At long last, version 3.0 of the Phone OS has landed. There are already some excellent in-depth reviews, such as the ones on iLounge and Ars Technica, so I won’t go into lengthy details here. Instead, here are some first impressions of the new OS, both good and bad…

Select, cut, copy and paste

A clipboard was one of my most wanted features, and it’s wonderful to finally see it in action. To start with I tried selecting a paragraph of text in Safari, at which point Safari bombed out and returned to the Home screen. Oops! Not a fantastic start. However I tried again with a different page and it was fine. It’s relatively easy to use, considering the constraints of a small touch-screen: tap and hold to bring up the magnifier, then release and choose Select, Select All, or Paste:

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You can also double-tap a word to select it, then choose Cut, Copy, or Paste:

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To change a selection, tap and drag its end markers:

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I enjoy the odd Mac/PC role-playing game such as Baldur’s Gate and Diablo, so I thought I’d see what RPGs are available for the iPhone. There are a few out there, including Vay (which I hope to review soon), but the one that caught my eye was the recently-launched Underworlds from Pixel Mine. So I took it for a spin.

Underworlds is in many ways a “Diablo lite” for the iPhone. It’s an isometric 3D hack-and-slash affair, with a single character that you move around various dungeons, killing monsters and picking up goodies.

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The graphics look great, even on the small screen, and the sound effects and music are suitably atmospheric. There’s a good range of scenery, items and monsters (although the monsters are very much of the “evil undead” variety) and the game is generally fun to play.

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