iPhone 3G iOS 4 Upgrade Aftermath

Yesterday, like a good lem­ming I updated my iPhone 3G to the newly released and re-named iOS 4. For what­ever odd rea­son it seems that you peo­ple are inter­ested in my opin­ion on such things — which frankly is more than a lit­tle dis­turb­ing — so here are my ran­dom thoughts on the update process itself, as well as run­ning a nearly 2 year old phone with Apple’s newest oper­at­ing sys­tem. Note that this will not be any­thing approx­i­mat­ing a full review of iOS 4. If you want some­thing like that I highly sug­gest that you read the excel­lent review from Ars Technica.

The Update Process

First some notes on the update process itself. I’m happy to report that, unlike many who were upgrad­ing an iPhone 3G, my upgrade went rel­a­tively quickly. All told it was prob­a­bly an hour start-to-finish, but that doesn’t count time spent sit­ting idle wait­ing for my input while I bug­gered off for din­ner. That said, the iPhone upgrade process as man­aged though iTunes is fuck­ing inter­minable. I’m not yet one of those peo­ple who call for the split­ting of iTunes into mul­ti­ple seper­ate appli­ca­tions, but I’m get­ting there.

During the entire process, which con­sists of numer­ous dis­tinct steps such as down­load­ing the update, back­ing up the iPhone, installing the update and restor­ing the iPhone the user is pre­sented with a seem­ingly end­less string of modal dia­log boxes that pre­vent iTunes from being used for any­thing else. Additionally annoy­ing is the stream of alert beeps that are trig­gered when­ever you attempt to switch to iTunes to mon­i­tor its progress then switch away to get some­thing done.

I do under­stand the rea­son for lock­ing iTunes dur­ing the upgrade process. When you are screw­ing around with things like a cell phone’s firmware and base­band soft­ware, inter­rup­tions can be cat­a­strophic. With that in mind, a much bet­ter solu­tion would be for iTunes to spawn a sep­a­rate appli­ca­tion devoted to the update itself. This is how the Mac OS already han­dles it’s Software Update mech­a­nism, and it’s a much bet­ter model.

iOS 4

So, what’s new in iOS 4? Well, if you’re using an iPhone 3G, pre­cious lit­tle and quite a bit — depend­ing on what you were look­ing for. It has to be under­stood that the iPhone 3G is the absolute old­est iPhone that iOS 4 is sup­ported on, and thus can uti­lize the least amount of new fea­ture. The inter­est­ing part is which fea­tures the 3G can lever­age, and which it cannot.

What doesn’t work

It should come as no sur­prise that some of the most talked about fea­tures of iOS 4 such as mul­ti­task­ing and blue­tooth key­board sup­port are not sup­ported. What hon­estly sur­prised me is that set­ting a desk­top pic­ture is also not sup­ported. Apparently a Jizzmodo reader emailed Steve Jobs about this (I’m fol­low­ing my no links to Jizzmodo pol­icy here) and was informed that the fea­ture was no included because it adversely impacted per­for­mance. It would appear that the spec­u­la­tion by Dennis in a com­ment to my bitch­ing about this yes­ter­day might well be correct.

What works

Again, I’m not going to do a full review of the OS here; these are just some of my obser­va­tions on what I’ve seen in a day of play­ing around.

The first new fea­ture that inter­ested me is Folders. You can get a bet­ter descrip­tion of how fold­ers work in the Ars review, but my ver­dict is: “where have you been all my life.” After a few min­utes of pokery-jiggery I’ve con­sol­i­dated my home screen from eight badly main­tained screens to three screens. There would be only one screen, but I want to keep games and the apps I don’t use in their own ghettos.

The next fea­ture that jumped out at me is the uni­fied Inbox in Mobile Mail. To be hon­est, I don’t like it. I have three accounts set up in Mobile Mail: Mobile Me, my domain emails and my work Exchange server. While I’m quite happy to co-mingle my per­sonal and domain emails, I have no desire to see my work email unless I specif­i­cally choose to. For me, a sys­tem of smart fold­ers such as exist in the MacOS Mail appli­ca­tion would be a bet­ter fit. For now I’ll be stick­ing with sep­a­rate inboxes. What I do like about the new Mobile Mail is mes­sage thread­ing. The bulk of my email is mail­ing lists, so this will come in very handy.

The Calendar app now allows you to pick and choose mul­ti­ple cal­en­dars for dis­play, which is a wel­come addi­tion. I have sev­eral cal­en­dars on my desk­top Mac that, while Mobile Me insists on sync­ing them, I have no desire to see on my iPhone.

The Photos app now sup­ports Places and Faces imported from iPhoto. Huzzah, I guess. I’ve never seen the util­ity of the iPhone as a pic­ture viewer. Additionally, the Camera app sup­ports dig­i­tal zoom. Yay.

The last fea­ture that I wanted to com­ment on isn’t actu­ally a fea­ture of iOS 4, it’s an appli­ca­tion that requires the update, namely iBooks. I used to use my iPhone as my pri­mary eReader via the Kindle and Barnes and Noble appli­ca­tions. Since embrac­ing the iPad lifestyle I can’t see using the iPhone as my pri­mary reader again, but it is great for sit­u­a­tions where I can’t bring the iPad (work crap­per, I’m look­ing at you). The fact that iBooks on both devices can sync book­marks is gravy.

Performance and Overall Impression

There have been many com­plaints on the intar­tubes that iOS 4 on the iPhone 3G per­forms badly. To be hon­est, I’m not see­ing a huge degra­da­tion in per­for­mance, but my iPhone has been drag­ging for some time. For a user who intends to con­tinue using an iPhone 3G for some time, I would seri­ously con­sider whether any per­for­mance loss is worth the lim­ited new fea­tures. On the other hand, if you are only using the iPhone until you can upgrade your hard­ware (LET ME ORDER MY WHITE iPHONE YOU PRICKS!) then I say upgrade away.