(2 votes, average: 5 out of 10)
Loading ...
What’s the opposite of rock solid? Paper flimsy or something? Maybe glass-jawed to borrow a boxing sort of phrase? Whatever it is, that term should be applied to the latest 2.0 iPhone software. Fantastic leap forward in its functionality and features, but a big step backwards on the solid, stable perfromance side of things, in my experience (and many others judging by tons of web reports on this).
That’s not a pretty iPhone screen above. Blank and hung up after a random, spontaneous crash of an application back to the obviously buggered home screen. I’ve seen this sort of screen a handful of times over recent days, along with other odd, hung-up screens when the previously rock solid iPhone just can’t seem to cope with life.
I’ve held off for a while on posting on this subject - trying to give 2.0 a fair shake and trying suggested workarounds to see if I could get better results. My iPhone 3G brand new when I brought it home displayed some pretty striking unstable behavior, highlighted by:
- Frequent application crashes back to the home screen - and not just with free or ’small’ apps - in fact, primarily with apps like Twitterific, OmniFocus and others that are from ‘known’, ‘established’ (and Apple Design Award winning!) publishers
- Intermittent sluggishness and lag when, for instance, typing in the Notes application, or pulling up and search within the Contacts app
- Spontaneous reboots when launching or working in apps
- Apps that freeze up and refuse to quit or even force quit gracefully
Like many others, I’ve gone the clean restore route to try to resolve these issues - twice so far. Once over last weekend when the restore build was the same as I had when I walked out of the store with the 3G (Build 345) and once a couple of nights back to a newer build (347). On both occasions, I chose to setup the iPhone as a new phone in terms of its iTunes partnership and not put back any backed up settings, just to ensure that no residual junk carried over that might hinder getting past stability issues.
So far, the latest restore and newest build have been a marginal improvement, but things are still far from rock solid. I’ve still had four sponteneous reboots in a couple of days, hangups like the one in the screenshot, and so on.
Am I tempted to revert back to a 1.1.4 build? Not at all. The benefits of 2.0 and all the new apps are still superb overall, and the instability is (just) tolerable for now.
There are rumors and reports around that Apple has got a 2.0.1 update in the works. I hope these are true and that it comes out soon and gets 2.0 back to being as solid and reliable as the iPhone has always been up to now.
What’s your experience with 2.0 and stability so far???
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed!
by 9600baud, on July 17 2008 @ 1:33 pm
I agree the OS is garbage. You’d think they been working on this for a while but the apps just dont play nice with this new firmware.
Today I synced my phone for the first time since I bought it and all my apps stopped working… but thats a story for another day…
by jj, on July 17 2008 @ 1:41 pm
I totally agree. It gets slow and can’t keep up with my finger. When I click a link in the mail app, it will open the website then freeze the screen.
Apps will randomly crash.
In general the operating speed and responsiveness sucks.
by TimmyGUNZ, on July 17 2008 @ 2:26 pm
Awfully buggy. I’m amazed that this software was released with this many problems. I have had all of the issues you have had as well as others. (Sometimes the iPod software doesn’t like to come back out of cover flow when turning the iPhone back to it’s upright position and I need to reboot it in order to get that back.)
I am hoping every minute that 2.0.1 come out and patches up a lot of this stuff. My brother, who is not as tech savvy as I am, was on his way back to the Apple store because he was convinced he had a busted iPhone. Turns out his symptoms are just like ours (and the million other people who bought this last week.)
by Brandon, on July 17 2008 @ 4:18 pm
Thankfully I’m not experiencing very many crashes. I’ve been careful about what I’ve installed and right now I’m still only running a handful of applications that I read multiple reviews on, but I have to agree - not stable - is a good summary of the current firmware. Its definitely not Windows Mobile 6 unstable, but its still not great.
I think my biggest issue is the general slowness of the OS itself. And I don’t know for sure if its the iPhone or the OS … but I do know that my iPod Touch isn’t troubled nearly as much by the slowness.
by PatrickJ, on July 18 2008 @ 10:35 am
Just testing a new comment …
by macgirl, on July 18 2008 @ 12:13 pm
I am having the same experience. I’m quite disappointed since instability is what drove me nuts with the Treo 680 I had before I got my first iPhone. I haven’t tried the 357 firmware yet, but will do so this weekend. I hope Apple fixes this soon, either via a firmware update or fixing issues in the 3rd party apps that may be causing these problems.
by Reference: iPhone OS 2.0 pWnage « Mike Cane 2008, on July 20 2008 @ 5:21 pm
[...] it’ll all be (temporarily) obsolete once Apple pushes out a(n apparently much-needed!) 2.0 OS update. But then the haXXorz will get back to it and make it possible [...]
by Ragart, on July 20 2008 @ 6:18 pm
sad thing is that updates will be so slow to get here via 3rd party devs b/c of the hand-picked update system Apple has in place.
“Ok, App No. 3542 step up to the yellow line…”