gdgt

Try the fix I noted above. It's been a couple days since I did it and my 3G is running a lot better. While not perfect, it's almost night & day in terms of an experience.

Do a restore *without* letting iTunes restore you iPhone backup. You have to manually click "set-up new phone/user" during the process. It's a pain, but worked for me.

I actually did a Google search and found a recommendation to do a restore WITHOUT letting iTunes restore you backup. You have to manually click "set-up new phone/user" during the process. I let it do so while I was out running some errands and will report back when I know if this works.

Ok it's finished. The phone does seem a little more snappy and a lot of the sluggishness is gone. I wouldn't call it smooth, but there is an improvement.

I still have a lot of settings I need to enter into the phone again, but I knew this was coming when I didn't do a full restore. What's interesting is I think it freed up a little space compared to what I had before. Just under a gig or so. There might have been some duplicate files here or there on the phone. My only disclaimer on this point would be that I am not 100% sure I set it to sync everything I was before I did the restore. So take this worth a grain of salt.

I'm glad I did this as the phone was becoming unusable. I don't know why, but iPhones seem to become more sluggish over time. I also suspect that Apple is not optimizing for their older phones as well as they are for the new ones.

Sorry you're not having a great experience with it, but that will always be the case with older hardware. A newer OS will never run as good on older hardware as on the new hardware... try running Windows 7 on a computer you bought several years ago... It will work, but will not provide the best experience. The same holds true with mobile OSs. The new OS is designed to take advantage of newer and more powerful hardware to allow you to do more or to do things in a more visually appealing way.

This is why Apple supports older devices with this cycle:

-Newest iPhone model - released with newest OS and provides best experience
-One year old model - will fully support the new OS, but might not be as good an experience
-Two year old model - will support some, but not all features of new OS
-Three year old model - newest os not supported

I actually have some fundamental disagreements with what you are saying Npbeers...

1. Windows 7 actually runs well on older hardware. Better then Vista did, that's for sure. I have heard of people running it on some fairly outdated computers with success.

2. iOS 4 is not a "new" OS from the ground up like Windows 7 was to lets say XP. They didn't add that many new features to it and the underline architecture has not changed that much.

3. Apple is already limiting the new features on my 3G that could impact performance. I don't get multitasking and I can't do the background wallpaper on the home screen. I get folders, iAds and a bunch of the other small tweaks. Nothing that should prevent the OS from running as smoothly as it did on earlier versions of iOS.

4. Apple has always used the fact that they will let older hardware run their newer mobile OS as a selling point. Because of this it is not unreasonable to expect them to optimize and de-bug it for a two year old phone as well as they have for the newer hardware.

I'm just saying that newer OSs (whether they are complete rebuilds or not) will always be designed to take full advantage of the best hardware available. Backwards compatibility is needed to a certain extent to keep customers happy, but the experience will never be quite as good. It's simply how technology progresses. An iPhone 3G with a 412 MHz processor and 128 MB of RAM will simply never do as good a job running software designed for a device 1 GHz processor and 512 MB of RAM. You might, as we and our wallets always do, wish this were not so, but it's an undeniable fact.

Well either way, the iPod app on my 3g now takes literally 30 seconds to "load", and then crashes. And this is right after I reset the phone, without opening any other apps. What has changed in the music app? We can now name our on-the-go playlists. Are you saying that it loads this slowly because they didn't optimize this small feature? It's hard to believe that. I'm starting to believe lately that Apple screws anyone who doesn't immediately purchase a new product when it is released. Well, and they screw early adopters too. Yikes.

I'm not a programmer, but I would be willing to bet even small changes to parts of an OS can effect performance without optimization. I know there are people who think that Apple slows older hardware on purpose, but I think it's more of a case that they simply don't spend as much time optimizing.

Anyway's FoxyNinja you should try my fix above. My 3G is running a lot better now with iOS 4. Might fix your problems too. Send me a message if you have any Q's on what I did.