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Tired of fumbling around the iPhone's onscreen keyboard to send a text message? Soon you can skip that altogether, as long as you can speak English properly.

It's Day 3 of my week-long look at the new iPhone OS 3.0 and some updated apps with new features. We've looked at Push notifications and Spotlight already and today we'll look closer at text messaging (or SMS).

iPhone 2.1 represented both a large leap of stability across the OS and a brisk stride of new features in key areas like the iPod app and even SMS. Now that folks have dug through recent builds of the beta iPhone 2.2 updates, Apple will apparently maintain a casual jogging pace with new features, though you wouldn't know it from the release notes.

"They wrote this for you," Josh said in IM to me about Devicescape's Easy Wi-Fi for AT&T, an app that directly addresses my complaints about the free Wi-Fi that AT&T now provides to iPhone users at Starbucks and various airports.

Few things go together better than Skype and smartphones. That's why the Skype application for the iPhone has been so successful. It was released at the end of March and, as of this May, it's been downloaded over 4 million times. That means that roughly one out of every ten of the 40 million iPhone users out there has Skype on their phone.

Techcrunch has an interesting "rebuttal" up regarding Apple's response to the FCC over the rejection of Google Voice. I use the quotes because I think the rebuttal part itself is off-target, while the conclusion is fairly spot on.

Thanks to improvements in the iPhone OS 3.0 software update released Wednesday, connecting to a Wi-Fi hotspot with your iPhone or iPod touch should become almost as easy as roaming on the cellular network. Two new features radically improve the process of logging in (when you've already got an account with the Wi-Fi hotspot provider) and filling out information when it's required for free access. However, there are some catches, and-wouldn't you know it?-an incompatibility or two.