Pity the poor iPhone 3G owner who now has to grapple with reality; yes, what was until Friday the world's coolest smartphone is now simply a piece of yesterday's tech, as current as a punchcard and as enduring as a wax cylinder recording on a hot afternoon. No, not really -- the iPhone 3G is just as cool as it was a week ago, and for $99 it's a relative bargain. Still, there's some envy on the wind.

Some of our readers have apparently been so dazzled by Apple's enthusiastic promotion of the new iPhone 3G S that they were fooled into believing that the hardware-linked features of the 3G S (the compass and the voice controls, specifically) would be made available on the 3G with the delivery of the 3.0 software update. They have written to us, irate and frustrated, wanting to know what happened to their promised features. We sympathize, and we want to help.

There is, as it happens, a way to get one of the marquee features of the 3G S -- voice control -- onto your iPhone 3G or original iPhone. The vlingo app, available free in the App Store since December of last year and also available for Blackberry & Windows Mobile, gives you voice command dialing from your address book, map search, Yahoo web searches, Twitter/Facebook updating, and more. The recognition quality is quite good; it's worked as well as Google Voice Search for me in most cases.

Vlingo is quite a bit slower to recognize audio on the 3G than the built-in Voice Control is on the 3G S (unsurprisingly, considering the horsepower boost on the new phone); it also does not allow iTunes control, while Apple's tool does. Despite these drawbacks, it's fun to use and very slick. Update: As Eitan points out in the comments, vlingo's speed is not necessarily limited by the local processing power, since it depends on the remote server for audio analysis.

One of the major points of contention regarding vlingo, and a cause of many negative reviews on the App Store, is that the app does have to do something a little bit touchy in order to enable voice dialing: it asks if it can upload your contact names to vlingo. While this is a necessary step if you want to use voice dialing, and while the company says it does not include phone numbers with that upload nor does it use the information for any purpose other than creating spoken profiles to recognize the names of your contacts when you speak them, there are plenty of users who aren't comfortable with this step. If you're not OK with it, you can still use vlingo without the voice dialing feature; at that point, however, it's not dramatically better than Google's Voice Search.

You can watch a video demo of vlingo in the 2nd half of this post. If you've got other workarounds or third-party apps that help 3G owners level up with their happy 3G S comrades, please let us know.

Anyone who is as ancient as me will remember when "dialing" a phone meant putting your finger into a little circular hole in a rotary dial, dragging it to a small metal stop, then pulling your finger out of the hole to dial that number. Rotary dial phones disappeared in the 1970s, but now MildMannered Industries is bringing back the fun with Bakelite 1.0 for iPhone.

As the screenshot indicates, Bakelite provides a rotary dial interface for dialing phone numbers. It even has a feature those old dial phones didn't have -- the ability to delete the last number if you mis-dialed it.

Bakelite isn't very practical, but it's fun! The price is right, too. Bakelite is available from the App Store (click opens iTunes) for free.

As a fan of his EntourageABMenu utility, I was pleased to discover that developer Jon Nathan has a new item in his kit: Dialectic, a phone dialing tool that has more tricks than a magician's convention. Dialectic replaces the older Jon's Phone Tool and provides a bridge between almost any Mac PIM or database (including Address Book, Entourage, Now Contact, Daylite and more) and phone dialing via VoIP systems, hardware dialers, modems, Skype and other voice chat apps, Bluetooth-enabled cellphones... the list goes on.

Dialectic can trigger events via AppleScript when a call starts, so pausing your iTunes playback (or indicating a call start in your billing tool) is straightforward. If you make a lot of phone calls, you might be interested.

The online help includes a crowded page of resources, apps and scripts to get you rolling. Dialectic is a Universal Binary, costs $25 for new users and requires Mac OS X 10.4 or higher.

Thanks, Rich.

SPI Labs is claiming to have discovered a fairly significant threat to iPhone security due to MobileSafari's ability to dial phone numbers found on web pages. The feature can apparently be exploited in various ways, such as redirecting the actual call to a number other than what is viewed on the webpage, tracking calls placed by a site visitor, bypassing the confirmation dialog and forcing the call to continue and even preventing the phone from dialing calls altogether. Imagine clicking on a local number for a restaurant on a malicious website, only to discover you're actually calling an international number and, perhaps more importantly, paying international calling rates.

While SPI Labs has rightly chosen not to disclose the actual nature of the exploit and how to perform it, they do state that they have alerted Apple and are cooperating to plug these holes. If these security threats worry you, SPI Labs recommends that users simply don't use this feature for now. Ultimately, it is probably a safe bet that Apple is working quickly to plug security issues like this and other bugs for a future software update that will be delivered (hopefully) soon.

Thanks Eliot!

German-based Nova Media landed on our radar last year with their iSync plugin that supports more phones than Mac OS X's default set. Not content with mere syncing, however, the company also makes an Address Book plugin, recently updated with more supported models, that allows phones from Nokia and Sony Ericsson to shake hands with Apple's contact manager for all sorts of phone call integration. Sending calls to voicemail, replying via an SMS, logging the call and even starting one are all possible from within Address Book. And while AB supports these operations with the default batch of iSync-supported phones, Nova Media's Address Book plugin enables these operations with a large set of Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones that Apple likely never will support.

Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be a demo available for download, but at roughly $8.50 USD (Euro 6,50), I bet it would be hard to go wrong. After all, I can say from personal experience that $8.50 would be a small price to pay for the satisfying ability of clicking a button in a Mac OS X dialog to send someone directly to voicemail.