Q: Iphone 3G slow after update to IOS4

The pleasure of using my iPhone is being devastated the disastrous lag time. Could Apple upgrade a custom fix for the older phones. I have time for a shave and shower between app changes. Today my phone rang and the slide thingy wouldn't answer the call (kept sliding back?), what made this worse was that it was my wife! Later I tried to blame the phone but she is still under the illusion that Apple products are incapable of such behaviour. Of course she concluded I was lying and really with another woman. I tried to prove it by letting her have a go but when she clicked on recent calls etc, she said nothing happened (I was shaving). This had the reverse effect and she suspected I had locked her out of viewing the details of the other women. I'm having regrets about the OS upgrade and believe that I, my wife and several other women would be a lot happier if things got back to normal.

I reset my 3G to OS 3.1.3 and speed picked backed up. I accidently installed iOS 4.0.1 and now I have the new functionality with the former speed. Hoo ha. Thank you, Jobs!

TomNYC wrote:

Bashing Apple? How exactly am I doing that? I'm simply trying to save people from having to restore, re-install or any of the other time-consuming "tricks" people keep posting here that could potentially brick their phones, because they simply won't work, and any perceived speed increase is either that -- perceived -- or temporary.

Statistically ill founded drivel.

Your phone is like a car where the front wheel fell off. My phone was like a car with no petrol left. You are basically telling people not to fill their tanks with petrol, because that does not make your car move.

I have had more problems with Apple in the last 18 months than I have had in the last 2 decades as a loyal customer. I won't go into details, that's for other forums - let's just say with problems with Airport /Tiger incompatibility to iWeb/MobileMe incompatibility, defective hardware brand new out of the box, to lousy cocky attitudes from Applecare phone help and instore Geniuses (I've just figured the term 'Genius' was a statement of self-depricating sarcasm on Apple's part, I didn't get the joke). Don't even get me stared on what that snarling beast Snow Leopard did to my printer, fonts and colour profiles.

I think the word we need to deal with is denial. Every issue I have had to deal with of late has seemed to be an 'isolated incident that was unique to me'.

This iPhone 3G/iOS4 incompatibility is just the same deal.

Apart from the huge cost and inconvenience to us as consumers, there are some pretty massive green issues here. We know that Apple as any other company needs a strategy to refresh it's market. But if that strategy, either knowingly or otherwise, results in perfectly good, well-made, fully operational, relatively new products become obsolete overnight .... then to me something is wrong. The production of our 3G phones came at a cost to the environment. The eventual disposal of our 3G phones will come at a cost to the environment.

Carbon footprint. iPhone 3G. IOS4. Landfill. I think these are pretty important keywords in the argument too.

P.S.

The iOS4.1 made no difference - kind of hoped they may have sneaked in a fix in there without shouting too much about it in the light of all the deathgrip stuff. But no, nothing.

Drivel or not, I've done several of the things recommended on here (hold both buttons until it shuts off, restart, repeat; backup and restore; cleaned out caches, cookies, IM convos; freed up ram... etc.) and every time things get better for a short while, then everything slows down again.

For comparison's sake, my wife has a 3gs which is running the same iOS4 update. Her iPhone is speedy and responsive and I haven't had to do a thing to it.

16Gb 3g

theLarch wrote:
Drivel or not, I've done several of the things recommended on here (hold both buttons until it shuts off, restart, repeat; backup and restore; cleaned out caches, cookies, IM convos; freed up ram... etc.) and every time things get better for a short while, then everything slows down again.

For comparison's sake, my wife has a 3gs which is running the same iOS4 update. Her iPhone is speedy and responsive and I haven't had to do a thing to it.

16Gb 3g

This does sound as if the root cause is the limited amount of RAM (128 MB) in the 3G, as has been suggested elsewhere on this thread. After a forced-reboot, the 3G starts up with some (small) amount of free space, but as you use it, the RAM gets filled up with caches, tables, etc, and gets fragmented as well. I've been checking my RAM usage (using AppBox Pro) - right after a forced-reboot, RAM usage is around 82%. After a day or two, it's crept up to 95% or more.

You might want to obtain a memory monitoring app (there are several available), install it on both your and your wife's phones, and see if you can correlate the flaky behavior on your 3G with exhaustion of free RAM. I suspect you'll consistently see a lot more free RAM on the 3GS.

