iPhone Hidden items in firmware update 1.1.3

Last week’s 1.1.3 software update to the iPhone brought a bunch of new features, which we painstakingly detailed over at the Mothership with a careful detail usually reserved for Talmudic study. But even under the magnifying lens of our scrutiny, one or two minor changes escaped our notice. Fortunately, the folks over at iPhone Atlas were sharp enough to pick up on them.

The limit on stored SMS messages has been raised from 1,000 to an ice-cream-headache-inducing 75,000. That’s right: now you can store every SMS message that you send in your entire lifetime—unless you are a teenage girl, in which case you’ll still need to erase all of your conversations every month.

And now you can use two fingers while typing, too. “Huh?” you say. “Couldn’t you already do that?” Well, yes, but now you can use two fingers simultaneously. Previously, tapping any key meant that the rest of the keyboard was rendered inoperable, which helped eliminating extraneous contact from your other hand. That apparently wasn’t as big a deal as Apple initially thought, so now you can use your left thumb to hold down the shift key while typing a letter: you’ll get a capital and the keyboard will immediately snap back into lower case mode. Handy for those used to, oh, almost every other keyboard ever made.

A final addendum on 1.1.3. Macworld head honcho Jason Snell was trying out 1.1.3’s new “Manually manage your music and video” feature; he gives it a thumbs down. While it does let you drag-and-drop music and video files onto your iPhone, the major advantage that the feature brought tot he iPod—letting you transfer music and video from multiple computers to one iPod—has been locked down on the iPhone. Try to manually manage an iPhone on a second computer and it’ll work—after iTunes offers to erase any files currently on the iPhone. So those hoping to sync with multiple computers are still forced to engage in interpretive dance and ritual sacrifice.