

IPhone 3G Performance with iOS 4.0 is terrible - miltred
http://www.reynoldsftw.com/2010/06/iphone-3g-performance-with-ios-4-0-is-terrible/

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jbhelms
I have had the iOS 4 on my iPhone 3g for almost 24 hours and haven't noticed
anything weird or off the wall. I did notice that not much in iOS 4 is
available on the 3g. No multitasking for one. I had some problems with
Exchange, but a reboot of my phone fixed that.

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catch23
I also didn't have any problems either. I'm currently using the gm seed, and
it seems not much different (speed-wise) on my 3G compared to the previous OS
version (I was using 3.1.2 before)

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joezydeco
The GM seed is much better than some of the betas, but that's not saying much.
Beta 3 on the 3G was especially bad.

But all in all I think the overhead of all these new features are slowly
overwhelming the 3G. The only thing really worth it is mail threading.

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cloudwalking
(pure speculation:) It may be possible to install Mail.app without iOS 4.

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illumin8
It's worth mentioning that when you do an upgrade, the Spotlight process must
go out and re-index all of the content on your phone. This is a background
process that might take a few hours to complete, especially if you have a lot
of content and email.

Most people are saying that after a few hours the phone is noticeably faster
or at least back to normal.

I think what is happening here is this background Spotlight index is killing
performance right after the upgrade, and people are mistaking this for
terrible long term performance.

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agotterer
The moment after I upgraded, the phone was completely useless. I restarted
twice and it picked up a little speed. Its now 24hours later and its still
extremely slow and laggy.

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invisible
I've always found that for some reason with OSX (which is perhaps somewhat
comparable), I get the best results with a fresh install. I think Apple
sometimes doesn't do the best housekeeping.

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mbreese
My 3G (w/ the 4 GM) routinely freezes to the point where it just stops
responding to input. I'll probably attempt to downgrade it to 3 soon. Which, I
honestly don't mind. I mean, I would rather Apple not even support the 3G with
iOS 4 rather than have to deal with this user experience. It's not like it can
even deal with background tasks anyway...

~~~
ique
Interesting, my 3G had the exact same problems as you (just froze and didn't
respond to anything for like minutes at a time) with OS 3. But the problems
have gotten a lot less frequent with OS 4 for me.

~~~
9oliYQjP
I read somewhere that upgrading a 3G from OS 2.x to one of the OS 3.0 betas
and then to OS 3.0 final, without doing a full reset somewhere in between
would cause this problem. OS 3.0 was sluggish as hell for me until OS 4.0 beta
came out and I did a full reset. I'd get random pauses and freezes just like
others here are reporting. After the full reset, the 3G was running smoothly
again. I just upgraded to 4.0 final and it is smooth too.

A full reset kind of sucks. We're not talking a restore here. Just start from
scratch. With the exception of one or two apps though, my data was in the
cloud so it was largely painless to get everything back in sync.

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mkramlich
I've seen claims in both directions. To play it safe, I'll keep my 3G on 3.x.
There was only 1 new feature in iOS 4 (that also worked on 3G models) that
attracted me anyway: the unified mailbox view thing.

Actually I have a short list of desired improvements that might make it worth
it, despite a speed drop:

* photo synching to my desktop (so not limited to the lame select-up-to-4-then-email-them thing, which is way too time-consuming if you have many photos and/or add new ones frequently)

* in Safari, when hit Add Bookmark, and goes into the Bookmarks view, it should start in the top-level collapsed state, that way I can quickly navigate to the right folder to select. Divide and conquer would speed it up in the case where there are many nested folder categories.

* making the Back button in Safari take you back to a cached, post-rendered view of the previous page -- rather than having to re-fetch/parse/render all over again, wasting my time, battery and the network ( _groan_ )

* cached application state restoration in general, consistently -- i realize the critical ingredient here is partly having enough memory and flash, so just beefing up the hardware with each new model refresh should get us to an ideal state eventually. Right now, lots of frustration and wasted effort when I go back in Mail and Safari and it's forgotten where I was last at and has to redo everything, sometimes reseting to some default state (such as scrolled to the extreme top rather than down in the middle where I was)

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neilc
_making the Back button in Safari take you back to a cached, post-rendered
view of the previous page_

This behavior is extremely frustrating. It is similarly annoying when Safari
reloads a page because the previous copy has been reclaimed due to low RAM.
Rather than flushing the previous version entirely, it would be much nicer for
Safari to write the old version to flash. Reloading from flash would be much
faster, and would also prevent the page content from changing on reload (e.g.,
Google Reader won't reload "read" items on reload).

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Hates_
I had terrible speed issues until I did a full reset. Now it seems even faster
then with the older os.

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obelix
Do you mean a restore and reinstall all your apps?

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berryg
Performance is indeed bad. I downloaded iBook. It takes about a minute till
the first page of Winnie the Pooh is shown. Flipping through the pages is
slow.

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tjmc
Anyone noticed any changes regarding signal strength or reception for better
or worse with iOS4? When I upgraded to OS3.1 and I went somewhere without
coverage, my 3GS sometimes refused to come back from "No Service" until I
either did a cold reboot or switched in and out of Airplane Mode. Then it
would work fine again, so I suspect it was a software issue and not the
network (Vodafone in Perth, Australia).

Has this happened to anyone else here and have you noticed any change in iOS4?

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studioprisoner
I haven't had any issues yet. I have a 3G and it seems to be running great. I
just have to update some apps that have an update in the app store and I
should be right.

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ZeroGravitas
I think I'll wait for 4.1 in the fall. If they couldn't spare the engineering
time to get their 2nd flagship product up to speed with iOS 4 for the iPhone 4
launch, then you can imagine them de-prioritizing the no longer for sale
iPhone 3G too.

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Manci5
I think my iPhone 3G goes super fast with iOS4!! Rolando 2 goes Like crazy,
its 2x faster (some bug idk), Safari goes faster and Apps load slightly
faster! I don't understand how this happens, but it's way better!

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there
now to see how many people will downgrade to ios 3 instead of being persuaded
to upgrade to the iphone 4...

~~~
samsonasu
None. This Guy was literally "thanking the apple gods" for selling him a new
phone after basically bricking his old one.

Apple has never cared about supporting old hardware and they never will as
long as people are falling over themselves to shell out every other year.

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ignu
i just did speed tests with my coworkers 3GS running 3 and my 3Gs running 4
and camera, settings all were a lot faster with iOS4

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sigzero
I have the same experience with my 3G(S). It is speedier and snappier. I like
the experience a lot more now as well.

