First is Verizon’s plan for the 4G rollout – instead of the standard rollout of 3-4 cities per month for the first 6 months, and accelerating thereafter, Verizon announced that they’ll push out 4G to 25-30 cities at the initial launch. The first question to ask yourself is that with no major announcements of a 4G handset, why would Verizon be in such a rush to put 4G out there? Yes, Clear is now available in a few cities, but their speeds are comparatively low to what Verizon is expecting 4G to provide (4Mb/s for Clear WiMax vs 8-12Mb/s for 4G/LTE). Verizon also needs to compete with the 7.2Mb/s HSPA network AT&T will start to offer – CDMA and HSPA currently offer theoretical speeds of about 3.6Mb/s, with real-world speeds of around 1Mb/s, and when HSPA speeds double, it is expected that speeds will increase to 1.5-2Mb/s for users who have the device to take advantage of it.While AT&T might have double the speed, it doesn’t seem to necessitate a faster rollout – Clear and AT&T aren’t accelerating their technology rollouts to compete with each other.

It would seem to me that you would only simultaneously push this type of release if you were going to offer a high-profile device nationwide to go with this network. Now that doesn’t specifically mean iPhone – we may see many LTE phones at the 2010 CES show – but there aren’t a whole lot of top-tier device manufacturers (Apple, Palm, Blackberry) who can push a high profile device.

Next is the rumor that Verizon is suddenly giving the Palm Pre the cold shoulder. The Pre is a pretty good device – and with the exception of fighting with Apple over iTunes syncing, there aren’t many downsides to the device. Why Verizon would want to not carry a device that would surely please customers is curious. The presumption is that some other smartphone manufacturer is pressuring Verizon to not carry the device. It could easily be a term of the agreement between Apple and Verizon if Apple were to bring the iPhone to their network, since Apple is working to block Pre syncing at every update.

There are a few other possibilities – it could be Microsoft’s supposed new phones. They could not want the Pre on Verizon because if the Pre is launched in Q1 and “power users” upgrade to the Pre (from either a first gen Storm or other smartphone), they wont be eligible to upgrade again so soon. Likewise, I would expect an announcement on Apple’s intentions as soon as they are legally allowed to announce something, even if its six months before the unit ships – Apple did this in 2007 with the original release because it kept people from upgrading and ensured a large number of upgrade-eligible customers at the release of the phone (if you assume that people upgrade every 2 years, that would mean that Apple had 25% of AT&T’s customers as the bare minimum who, if they wanted, could postpone upgrades until the iPhone came out).

Its my opinion that inevitably, Apple will have to go multi-carrier in the US simply because AT&T’s network cant handle all the devices Apple wants to sell – we see that now, AT&T has had a hard time keeping up. We’ll see how today’s launch of MMS goes, but considering that carriers around the world have been handling MMS for a few months now, if AT&T screws this up, their incompetence has sealed the deal to let the exclusivity agreement expire in 2010 and Apple to allow go after other partners in the US.

Edit 9/25: Electronista is reporting that a note from an investment bank indicates that the Pre is still on track with Verizon so its unknown as to whether or not it will happen or not.

[Edit 11/6: The fifth snapshot has been released]

General Feel

The feel of the OS hasn’t changed too dramatically. The new search tool works just like you might expect it to. You can now redeem codes from the App Store right on your phone instead of through your PC (though the developer test of AIM push didn’t work properly OTA or WiFi, and my iTunes didn’t want to sync it over without erasing all my programs and settings and copying them back over from the PC – or so it said).

Bluetooth

I tried to use the A2DP (stereo bluetooth) in my car (MS Automotive 5.5/Ford Sync 1.3) and I’ve noticed the phone sometimes gets confused whether it wants to be connected via A2DP or the USB dock connector. Sometimes I’ll plug it in the USB connector and it takes longer than OS 2.x to be recognized, and occasionally have to use the iPod “Accessory Connected” screen to tell it to use the USB connection instead of BT.

The reason I don’t want to use A2DP is that the USB connection offers me more – song metadata (name/artist) and being able to choose song, artist, playlist, etc to play, while I cant even get the next/previous track functions to work properly on the iPhone and my Ford Sync system – I believe the iPhone OS 3.0 is missing whats called AVRCP or audio/video remote control profile. Even if OS 3.0 had AVRCP, the Ford Sync system only seems to support the basic AVRCP protocol, since it only allows next/previous and play/pause controls. AVRCP 1.4 supports search capabilities similar to whats available over USB.

Also, the 3.0 OS does not appear to support Bluetooth text messaging, as the Ford Sync system supports reading back text messages (acronyms included).

Cut, Copy, Paste

There isn’t really much to talk about here, it works pretty well. In the beginning I had to train myself not to give the phone spurious inputs to trigger the C/C/P menus. But after I got over that hurdle it was fine. I even had some bright idea moments when I realized that I could use it instead of having to try and remember some long string (iPhone app redemption codes, UPS and FedEx tracking numbers, etc).

Landscape Apps

The landscape layout works great in Mail. It is slimmed down the non-message parts of the screen so more mail appears. I can see mobile mail enthusiasts picking this mode more than the standard portrait mode.

Other apps like Stocks support landscape mode, however Maps doesn’t, which is kind of disappointing.

Surfin’ Safari

Safari is pretty good. I tried some data and javascript intensive sites like digg (non-mobile) and ars technica. Both performed really well. Ars performed pretty well before but digg didn’t. This time both loaded and performed great, but it seemed with digg that it took a little while longer to render the page. Likely this is where the iPhone 3G S CPU speed up will help out. Other bits like Autofill were useful for Ars. In the week I used it I didn’t notice any crashes or issues.

MMS & Tethering

The delay in supporting MMS is odd. I don’t know why AT&T would have problems supporting it sooner, at first I had through they were planning on charging extra, but they recently clarified that. I completely understand charging the user an extra $15-30/mo for tethering via the iPhone or even $2.99/day for those who need it for a few days on vacation ($2.99 is still way cheaper than $15/day at a hotel for WiFi).

Thats pretty much it as far as the new OS goes. There are of course other features in the API that new software in the App Store will bring. Another round of innovation from Apple.

Later this summer, as part of the 3.0 software, AT&T will make multimedia messaging (MMS) available at no extra cost to customers with a text messaging bundle.

They also said they will support tethering later as well, but its understandable AT&T would charge more for tethering as the amount of data that can be transferred increases dramatically.

Stay tuned for my OS 3.0 firmware review Wednesday (when Apple pushes it out for the public to download and install).