While Jailbreaking iPhone 3.1 on the original iPhone 2G and iPhone 3G has made some strides, there’s still no sign of an iPhone 3GS version. What there are signs of, however, are more and more apps taking advantage of iPhone 3.1-only APIs, meaning they can’t be run on iPhone 3.0, meaning they’re not available to iPhone 3GS Jailbreakers.
So far these iPhone 3.1-only apps are confined to a few camera-specific apps, but including the new features of the update, as augmented-reality functionality spreads, never mind whatever comes with the iPhone 3.2 beta when it appears, the number of incompatible apps is only going to grow.
So here’s our question for iPhone 3GS Jailbreakers — are you still content to wait for the Dev-Team to Jailbreak (and allow safe unlock of) 3.1, or are you getting tempted to restore to the plain vanilla OS? And how long will you wait?
This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.
iPhone 3.1-Only Apps Getting iPhone 3GS Jailbreakers Down?
With the iPhone 3GS and it’s accessibility features, you can now enable triple-clicking of the Home Button to toggle VoiceOver, Toggle White on Black, and Ask (which then will pop up a menu offering Turn VoiceOver On, Turn Zoom On, Turn White on Black On).
Voice Control in iPhone 3.0, after holding down the Home button for several seconds, let you speak simple commands to place calls and control music. With iPhone 3.1, it will now also work over Bluetooth.
Expanding on the Find My iPhone remote tracking and wiping service that came with iPhone 3.0, you can now also remotely assign a passcode lock. This is a nice half-way ground between leaving your iPhone wide open, or having to wipe it clean, if you can’t find it but aren’t sure you’ve permanently lost it.
Still no MMS for AT&T users. That’s being released on September 25 (though whether it will require an iPhone 3.1.1 update, or just a new carrier file is unknown).
Calendar gets a minor tweak in iPhone 3.1. Now event alerts also display the location of the event in the popup. Presumably, this is now considered important glance-able information.
Video trimming is now non-destructive. Previously, if you trimmed a video, it was automatically saved over the original, meaning you could never undo or go back to the full clip. Now, a Save As… dialog gives you the option of preserving the original and creating as many version copies as you want (an short clip to email, a longer one to share to YouTube, and the full clip to sync and bring into iMovie, for example).
We haven’t seen this show up yet ourselves, but during Steve Jobs’ iPhone 3.1 overview, the slide behind him listed Sponsored Links in Maps as a… feature. (Maybe that’s why Google CEO, Eric Schmidt was there?). Not quite sure how we feel about this in a built-in app either, as opposed to a site we choose to navigate to in Safari…
Setting usually accounts for the longest list of changes in a new iPhone firmware, but this time it’s fairly short.
iPhone 3.1 lets you display available iTunes account credit both iTunes Store, and in the App Store. 
Since the App Store is closer akin to a local WebView, it’s fairly easy for Apple to update the App Store (or iTunes Store) without updating the firmware. Case in point, the night before iPhone 3.1 went live, the App Store was updated to feature “Top Grossing” as one of the view options.
Copy and Paste comes to the Phone Keypad. Just tap and hold and the input area will change from dark blue to light blue, and the Copy Paste menu will pop up.
The iPhone Paste feature is “smart” enough to change alphanumeric phone numbers to pure numbers (i.e. 1-800-FLOWERS to 1-800-356-9377).
