1st Impressions

The iOS 4 update was just released and I installed it on my iPhone 3G (now for sale) to check it out.  Give yourself plenty of time for this one.  The  update takes a lot longer than a traditional backup.  The installation warned that it might take up to an hour, and they mean it.  The backup alone took 40-minutes.  It then went though a restore, a verification of the restore, and then a restore of the firmware.  This process took another 8 minutes.  Once the iPhone re-started (another couple of minutes), it had to restore everything from the backup.  One odd thing to note is that this restore message was displayed on some water-drop wallpaper that the 3G is allegedly incapable of. LOL

After the 5-minute restore of whatever it was doing, it then reset yet again and started in on the restore of all my installed apps.  I was 66-minutes into the process when the first of two post-app-install reset occurred and still had another restore of applications process to go through.  This second “Restoring iPhone Applications” process took considerably longer.  I was an hour and forty minutes into the process before that completed and it started in on my music and videos.  With about 6GB of audio books on my phone, that took a while as well.  All told, the entire process took much closer to two hours (actually over by 15 minutes) than the one hour I was warned to expect.  And, once the process finished, it did not re-connect to iTunes, the phone locked up, and I had to manually reset it.

Out of the box, I have to say that I am disappointed (but not surprised) that Apple refused to allow 3G owners to have access to wallpaper and “multitasking”.  I know the hardware is capable of it because the jailbroken phones do it.  Sure, there is a performance issue, but that should be the decision of the user, not Cupertino.  Saying that the hardware is incapable of something while it can be demonstrated to work is inexcusable.  It’s a small issue though as my days with this unit are coming to a close.

Of the other options, there are some that will have no impact on me whatsoever.  For example, the mail improvement won’t really effect me as I only use one mailbox and use a third-party Gmail app for that.  Support for iBooks is another thing that I won’t use.  I just don’t read much any more.  If they were to add better support for Audible books, that would be a different story.  While I like the ability to create playlists, the audio content on my iPhone is basically books and doesn’t change a lot so I won’t be using that too much.

What I do really like is the folders, options to search the web or Wiki from the search screen, character counts on text messages (if I can figure out how to get them to show up even when the settings option is checked), and persistent wifi connections.  The spell-check is a great improvement as well.  I can’t tell you how many times I hit one of the wrong keys in the keyboard sequence of “UIO” on the keyboard.  ”List” more often than not becomes “Lust” or “Lost” though, so the spell-check isn’t going to pick that up.  I’m also looking forward to checking out the camera options.  I can also see myself using the new ability to gift an app.  Any takers?

Here are the full features list from the Read-Me that is part of the install: