By AppleInsider Staff

Published: 03:00 PM EST

A new beta of Apple Inc.'s iPhone software v2.0 released privately on Tuesday includes a handful of subtle refinements and feature additions, such as a contact list search.

The inability to search the address book and phone number listings has stood out as one of the iPhone's most glaring omissions given that such capabilities have routinely been included out-of-the-box on most rival handsets.

At last month's iPhone Software Roadmap event, Apple inadvertently dropped hints that the feature would finally arrive as part of the iPhone software v2.0 due this June when a slide demonstrating the some of the update's features revealed an inconspicuous magnifying glass icon atop the phone app's alphabet search strip.

Although the first few external betas of the iPhone software v2.0 did not include the feature, build 5A240d released on Tuesday does according to Engadget, as evidenced by the below screenshots.

Also new to the latest beta is an iCal meeting invites folder, accessible via a drawer icon at the bottom of the iPhone's iCal application -- a button that was disabled in previous builds.