Taptu is a very cool app designed specifically for mobile search. It is very well designed and very easy to use, I may add. I had the priviledge of being selected for the beta testing and have been playing with it for some time. It is now out of beta and can be downloaded from the iTunes store. It does a very good of returning iPhone-friendly search results. You can also add sites or searches to your “Favorites” (bookmarking), share links via email or email the same link to yourself.

One great feature I like is that clicking on the Taptu icon next to the search box brings out this sort of springboard with specific search locations, i.e, Wikipedia, Games & Apps, Blogs, Twitter, etc. Very cool and clever! See some screenshots below. Oh and best of all, it’s FREE

Push notifications are live and well on the iPhone, though the number of apps taking advantage of the feature at the moment is not very large. I have only 3 apps installed on my iPhone that have push notifications: AIM, AP News, Umbrella.

It’s been two days since Phil Schiller and company got on stage at WWDC 2009 in San Francisco. Now that I’ve had time to watch the video of the keynote and read dozens of posts and comments about the announcements as well as the myriad of Twitter updates, I’ve decided to write my thoughts.

First of all, looking at the keynote as a whole, I think it was a let down. It’d be hard to argue that we all expected more. Yes, there was a new iPhone announced – the iPhone 3G S – although the “new” can be argued. It’s still the same design, only thing that changes is the phone’s guts.

The highlights:

• OS X Snow Leopard – I was impressed with the presentation and the improvements announced at the conference. No doubt in my mind OS X will continue to add market-share even more now. Lighter version, takes much less disk space to install, installs faster. Exchange support implementation promises to be nothing short of amazing. Add to that a $29 upgrade price and it gets better.

• 13″ MacBook Pro – This is simply a winner in my book. It starts at $1199 for a MacBook Pro!

• $99 price for iPhone 3G – Okay, in my opinion, this was a great move for Apple. Bad economy and money is tight for everyone, so it makes sense. So far they have sold more than 40 million iPhones worldwide and this price will translate into even more iPhone users out there. This to me was the most important highlight of the event.

The let-downs:

• iPhone 3G will not gain video-recording capabilities nor voice control capabilities with iPhone 3.0 software update. Yes, I have video recording on my iPhone 3G via the jailbreak hack but it would be nice to have it with the native Apple firmware. There are apps in the jailbreak world that enable voice control but is not as intuiteve because the app is not available from any running application, as the Apple implementation will work.

• MMS capabilities will not be enabled for AT&T users right off the bat! Come on AT&T – this is inexcusable and pretty lame! Allegedly, it will be available “later in the summer”, which means who knows when.

As we all know by now, iPhone OS 3.0 will be released to iPhone/iPod Touch owners on June 17. Free for iPhone users but iPod Touch owners will have to shell out $9.95 for 3.0 goodness.

Many of my friends have been wondering if I will sprint to upgrade to the 3G S on June 19 and at this time my decision is no. I am content with the iPhone 3G, and since I’m not eligible for an upgrade at this time, would have to shell out more money than the $199 advertised price. In the meantime, I will go without the better camera and the compass and the native video-recording capabilities and the voice control.

Now, I anxiously await a jailbreak version for 3.0 and life will be good!

As Apple gets ready to show the world its new iPhone 3.0 today, I’m keeping my expectations low so as not to be too terribly let down. Let’s see what they announce, but there are two features they MUST have on 3.0 in my opinion: copy/paste and background apps. If these two are missing, then version 3.0 is a complete joke!

Update: Okay, so copy/paste was announced but background apps is another story. They still insist on the push notification system. Let’s see when it comes out.

The official Gmail Blog announced today a couple of updates in the way Gmail handles attachments. You can now select multiple files at once instead of one by one, which was tedius. Also, you can now see a progress bar for all attachments in the message. I like this a lot…..keep the new features and updates coming Google!