My iPhone is a 3G running OS 3.1.2 and it’s jail broken and unlocked. Everything was fine and dandy with it, but I kept hearing about the new OS, iOS 4, and and how it included many little tweaks that would improve my overall experience.
I knew that I wouldn’t be getting the multitasking features and a few other things as I have the older not so snappy hardware, but I thought I’d give it a go all the same. I backed up the phone’s data to iTunes and then hacked a copy of 4.0 and installed it and restored the backup. Doing this, and restoring my carrier and a few other tweaks was a long, but relatively straight forward process.
Now I was up to date. There were many little improvements that I noticed, such as universal spell checking, being able to group app icons into groups or folders, and at last — a character count in messaging. All good.
What wasn’t good was the slow down in responsiveness. Half-second delays had turned into one, or even two second delays; and boy, was it noticeable?
I remembered an article written at the time of the Apple Newton. They talked about how studies had shown that any more than a half-second delay before the software responded in some way, and the user rapidly loses interest. How true it turned out to be for me. I decided to trade the new features to get my half second back and I invoked a disaster recovery restore back to my old OS.
It’s not like Apple to put out OS updates that slow you down — usually it’s the other way, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a faster leaner 4.1 sometime soon. Maybe, just maybe, when that happens I’ll wait for the verdict to come in before making the leap again.
Disclosure Triangle 