Well, we’re just a few hours away from the formal release of iPhone OS 3.0. I for one couldn’t be more excited as it means that, once again, our iPhones and iPod touches are about to be transformed into something largely new. It also means that we’ll be seeing a host of new applications and update applications.The surprise tonight, was a bit of unexpected insight into a whole different aspect of 3.0 thanks to some banter from the folks at Evernote.

As a huge Evernote fan  I was excited to see that in their latest podcast notes they made mention of their upcoming  version 3.0 iPhone application. I immediately began to listen to the podcast, which is entertaining if you are an Evernote Evangalist like me, only to find something really exciting contained therein. In the discussion about the upcoming new version of their application (exciting enough as it is in my opinion!!) they actually reveal what is really going on with the new version of iPhone OS 3.0.

And it’s definitely worth noting

I’m really excited about the 3.0 app. Partially because it makes everything a lot faster and much more functional. But I’m also excited about is that it’s going to make future development on the iPhone much faster. Because basically, we were able to leverage a lot of code from our Mac’s desktop using the new iPhone SDK [because of it] basically you are able to use a lot of stuff from the desktop and vice versa. The two are kind of converging. For example when Snow Leopard comes out of the desktop we’ll eventually take some of our iPhone code, some of the core location stuff and move it onto the desktop app. And the two are getting closer together which basically means we can leverage more resources across Mac Leopard and iPhone development and both will start happening faster and lots of cool exciting features will start coming out every month or so…

(emphasis added)

We’ve known from the beginning that iPhone OS is, in essence, a stripped-down version of Mac OS X. Until this time last year, however, it was an entirely different animal because you couldn’t actually run separate applications on the device. Last year the iPhone took a move one step closer to being a portable a handheld computer with the ability to add third-party applications to it. But if I’m understanding these folks properly, iPhone  OS 3.0 is closer than ever before to the operating system in our Macs or MacBooks. They are so close, in fact, that code from one can now be used to speed up development on the other.

If you didn’t think the iPhone was a handheld pocketable computer before just wait till tomorrow.