Within days of my putting on iOS 4.0.1 onto my iPhone 3G, the phone started to crawl. Playing music was painful and using applications became a joke. For example doing anything with Camera+ (a very cool photo app BTW) would take minutes when it used to take seconds. Downgrading to 3.1.3 caused my apps to become responsive.
Last Wednesday I installed iOS 4.0.1 and did not restore my backup. I factory defaulted the phone and when it was plugged into my PC, I treated it like a new phone. This meant I had to copy my song library, apps, etc. from scratch. I recovered my contacts easily enough because I use Google Sync.
Next up I went into my iPhone’s settings app and turned off all Spotlight searches. If I could disable Spotlight 100% I would do it; this is one feature that Apple should have left on design table.
I also jailbreak’ed my iPhone and made the following changes:
- I turned on SpringBoard’s image backgrounds.
- I enabled Multitasking.
- I turned on the percentage battery meter option.
Why not? I ended up turning off multitasking because while everything ran acceptably, when you are out of memory, apps would not start properly. The background image is not as fast as a 3GS but still usable and makes the phone more attractive.
To make my modifications, I installed iPhone Explorer on my PC to copy and modify a .plist file manually. This is not not the safest way to do it. In the Cydia app store is an application called Features (for iPhone 3G) that installs in WinterBoard.
So far the performance has been alright. If/when I get an iPhone 4 the display and speed will probably startle me.