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Comment by siculars | Hacker News Reader

Any word on how this functions on older 3g and 3gs hardware? I've been waiting to upgrade my 3g due to reports of severe slowness on 3g+ios4.

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3GS will have no more problems than previously (== no problems), 3G will be no better: iOS4 is apparently significantly more memory hungry than iPhoneOS 3, which leaves the RAM-constrained 3G in a bad position. Many applications (including built-in) have come to be quite slow and laggy, and RAM-intensive applications (e.g. big games) have generally taken a turn for the worse.

4.0.1 doesn't look like it has much improved on the situation (apart from the psychological trick of "new release = faster", and the fact that freshly booted phones are less memory-constrained since Mail and Saf's background processes aren't running yet) so far.

Unless you need iOS4 features (or iOS4-only apps), i would recommend staying on 3.1

I upgraded my 3g to iOS4 and its barely functioning, constant hangups - do not recommend upgrade. Very highly recommend the iPhone 4 though.

Same situation on my 3g. Apple probably shouldn't have even pushed this update to 3g models, to be honest.

It made my 3G nearly unusable too, sometimes taking a minute to open the SMS app, or contacts. Typing was very difficult because it would hang once pressing a character.

3G is unusable with iOS4 for me too. Only way to keep using it is to close all open Safari tabs and occasionally do the following: hold sleep button until power off screen (swipe) then hold home button until home screen returns.

I have also experienced extreme slowness with ios 4 on 3G. Clearing the safari cache and restarting made things quite a bit faster - but still slower than ios 3.

I remember some reports on Twitter saying a backup-and-restore helped with 3G slowness on iOS4. Worth a shot?

Didn't work for me.

Reports show that it is no faster, unfortunately. If you haven't seen it, here's a parody of the original iPhone commercial showing a 3G on iOS4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pdk2cJpSXLg

That's a funny commercial, but maybe he should try a full settings restore (factory defaults, no restore of backup) of iOS 4 before giving up. It looks like he had a large music library, 6 open tabs in Safari, and a ton of email saved to the phone. Start with a fresh phone and re-load it and see if the problem clears up. It's most likely a remnant of a huge Safari cache, iPod library, and Mail.app account that is performing badly after the upgrade.

It's pretty shitty to have to wipe out your data just to get it to function like it should.

It might be shitty, but a good analogy is if you bought a PC with Windows 95 on it, would you expect to upgrade to Windows 98, keeping all your apps and data, then upgrade to Windows XP again with the same apps and data, and have everything work fine? You've gone 3 generations of software with the same data. Those SQLite tables (CoreData) probably need to be optimized in some way, and the easiest way to do that is start fresh and do a new sync. Or just live with your slow phone; either way I could care less.

What would you lose? Refraining from restoring from backup does not mean that you can't still sync your data in iTunes afterward.

I didn't say you would loose your data. I said wipe out your data with the implication of it being wiped off your phone.

That being said, maybe my understanding of how iPhone updates happen is a little flawed. I'm not too clear if it wipes your phone clean and then resyncs everything after the update. Or does it keep your data on the phone during the upgrade?

Do you have an iPhone 3G with iOS 4.0?

iOS 4 is significantly worse on my 3G. The phone needs to be restarted a couple times per day. Mail and the SMS app crash pretty regularly and everything is significantly slower to respond. I've helped a few friends downgrade to 3.1.3 since they were having similar problems on the 3G. iOS 4 seems to work just fine on the 3GS however.

On my jailbroken 3G, I use the SBSettings processes option to forcefully kill off processes running in the background (yes, I foolishly enabled multitasking, thinking it would behave sanely; Backgrounder, another jailbroken app, provided this kind of functionality previously, and did so very well) and to force the garbage collector to run; the latter can help significantly.

Overall, 4.0 was not a good upgrade for the 3G.

I used similar tools on my 3G with the 3.x series but haven't taken the time or bothered with jailbreaking iOS4. I figured there would be updates relatively soon and wanted to at least give it some time and see how things ran stock. So far I've been really disappointed and I have to agree, 4.0 is not a good upgrade for the 3G. I have to wonder if perhaps Apple should have just made the upgrade unavailable for 3G owners like they've done with the previous generations of the touch.

OMG now I know i'm not alone! I also have a 3G and installed the iOS 4.0 update and this video depicts exactly what it's been like for me. Lots of strange hangs in many of the apps I use regularly. It's become a much more frustrating experience using it. You press a navbar button and it just sits there, doing nothing, for example.

The 3G was barely usable with OS3. OS4 is embarrassingly slow. Don't upgrade unless you can deal with 30+ second waits to launch apps and continual hitching.

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