iPhone 3G Users: Quit Complaining
By David Worthington | Tuesday, June 22, 2010 at 2:01 pm
Sometimes it is difficult to discern whether complaints are coming from actual users or are a product of blogosphere hyperbole, as was the case yesterday when the iPhone 3G didn’t get all of the new features available in the iOS 4 upgrade. One thing is for certain: had those customers received those features there would be real cause for complaints.
iOS4 performance on the iPhone 3G is a mixed bag, according to tests compiled since its release. That’s without all of the bells and whistles such as backgrounds and multitasking. When a Gizmodo reader e-mailed Apple CEO Steve Jobs asking why backgrounds were not included in the update, Jobs replied, “The icon animation with backgrounds didn’t perform well enough.” If that’s the case, just imagine the performance hit that multitasking would take.
The iPhone 3G’s hardware is substantially less powerful than the 3GS and iPhone 4. Had Apple chosen not to omit those features, many more people would be complaining about bad performance and being “forced to upgrade.” A phone should be snappy– not slow like an old PC overloaded with new software. Anything less is unacceptable. Apple did the correct thing by its customers.
Were many people complaining about not having wallpaper before yesterday’s free upgrade? Absolutely not. If you liked your iPhone yesterday, there are no fewer reasons to enjoy it today. If you don’t like your phone, sell it, and find something that better meets your requirements. You can get good money for it on trade-in sites.
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June 22nd, 2010 at 2:18 pm
Having the option of multi-tasking or custom background should be the users. If it causes the device to be slow, the user can decide not to use multi-tasking or not use custom backgrounds. Truth is, Apple leaves out key features to “encourage/force” upgrades, i.e., lack of a camera on the iPod Touch, lack of multi-tasking on iPhone 3g and iPod Touch 2g. Installing iPod Touch OS 3.1.x killed the Wi-fi on my 1st gen iPod Touch. Google “OS 3.1 killed wi-fi”.
IMO, Apple products are designed for obsolescence after two product updates or 3 years, whichever comes first. Did Apple pay for this article?
June 22nd, 2010 at 2:25 pm
Apple can decide what software it loads on its products. If people don’t like it they can buy something else (uh oh… it’s going to stop the check now!)
My G4 Mac laptop is over 5 years old, has had more than two updates, and runs great. You are entitled to your opinion, but it doesn’t mesh with my experience.
June 22nd, 2010 at 2:25 pm
How about us dopes with iPhone 2Gs, which are essentially the same processing power as the 3G but get left out in the cold?
June 22nd, 2010 at 2:27 pm
Guys, phones in general are built for a two year lifespan. Apple is doing nothing different than what other manufacturers have been doing for many years now. The 3G is now a two year old phone, and the 2G three. Time to upgrade folks 🙂
June 22nd, 2010 at 2:27 pm
No offense, but that’s a pretty broad brush you’re using to paint the universe of iPhone 3G users. We don’t all need to be scolded, which looks to be the goal of this post.
I know that it was well-communicated that multitasking would not be enabled on the iPhone 3G/iOS4 because of performance/processor concerns, and that’s something that I certainly understand.
However, I’m not sure that it was as commonly known that backgrounds would not be supported. Well, at least it wasn’t known to me until today.
The absence of that capability is just a nit to me, though I will most certainly be glad to take advantage of it when I upgrade to the iPhone 4 later this summer.
Thanks for the opportunity to share my views; your post isn’t really as inflammatory as your headline, so I guess you succeeded in getting attention for the article.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. 🙂
June 22nd, 2010 at 2:34 pm
I’m an iPhone 3G user.
June 22nd, 2010 at 2:37 pm
@Ed good point. I’ve owned my iPhone 3D longer than any phone I’d have since I was a student. It’s received MANY new software updates, and I plan on keeping it into the fall before upgrading. I could keep it even longer if I wanted to, because it does what I need. It’s not suddenly useless because it can’t multitask – it never could!!!! send in the wambaulance.
June 22nd, 2010 at 3:31 pm
1 – I don’t know if I would call custom background a bell or whistle. Seems kind of standard (apparently not).
2 – The test you linked is not accurate at all. It just isn’t. I tested it myself, and you can read in the comments following the video you linked (the video is available all over the internet) that other people are not experiencing such decrease in speed upon the iOS4 upgrade. Ex: http://9to5mac.com/node/18378
3 – The bit about being forced to upgrade is silly and out of touch. If Apple chose to include those features (assuming they didn’t work well) people would only complain that they don’t work well! I don’t think users would feel they were forced to download a free upgrade. They would only feel that they were being forced to pay for a hardware upgrade, which is the same way they feel now. The free OS is ultimately irrelevant, it’s the features which, as we’ve seen, are a combination of hardware AND software that users feel like they’re being cheated out of.
4 – People weren’t complaining about the wallpaper before because anyone who wanted it bad enough jailbroke their iPhone, and it worked fine. Now Apple tells us it doesn’t work. Well…it does…and it’s confusing to me how anyone could not understand the frustration felt as a result of this.
June 22nd, 2010 at 5:09 pm
I don’t understand apples resentment or reasoning in locking out multitsking. Backgrounding works great on a jailbroken iphone 3g. The idea that the 3g can’t handle it is wrong, it can, they just don’t want it to.
June 23rd, 2010 at 7:57 am
Keiran – Apple has certain standards for performance that they hold their devices to… Just because backgrounding “works great on a jailbroken iphone 3g” in your opinion doesn’t mean that it meets Apple’s high standards. I know that my own 3G, when I had it jailbroken, was quite noticeably sluggish even without backgrounding turned on – I jailbroke it specifically for the sbsettings app only, and that was enough of a slowdown for me to eventually give up on jailbreaking and go back to normal.
As far as complaints about missing features go – the only one that makes absolutely NO sense to me for being left out of the 3G is screen orientation locking. I can’t imagine any possible reason for them to have left that feature out.
June 25th, 2010 at 6:12 pm
I’m complaining because my 3G is now slow! Terribly slow! And from Apple, that’s not good enough.
Just like you say, a phone should be fast and snappy, not sluggish and jittery. Very unhappy with my iPhone now… but I’m hoping Apple come out with a quick fix… please Apple!
July 6th, 2010 at 2:41 pm
I have an iphone 3GS. My 3 year old goes through pretty much all the games over a weekend. I did notice a performance hit and also my mail did not fetch since yesterday. Also noticed my camera taking longer than usual to start recording. When my buddy mentioned to me about the multitasking feature and how to close them out, I had over 50 apps in the multitask bar. When I closed out all 50, my phone went back to normal.
There should be a way that we can users can limit the amount of apps running concurrently. I now have some weekly maintenance to do until the 4GS comes out.
July 10th, 2010 at 8:56 am
As people have claimed. I have the 3G, I updated only to get the "folders", but my phone keeps dropping calls and it's now slower than ever, applications crash all the time. If that was good enough for them, well, thanks.
To Ed Oswald, I have an HTC Wizard (8125 Cingular), that still keeps up with long charges, WiFi, and doesn't drop the calls. It has a 200MHz processor and runs multitasking on WM5. It's more than 4 years old (almost five), what is it with a device that properly works from the beginning to the end of its lifespan, instead of being crippled with periodic updates?
August 11th, 2011 at 9:09 am
the iPhone is a work in progress, complaining means that there is one more thing that Apple would actually change for the next version
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