make their way into the release as well. Specifically mentioned are a few welcome changes, such as the ability for iPhone 3GS users to edit a video clip without necessarily overwriting the existing clip, comaptibility for the 3GS’s Voice Control feature and Bluetooth earpieces, and a fraud protection slider in Safari’s settings. In addition there are also supposedly some performance improvements to OpenGL, Quartz, and updates to AT&T’s profile and the modem firmware, which are rumored to enable MMS on AT&T.
As this is the first beta of iPhone 3.1, there’s probably still some time before it shows up in iTunes—for comparison’s sake, iPhone 2.1 shipped in September 2008, two months after iPhone 2.0 was released. And, as always, some or all of these features could change or disappear before the official release, so keep your fingers crossed.