But that doesn’t mean that everything is perfect. You see, a flaw that wasn’t evident during the beta phase of iOS 4 has become abundantly clear as the majority of my apps have been upgraded for multitasking: keeping background apps in memory for fast app demolishes iPhone 3GS battery life. For all of Steve’s promises to deliver multitasking without battery problems, I now have to charge my iPhone by 8 p.m. to keep it functional through the evening, which I never did before. Without changing my behavior in the slightest — nor even using more advanced multitasking like background third-party audio and VoIP, my phone now needs its charger around at all times.
And, unfortunately, it’s just the tip of the iceberg for the issues found on any 3GS running iOS 4 as it’s meant to be.
In general, iOS 4′s biggest problem on 3GS is kruft, an older term for badly written code whose performance degrades over time thanks to intrinsic flaws. To use it in a sentence, “Windows Me is the kruftiest operating system ever created.” Kruft is the reason why the classic Mac OS and every version of Windows ever can’t simply be left on or in standby at all times without becoming comically inept or requiring a restart. And a lack of kruft is the reason why every version of
Mac since Panther has been a delight to use — I can’t remember the last time I needed to restart a Mac besides software updates. And, at least until iOS 4, I’ve found the iPhone to be kruft-free (other than the legions of cheap apps no one should put on their phones) and pleasant. I virtually never restarted it, it hasn’t frozen up, and the task management was smart enough to never require me to intervene. But a big part of that was the simplicity of the system. Other than a few system utilities of Apple’s, whatever was on-screen got attention, nothing else. By contrast, iOS 4 keeps the most recent apps in RAM for quick access, and stores others for quick relaunch, using an automated process to push and pull them out of memory.
And that means that the longer you use your phone, the harder it has to work to do many of the basic things that make it great. Button presses get sluggish, scrolling stutters, even e-mail loading takes much longer than normal. And many, many screens come up blank and stay that way for longer than they should when you make an app switch.
I would chalk this up to unoptimized code for a new major release were it not for the fact that I have discovered two fool-proof methods for improving battery life and overall performance:
1. The
“double hard reset” method we discussed earlier this month.
2. Pulling up the app switcher, pressing and holding any icon to bring up the delete button, and then getting rid of every app to clear out RAM.
Worse still, I’ve found 2 to be a much better method. Because of the rather dumb way that iOS 4 handles a really large number of apps being opened and closed (I have a lot of interests, OK?), I currently have 43 allegedly open apps on my phone. Now, clearly only the most recent 4 or so are actually in memory, but one would think retaining more than the most recent 8 applications would be a complete waste of time, as navigating back further than that is probably slower than just relaunching an app you haven’t used in six hours.
Back in April,
Steve Jobs said, “In multitasking, if you see a task manager, they blew it.” I completely agree, Steve. So why am I constantly having to dismiss tasks that I haven’t touched in days just to get a decent scroll rate?
Am I the only one? Or is your 3GS getting bogged down and losing charge to quickly?
