So, like a lot of other folks, I installed iOS 4 on my iPhone 3G yesterday. First off, I have to say, if you haven’t done this yet, and you own an iPhone 3G, make sure you have A LOT of time to do the upgrade. It took me 3+ hours to do the upgrade. I have heard that iPhone 3GS’s take much less time to upgrade. I’m guessing that the slower processor of the 3G is the biggest reason for the slow upgrade.
That said, my upgrade went relatively smoothly. There was an issue with the images that were “restored” to my phone after the upgrade. My iPhone wallpaper album had images that were much smaller than they were on my computer. Like half res, so a 320×480 image seemed to be 160×240 at best. After I sync’ed the phone again did I see my photos back to the resolution that they were before.
So the upgrade process starts by downloading the new OS then backing up your phone. This backup process took way longer than it usually does. Almost a full hour. It then reset the phone back to factory settings and installed the new OS. This seems different than previous major version upgrades, but I really don’t remember the 2.x to 3.0 upgrade.
Then the phone restored the data (30-45 minutes) and then restored all the applications that were on the phone (30-45 minutes), finally the photos and other things (about 30 minutes).
After that, I would have thought that the upgrade was finished. However, as I said earlier, when I sync’ed the phone later, it told me that it was “resizing photos” which is something it does when first adding photos to an iPhone/iPod touch/iPad. It then synced the photos to the phone and I had all my photos back to the resolution they should have been. Why it restored the photos that were “backed up” at a lower resolution than they were stored on the phone is a mystery to me.
I have to say that I’m very disappointed in iOS 4 with a 3G. I don’t see any reason why Apple didn’t allow users to have background images in the home screens like the 3GS, iPhone 4 and iPad. I get the feeling that Apple is really pushing its patrons to upgrade to the new iPhone 4.
Update: AppAdvice.com has a piece that has someone emailing Steve Jobs asking why no home screen wallpaper. The response was:
The icon animation with backgrounds didn’t perform well enough.
That’s good enough for me. I really like that Apple really takes care to make sure the users experience with their devices is pretty much perfect.
The one thing that does work very well is Folders. I had a full 11 pages of apps on my iPhone and now I only have about 7 with lots of empty spaces on the pages still. I haven’t really organized the folders yet. I just grouped all my games into folders and some other apps that go together into folders. I am really loving Folders.
The only major drawback to folders is a couple of extra taps to launch an app, but I can live with that in order to get a few more apps installed on my phone.
The unified email inbox is also a wonderful thing. Now that I have moved to Gmail for all my domains email, I have a few that I have to check. Having all my email go into a single inbox is perfect. Threaded messages are also quite nice and useful.
Those are really the only two features I have found that are truly new to iPhone 3G users. You can have the Home button do a few more things than with prior version of the OS. No 5x digital zoom (not that it’s missed really, digital zooms usually suck and on a 3G it really sucks). Sure, there are some improvements to the Apple default apps. iBooks is actually pretty nice on the iPhone and works pretty much just like the iPad counterpart.
The lack of multi-tasking is really missed. I suspect it’s just really difficult since the iPhone 3G only has 128MB’s of executable RAM. Still…
The lack of new features on iPhone 3G iOS 4 isn’t the reason I am upgrading to an iPhone 4 later this year. It’s mainly because I want to get a phone that is faster than most Netbook computers. 
That and have a true video camera always on hand as well as a kick-ass camera. FaceTime just isn’t going to be practical since it only works with other iPhone 4′s. Hopefully Skype will have video chatting in a later release that will work with computers as well as other mobile devices.
So, my final thought is that if you don’t really need iOS 4, (Folders), and have an iPhone 3G, don’t bother upgrading. Otherwise, if you are planning on getting the new iPhone 4 or have a 3GS, then it’s probably worth it.
Oh, I almost forgot, as was known because Steve told us so, iPad’s don’t get updated yet to iOS 4. Hopefully “early” fall will see that update.
