Chances are you’ve seen the news about the iPhone 3.0 Soft­ware Update that Apple recently released. For iPhone users, it’s a free upgrade so it isn’t really a ques­tion of whether it would be worth it — free is free!

For iPod touch users though, due to the way Apple does their books on the iPod touchs, it’s a $9.95US upgrade. Which begs the ques­tion — is it worth it to upgrade your iPod touch to iPhone 3.0?

Unless you just bought your ipod touch you prob­a­bly don’t already have the iPhone 3.0 installed but it might worth it to dou­ble check. To find out which ver­sion you have:

• Tap the set­tings icon
• Tap Gen­eral
• Tap About to see the ver­sion number

Apple lists the major new fea­tures for iPod touch users as:

• Buy Movies, TV Shows, and Audio­books via Wi-Fi
• Stereo Blue­tooth (only for 2nd gen­er­a­tion iPod touch — to tell if you have a 2nd gen or not, you can eas­ily tell by whether your iPod touch has a speaker built in or not. If you can’t hear any­thing from your iPod with­out head­phones plugged in, you’ve got a 1st gen iPod touch)
• Peer to Peer Gam­ing (also only for 2nd gen iPod touch)
• Land­scape Keyboard
• Spot­light Search
• Cut, Copy & Paste

There’s a few other upgrades worth men­tion­ing as well includ­ing parental con­trols, auto­matic wi-fi login, iTunes store account cre­ation, new lan­guages, push noti­fi­ca­tions, third party acces­sories, Safari improve­ments, sync notes and shake to shuffle.

After ini­tially installing the update on my 1st gen iPod touch I wasn’t that impressed with every­thing to think it was actu­ally worth it. Cut/copy/paste is nice, but not a fea­ture I’d use a lot. Same thing with the land­scape key­board. The push noti­fi­ca­tions and third party acces­sories will be nice, once software/hardware devel­op­ers start sup­port­ing them but as of now there isn’t a lot that are — though that’s sure to change in the com­ing months.

The Safari improve­ments are nice and it’s def­i­nitely a quicker browser, but it’s not wouldn’t be enough for me to war­rant an upgrade either. I knew I’d like the fact that the Notes app would finally sync to Mail.app but it also wasn’t a deal maker/breaker for me.

So my ini­tial impres­sion was that I wouldn’t really rec­om­mend it to folks at this point. If $10 could be bet­ter spent else­where, then do so.

After hav­ing used it for a cou­ple weeks though, I think I’ve changed my thoughts. The Notes sync­ing has become some­thing I’m using much more (though to be hon­est, it should have been there from the begin­ning). Same goes for the land­scape key­board — it’s nice to have but not some­thing that should have taken until ver­sion 3 to arrive, in my opin­ion. Spot­light search is also a very handy tool to find information/apps on your iPod touch — I just need to remem­ber to use it more often instead of man­u­ally try­ing to find it.

At this point I can say that I’d rec­om­mend upgrad­ing. Besides the few major fea­tures, the behind the scenes improvements/optimizations are well worth the $10 price. If you think of the money you’d spend on a Mac OS or, heaven for­bid, a Win­dows OS upgrade it’s a pretty cheap OS upgrade. Once more apps start mak­ing use of push noti­fi­ca­tions and the peer-to-peer con­nec­tiv­ity (con­nect­ing to another 2nd gen iPod touch or iPhone), it will be well worth it.

Click here to visit Apple’s iPod touch soft­ware update page for more information.

What do you think? Will you (or did you) upgrade your iPod touch?