At this latest Macworld Expo, iPhone firmware 1.1.3 was announced, with features such as “customizable home screen,” “Webclips,” and a new interface for Maps. It was then announced that these enhancements, along with five applications previously only on the iPhone, would be coming to the iPod Touch in $20 “January Software Upgrade.”

Fast-forwarding past all the “it’s sooooooo unfair why Apple why?” aspects of the move, we must direct our attention to the applications themselves. In addition to the applications, the new features of iPhone firmware 1.1.3 (Webclips and Icon Layout on Springboard chiefly among them) were also included in the software upgrade. For iPhone users, the following rundown/review will say only what you already know. I’m providing this information for those of us who don’t have $60 to spend on phone service each month, no matter how functional and sexy and fingerprint covered the phone happens to be.

Mail and Maps

Mail is a light and decent email client, especially for a mobile device. With support for both POP3 and IMAP, Mail has preset configurations for several popular mail services, such as Gmail and Yahoo! Mail, as well as Apple’s own .Mac mail. Mail works with any other service supporting either of the two protocols mentioned above, of course, but settings will have to be obtained and entered manually.

Mail maintains the same folders you’d expect from an email client, like Inbox, Sent, Drafts, etc. Messages can be moved between folders, but new folders cannot be created directly in the interface; custom folders can be synced if the email service uses IMAP. Mail displays a two line preview of every message in the list by default, and the number of lines can be changed between none to five in the Mail menu in iPod Settings.

Mail displays as expected from the Safari engine, and supports the same gestures as Safari in HTML emails. Plain text email also displays well, at a size that doesn’t require zooming to read. Puzzlingly, however, no landscape mode support is to be found, in Mail or any software upgrade app, an omission that varies in magnitude from application to application.

The interface is well-integrated with other features of the iPod, if a bit simplistic. Not only can contacts be created or edited by touching the name of a person in the mail headers, but many other iPod applications integrate well with Mail. iPhone users have had this sort of integration since the beginning, but it’s a welcome feature to have added to the iPod as well. YouTube videos, notes, links to web pages, and pictures can all be sent through mail, and emails can be opened up pre-addressed by touching the email address listed for any contact. Nearly every other application on the iPod integrates with Mail in some way.

Maps is essentially the same Google Maps you can find on the internet, just with an interface more conducive to touch use. Maps actually received several new features and an interface refresh for the Software Upgrade and iPhone firmware 1.1.3. New to Maps is the Hybrid view, which shows satellite photos, overlaid with streets, traffic view, which overlays major roads with either green, yellow, or red to indicate traffic flow speed, and Locate Me. Locate Me uses a database of Wi-Fi hotspots to attempt to ascertain your location. I say attempt because, at least in my anecdotal case, Locate Me says I live in the middle of a farm near Topeka, Kansas (I live in Phoenix.) To be fair, this is a residential area, and I haven’t had the opportunity to try it out at some place more public, but I found its current answer a bit more entertaining than a generic “Your location could not be determined.”

Widgets

The rest of the five applications included in the upgrade are considered by Apple to be widgets, a term I find quite applicable. All three of them have fewer features than Mail or Maps, but are useful in their own right. Of these widgets, however, the most app-like is easily Notes.

Notes allows you to… take notes, as is made apparent by the application’s legal pad theme. Notes can be viewed, edited, emailed, and… that’s about it, really. The functionality is rather light, but what Notes does, it does well.

Stocks and Weather are the two other widgets, and are exactly what would be expected. In fact, they happen to bear a more than a slight resemblance to the same widgets in OS X’s Dashboard feature. Stocks displays the day’s loss or gain for each stock added, with a graph available at the bottom with data for up to two years. Weather displays the current conditions, as well as the forecast for the next six days. Multiple locations can be added and flicked between.

Minor Embellishments

In addition to the five iPhone applications, the January Software Upgrade also includes the new features added to the iPhone as part of firmware 1.1.3. Of the minor enhancements, only two are really anything worth mentioning: home screen customizability and Webclips.

The home screen can be rearranged if any icon is touched and held until they all start shivering (of all things….) Icons can be pulled out of the dock, placed in the dock (still only a maximum of 4 icons; unfortunately, there’s no way to pull all icons out of the dock either,) rearranged within the icons on the home screen, or sent to a different home screen altogether. Nine home screens are allowed, and none of them have to be full – just drag an icon to the side of the screen and it’ll flip over.

Webclips are simply bookmarks that are placed on the home screen and remember the position of the view on that web page. For example, if someone were to visit www.dtgeeks.com, then zoom in on the “Currently on Deep Thought” section, then bookmark the site, only the web address would be remembered – further visits to the site through that bookmark will start with the page fully zoomed out. Creating a web clip, however, will return to that exact placement, a function that is handy for quickly referencing, say, a list of recent articles. Webclips also may be used to link frequently used web applications to the home screen – there’s even a method for developers to create their own icon for display on the home screen.

Are these features worth $20? In the end, I believe it all comes down to the availability of wireless access points during most days. If there happen to be Wi-Fi hotspots all over the place in the area where you live, these features are going to get more use than a situation where the only Wi-Fi hot spot for miles is a corner coffee shop. Having an access point at home can provide a good amount of time connected, and some applications, such as mail, can be used offline. Unfortunately, other applications, like Weather and Stocks, don’t’ cache their data, an omission that isn’t apparent at all on the iPhone, but is a nuisance on the iPod Touch, which doesn’t have the luxury of a cell-phone network to pull data off of when there are no open hotspots.

Personally, I’ve found the upgrade to be with the money, though I may be biased as I payed $20 less for the unit itself in lieu of having the applications installed. YMMV.