The General Theory of RIAtivity

Over the past week I’ve been experimenting with my old first generation iPhone, my new iPhone 3G, various jailbreaks for each, and the iPhone 2.0 firmware. My decade in technical support has developed in me an insatiable need to fully troubleshoot an issue to reveal the root cause of a problem; my problem the past two months has been an excruciatingly poor experience with my iPhone 3G. I wanted to find out for myself if the problems are the hardware, the firmware, or AT&T. In short, my findings have revealed that the overwhelming majority of my pain comes from the iPhone 2.0 firmware, not the hardware. Other tests show the same, although seem to be more focused on telephony issues related to the supporting cell networks.

First, however, let’s be clear on what my biggest complaints have been with my new iPhone 3G:

1. The battery life sucks. I used to leave my first gen iPhone on standby for two days and use it each day for a few hours worth of conference calls, and some web surfing/text messaging, and still have a little charge left. Usually by the morning of day three I’d have to charge for sure. Not so with the iPhone 3G. I’m lucky to go from 9am to 4pm without having to charge it, and that’s without using GPS or Bluetooth. I’ve literally watched my battery charge indicator drop 33% over a period of an hour while talking or web surfing. Is it battery size? Is it increased baseline load on the battery due to the 3G transceiver, GPS, etc.? That would make sense, but what proved to me that it’s not is the fact that on my first gen iPhone I was running firmware 1.1.4 under which I got tremendous battery life. I then installed on my old iPhone the 2.0 firmware (the build specific to the first gen iPhone) and noticed the battery life on it all of a sudden went to hell. Verdict: the iPhone 2.0 firmware power management is different, much different and now my first gen iPhone battery life is as bad as my iPhone 3G’s.
2. Slow response to keyboard inputs. This has been reported by lots of folks and there are videos on YouTube proving it. Reply to a text message or an email and when pressing a key it seems like the signal is making a round-trip to Pluto and back before being reflected on the screen. Press “A”, wait 4 seconds, “A” appears. Pathetic. There is a workaround someone discovered and it works, but this is not the Apple experience we’ve come to expect. I’d expect this from a $99 toss-away phone, not from the iPhone. I thought perhaps this was hardware related, so I installed the 2.0 firmware on my first gen iPhone. Poof, problem recreated on my formerly perfectly working first gen iPhone running firmware 1.1.4. Verdict: the iPhone 2.0 firmware is to blame.
3. Annoying delay when answering a call. Another very annoying issue that soon after getting my iPhone 3G I noticed when I tapped “Answer” to an incoming call, there was almost a 4 second day to my input, then the animation appears that takes one into the current call screen and only then could I actually speak to the person calling me. “Hardware problem for sure”, I thought. Nope. I installed the 2.0 firmware on my first gen iPhone and in no time I have an equally abysmal experience. Verdict: the iPhone 2.0 firmware sucks.

My recommendation, if you have not upgraded your first gen iPhone to the 2.0 firmware is just don’t do it. Not 2.0, not 2.01, not 2.02. I’ll update this posting when I feel, after my testing, that there’s a firmware version worthy of use. If you have already upgraded your first gen iPhone to the 2.0 firmware, consider downgrading to 1.1.4.