For those of you who attended the South By Southwest Music Festival last year, and happened to use AT&T as your cell carrier, you most likely experienced some truly horribly phone service. With the explosion of iPhone users during SXSW, AT&T’s network was completely overwhelmed, turning our phones into nothing more than fancy paperweights. Fortunately, AT&T has prepared for the massive increase in cell phone usage for this year’s festival. Check out this article over at GigaOM to read more.

For those of you with iPhones, go ahead and plug ‘em in to your laptops, as the mighty 3.0 software update is finally available for download. Looks like we’re getting plenty of goodies with the upgrade, including the ability to send photos via text messages, and yes, CUT/COPY/PASTE! Yup, it is about time! Some of the other new toys don’t matter too much to me, although an improved version of the Safari browser will be nice. The landscape keyboard function will rule as well when the ol’ eyes get a bit tired.

Another iPhone release happened last night, as the popular TweetDeck software finally unleashed their own iPhone app. For now the download is free from the iTunes app store. I’ve been using it since last night, and so far so good. The look and feel of the app is great, with the ability to scroll to different customized Twitter lists with ease, although I don’t like that it is missing a contact list - something that is handy when including names in a Tweet. I’ve been using TwitterFon up until now, but we’ll see if TweetDeck becomes my primary app.

OK, that is enough nerd chat for now. I am taking off my pocket protector…

UPDATE: So I got the iPhone 3.0 update, and was a little bummed out about one of the key features offered. The iPhone has updated the texting service to MMS, but ol’ AT&T isn’t ready yet. So, although the iPhone 3G and 3GS are both capable of sending photos/files/etc via texts, AT&T will not be allowing these MMS messages until later this summer. Lame. Also, if you happen to have any issues during the installation process, just be patient. It might take several attempts to reactivate your iPhone through the iTunes store, as their server is totally overloaded and crapping out at the moment.

Got an iPhone or an iPod Touch? Addicted to the iTunes App Store? Yeah, we are too. There are a few new ones worth mentioning, such as the recently released batch of apps from our friends at the influential radio station KCRW. The main KCRW Radio app will allow you to listen to all three KCRW.com channels, checkout shows and live performances on demand and even keep an eye on their playlists in real time. You can also access the KCRW events calendar, making it a one stop shop on your phone. They also released an In Studio app for checking out video from the best performances from Morning Becomes Eclectic, and also a Good Food app to keep up with that particular foody program as well. Those will all set you pack a whopping $0.99 each, money well spent if you’re a huge KCRW fan.

It was only a matter of time before Dangerbird Records unleashed an app of our very own, which is now available for free at the iTunes store. You can keep tabs on the latest news, tour dates, Tweets, videos and much more. Get it by clicking here. Do it!

The Dangerbird Austin team (all two of us) is making the trek to Los Angeles for a round of meetings and hang time with the rest of the crew. It is always important for me to have an iPod (or in this case, an iPhone) filled with music to keep me occupied on a flight. I’ll have a trusty book with me as well, which will most likely be Bit Of A Blur by Alex James, but I need to have my headphones on to block out the general flight noise.

Since I hadn’t changed out the music on my iPhone in quite some time, I raided our music library to sprucen it up a bit. I did indeed put the new Eulogies album, Here Anonymous, on there… something we can’t wait to share with you when it hits stores on April 7. After a recent trip to Waterloo Records, I replaced my lost copy of Morphine’s classic album Cure For Pain, and promptly added it to my list of flight tunes. I also picked up a copy of a local band’s debut album, an amazing group called The Calm Blue Sea. It you’re into the more bombastic beauty of early Sigur Ros, this band is something you should check out ASAP. Since I have yet to give it a spin, another record that I transfered over is the latest War Child compilation titled Heroes, which contains some cool stuff like The Kooks covering The Kinks’ “Victoria,” Yeah Yeah Yeahs covering The Ramones’ “Sheena Is A Punk Rocker,” and Hot Chip covering Joy Divison’s “Transmission.”

I was in the mood for some older tracks too, so Catherine Wheel’s Ferment, Slowdive’s Just For A Day and even some Echo & The Bunnymen found their was onto my iPhone. With a good batch of tunes and a book, I am ready to get my travel on! See you on the west coast!