While waiting for my shiny new iPhone 4 to arrive, I updated my iPhone 3G to iOS4. I have no idea how long this took as I started the process before I went to bed and it was done by the next morning. No real issues to report, everything pretty much worked fine. Engadget has an article on what is/isn’t supported in iOS4 on a 3G.
Folders are great – I’ve compressed about 6 pages of apps to 2. I do wish Apple would allow the selection of an icon for the folder so I don’t have to stare at the labels. Digital zoom doesn’t seem particularly useful, but I guess if you hate cropping photos, this is for you. I couldn’t figure out how to use it without the internet, though. You have to tap on the display just above the shutter button and a slider will pop up.
The ability for the Photos app to display your photos by location (Places, as it’s called in the app) is quite nice. It generates a map with pins for where your photos were taken. As you zoom in, pins split into multiple pins. For example, zoomed out I can see I have photos in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles. As I zoom in on the Bay Area, that pin splits into the individual cities, San Francisco, Berkeley, San Jose. Further yet, and I can see which neighborhoods in a city I took photos in. If you zoom in too far, you’ll see errors in the geotag locations where your phone wasn’t able to get a good GPS lock when you took the photo.
Threaded mail and unified inboxes are sorta nice, but I’m really used to Gmail where my side of the conversation is included. Also, I wish I could see the Gmail tags on my messages in the Inbox. Basically, I want better Gmail integration without the ridiculous load times of the HTML5 mobile site.
I’m not sure when I’ll use the spell check functionality – the autocorrect still works as it used to and I generally either accept the autocorrect suggestion or override immediately. Being able to disable search categories in Spotlight is nice. Have no idea why the 3G can’t handle orientation lock or custom wallpaper. For the former, I suspect Apple didn’t want to override the double click with just the orientation lock and iPod controls without the multitasking app manager.
All was working well up until this evening, when my phone locked up. The normal power-off sequence didn’t work, I had to do a hard reset with the power/home button combo. Seems OK now. Most of my apps are being updated for iOS4 support, making for a seeming endless set of updates.