Nicely said MacOpH

I mentioned in another thread that I always used to give my old phone to my nephew. But I don't think he's really going to be all that happy with me when I give him a phone that has countless basic operation issues.
Landfill seems to be where Apple wants it.

i am having all osrts of problems since i did the update but justthought it was phone until i see the other people having trouble here.

my signal strength seems to have dropped,almost all my calls go directly to message bank,its almost impossible to swipe the unlock key when a call comes in,apps are slow as is every other app like mail and safari

i have reset and re synced and still no good and i hate to say it but this might do me with Iphones and i was thinking of getting the new phone until its ugly problems reared its head and i had heap sof problems when i first bought the Iphone 2 years ago and now the probelms are as bad all over again.

HELP.....APPLE.......HELP PLEASE!!!!

I concur with everyone on here. My 3g is a complete dud now. I even swapped it out at Apple for a brand new handset thinking it was the hardware. The brand new handset wasn't running iOS4, which itself should have been a dead giveaway. Immediately after updating to iOS4 it's back to apps crashing & everything else that people are complaining of. I'd go back to Apple & swap again, only my last swap was the very last day of Applecare.
Hopefully there'll be a fix soon.

onw123 wrote:
I even swapped it out at Apple for a brand new handset thinking it was the hardware. The brand new handset wasn't running iOS4, which itself should have been a dead giveaway. Immediately after updating to iOS4 it's back to apps crashing & everything else that people are complaining of. I'd go back to Apple & swap again, only my last swap was the very last day of Applecare.

Did you restore your old backup to the new phone, or did you set it up as a new phone?

Did you check with Applecare about yet another replacement? I thought they could be flexible, and that new hardware prolonged the deal somehow.

Discovered something weird. Removed all my apps out of the "folders" and did a double reset and it seems to be working better. Not sure if the reset did the trick (time will tell) or removing the apps out of the folders did. But worth a shot.

Good Luck.

onw123, your new 3g "should" have a 30 (or 90) day warranty, regardless of the AppleCare expiring. Mine did when I traded it in and my original 3g wasn't even under AppleCare...they just did it because I also had an $800 repair coming down the line on my iMac. I would think they could work something out for you.

There are also instructions on how to downgrade your iPhone out there as well.

http://www.macworld.com/article/152428/2010/06/rollback_iphone3g.html

Carlos Guerrero wrote:
Discovered something weird. Removed all my apps out of the "folders" and did a double reset and it seems to be working better.

Yes, there have a been a few reports that folders might slow things down. I have a feeling (guess) that the folders themselves do not slow things down, but that removing them refreshes something. You could try adding the folders back, and see if the performance slows down again. My guess is that it will not. I have plenty of folders myself and consider the current performance acceptable.

In my case, I noticed performance improvements after updating to 4.0.1.

I had also after the update to 4.0 but before the update to 4.0.1, restored to factory settings and set it up as a new phone. I hesitate to recommend that solution, as one loses all data, and it may not actually be what actually fixed it. It would be great if Apple could come with some official advice here.

Hi,

For those collecting info about iOS 4.0.1 update... For me, iOS 4.0.0 was another catastrophic case of sluggishness with a phone sometimes barely usable.
Since iOS 4.0.1, it has amazingly improved the performance to a similar level as before with OS3! So in my case, I'm totally satisfied and it's a real release.

Now, it seems many are not so lucky, and some even declare there couldn't be any improvement since Apple mentioned only a new way of measuring the phone signal and modified bars for this update... Well, even though I appreciate their effort in finding out the truth, I must disagree for two reasons:
1. it's extremely obvious that for me the phone went from sluggish to a normal speed again (I tried it with many features for several days — and there's no decrease (yet?) in performance since then).
2. OK, Apple has not mentioned this problem as solved in this update... In my opinion, it is quite clear that they don't like to acknowledge or recognize that mistake they made, so no wonder if they hurried to solve it via updates without talking about it. What I think is that these updates also contain unofficial (hidden) features like these.
I'm really sorry about those who don't see any improvement, but for the other desperate cases, this update (or maybe another future one) might work... Don't forget that most of satisfied people don't report in such forums and that statistically it might be a lot more on the positive side.

Good luck!