Apple just released the GM (Golden Master) candidate for developers. I downloaded and tested the new iOS 4 yesterday on my iPhone 3G 16GB. I skipped the betas as it’s currently my only phone and some of the betas were reported to render the iPhone pretty unstable.
This final release of the new iPhone OS 4 (now called iOS 4 as its range of target devices has been extended to iPhone, iPod and iPad) works fine and stable on my old iPhone 3G. I still can’t record videos and have to pass the multitasking feature due to lack of CPU power.
I won’t go into all the details and features as you can watch them presented in a much more impressive show on Apple’s website.
Installation
You need to download and install the latest Xcode 3.2.3 with iPhone SDK 4 GM and iTunes 9.2 beta (Mac only, no Windows atm) to update your iPhone 3G/3GS or iPod 2nd or 3rd generation. Then you need the appropriate firmware for your device.
After completing the installation just start iTunes while holding the alt-key and restore your device. The whole procedure took about 15 minutes but restoring all my apps and photos took about 45 additional minutes. So after approximately 1h my iPhone was set up with the brand new iOS 4 and all my mails, contacts, photos, apps have been restored.
Review
It’s been 24h since the upgrade and my iPhone 3G hasn’t encountered any problems. I’ve been making calls, sending and receiving SMS and emails and took some pics. Played some games. In total I had to recharge the battery twice in one day and again re-calibrate the battery indicator. The only bad thing is the loss of all my 2300+ saved photos. According to iTunes the photos still reside on the iPhone (used storage) but Camera Roll doesn’t show any old picture. There is still hope that an update or a restore will make the pictures available again.
- Overall performance hasn’t dropped compared to iPhone OS 3, it even feels a bit snappier than before.
- The new unified mailbox is great as I have to deal with several mail accounts.
- Folders now allow me to sort all my 100+ apps into categories and I only have to swipe across 2 spaces at max.
- Most apps work great, but some don’t. (see list below)
- iBooks currently not available for iPhone (iPad only).
- Game Center shows empty T&C when creating an account.
- Location Services can be toggled on/off for each app individually.
- Bluetooth tethering still doesn’t work with my provider.
- Emoji remain available after updgrade.
- Visual Voice Mail stuck with empty message until reboot (lost connection while downloading).
- Battery indicator percentage (show charge % display) still unavailable on iPhone 3G.
- Character counter added for messages.
Some of the apps working as of today’s version:
- Google Earth
- Dropbox
- Air Sharing
- Instapaper
- NAVIGON
- iOutBank Pro
- sipgate
- Skype (gives warning about unsupported OS version)
- Amazon
- ebay
- iSale mobile
- Wikipedia
- Sudoku classic
- sudoku2
- MotionX-Dice
- Convert
- 1Password
- Apple Remote
- Shazam
- WordPress (stuck in top menu once, works after re-entering blogs)
Apps not working since the update:
- SugarSync (hangs when opening any document)
- Evernote (NSURLErrorDomain (-1001) error when viewing content of any note)
- Yammer (crashes when opening an account)
- iAdSense (no network connection error – and yes, I am connected)
Updated apps working again:
- teXXas (v3.5)
Bottom line
Those non-working apps probably will soon be updated and resume functionality. I really hope that the iBooks app for the iPhone will come soon. iTunes tells me that iBooks is needed in order to read the synced books on my iPhone. It presented me a link to iBooks in the App Store but that version would only work for iPads. Now on every sync it gives me a pop-up to add the iBooks app to my iPhone via the Apps tab, but it won’t show up as an available app for iPhones.
Overall I’m very pleased with iOS 4 even though I can’t have the multitasking on my iPhone 3G nor will it be available on iPod 2nd gen.
Links:
yo can have the multitasking with the new redsn0w beta, i did it in my ipod touch 2nd gen
cool, thx m8! damn, my iPhone is a registered dev device, can’t fiddle around with it.
i lost my photos too. i tried restoring again from backup with no luck.
i used a tool: iphone backup extractor , it managed to read the backup file and extract the photos from there (at least you can backup them).
i hope there will be an update for this problem .
nice tip Tapouillo, thx. will give it a try. apparently the restore copied the pics back to the iphone but i can’t see them though they take up a lot of space. PhoneView doesn’t support ios 4 atm
my iphone 3G with iOS 4 doesnt have the photo sort. Do u guys have it? need help.
namestarX@yahoo.com = YM
yes i have events, albums, places and faces in photos on my iphone. but they’re synced from ilife iphoto. so this a mac only feature, too. if you’re on a mac just go itunes and select the events and faces. it’ll optimize the photos for your iphone. iphone photo library will be updated when opened for the first time. then you have the full sorting features (albums, events, faces, places) from iphoto. if you don’t have a mac and ilife 09 you’re stuck with albums and places only i suppose. places are created automatically from the geolocation infos from your pics. just enable location services and take pics on your iphone and it’ll automatically create the places.
i see. i use dell/windows 07.
Thanks jerry for the explaination, it really helps and clear things.
Any idea if theres a ilife/iphoto for windows?
no, ilife (including iphoto) is a mac only product. a lot of users would love to see it ported to windows, but i think that won’t happen anytime soon.
eventually the events feature may come to the iphone, but the face recognition feature can’t be handled by the a4 cpu and the limited memory. at least not in a reasonable manner. sry. See iPhone Photos description at Apple.
oraite. thx a alot jerry. really appreciate it. cheers~
i managed to rebuild the index like this:
1. Download PhoneView Demo (7 days trial)
2. Connect your iPhone
3. Launch PhoneView, go to Settings, enable “Show Entire Disk”
4. (Backup) and then delete the following files:
/DCIM/.MISC/Info.plist
/PhotoData/Photos.sqlite
/PhotoData/PhotosAux.sqlite
5. Unplug your iPhone
6. Launch Camera Roll, it will rebuild the database, and you will see all photos/videos