News that Apple will be hosting a media even next week about iPhone 3.0 has generated a lot of speculation about what might be coming in the new release.

Copy and paste and tethering are expected to finally make their debuts with the new firmware.

BoyGeniusReport claims to have heard two possible features that would certainly make many iPhone users happy. They believe that iPhone 3.0 will introduce MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) and Tethering.

MMS would finally offer iPhone users the ability to send photos by way of SMS, and tethering would allow you to share your iPhone’s internet connection with your laptop computer. An alleged Steve Jobs email even confirmed that Apple had been working on a thethering solution, so it certainly seems feasible.

A more interesting report comes from John Gruber about his “guesses” for iPhone 3.0 from back at Macworld:
“First, a new home screen app (a.k.a. SpringBoard), designed from the ground up for a system where users have a few dozen or more extra apps installed. Managing dozens of apps on the iPhone today is simply a pain in the rear. Second, maybe an answer to the question of where the background notification API is you know, the one we were told at WWDC to expect a few months ago, but which we haven’t heard a word about since. And maybe copy and paste.”

While Gruber labels this as his “wish list”, we have good reason to believe that these features will indeed be found in the iPhone 3.0 firmware. That could mean a better app-managing SpringBoard (with categories?), a solution to “push” notifications (background tasks?), and, yes… even copy and paste.