The story so far...

In a previous post (poor performance of iphone 3G under OS4.0), I described how the latest iphone OS4.0 software upgrade effectively killed my iphone 3G.

To cut to the chase, I have now reloaded the previous OS (3.1.3) into the phone, and things are working nicely again. btw: this is not a task for the inexperienced!

My strong recommendation is that if you have a 3G, do not proceed with the software upgrade to OS4.0.

Basically, after doing the upgrade, the phone ran extremely slowly. I was hugely disappointed with this result, and even returned the unit to Apple, who were unable (or unwilling?) to revert the unit to the previous version.

Here's my take on the saga:

It's very much like the early days with the '386 PC. The machine ran "ok" with windows98, but then later versions of the OS came out, each one with newer, better features - but each time they required a little more performance out of the machine.

Finally, when you were running the latest version, and your '386 machine had slowed to a crawl, you decided it was time to upgrade, and you went out and bought a bright shiny Pentium-based machine... and the cycle commenced again...

Well, it's the same in this case. I'm sure that the just-released iphone4 has ample power to run the new OS, but the old iphone 3G simply doesn't have enough grunt. In addition to the general slowness experienced with 4.0, I had these problems as well:

• Tomtom navigation app would take forever to respond to keypresses.
• Tomtom navigation app would lose its coordinates when you turned a corner, and would take up to 30 seconds to re-acquire.
• Ipod functionality impaired - frequent audio glitches occurred during playback
• Bluetooth connection frequently lost with connected devices
• loss of any realism in game-play ("angry birds", "real racing" etc) because of the stuttering performance - even Flight Control was pausing for breath!

On any device, the operating system should generally not get too much in the way. In this particular case, OS4.0 is so resource-heavy when loaded into the 3G that the machine has very little spare cycles left.

The part of this exercise that causes the most frustration is the lack of a backout plan from Apple for this software upgrade. In most environments where software upgrades are performed, a backout plan is mandatory. Why not in this case? Hmmm?

Sure, I'll eventually upgrade to the iphone 4.0, but in the meantime, my 3G does everything that I require - and I'll be staying on 3.1.3 for now...