I’ve spent all day updating my iPhone firmware to the latest iOS4 version. With hindsight I shouldn’t have bothered. I started at 9.30 this morning, downloading the firmware through iTunes which took about 30 minutes. My iPhone (previously running 3.1.2 (blackra1n)) took over an hour to backup. When it did try and restore my backup it failed – not surprising since it was jailbroken I guess but still quite annoying – it was actually working but because it reported an error I decided to do a full restore anyway as I felt it would be better to have a nice clean firmware to start with. I then used redsn0w to jailbreak it so that I could get multitasking and background wallpaper – both of which don’t come on the standard 4.0 firmware. The jailbreak was perhaps the quickest, easiest step in the whole process and was done in less than 10 minutes. I spent most of the afternoon setting up my apps and syncing with iTunes. The jailbreak came with Cydia and I then installed Rock which I used to download and install Five Icon Dock, SBSettings, Winterboard, OpenSSH – all of which worked fine on the new firmware.

General impressions:

Folders – I like the idea of folders but in reality they are slow on the iPhone 3G – it takes about a second for the folder to open which I find a little frustrating. By the way you drag and drop an app onto another app to create a folder – it wasn’t immediately obvious to me and it didin’t mention how folders worked on the Apple website (as far as I could see).

Multitasking – slow and it doesn’t really do proper multitasking which is what I wanted. I do like the iPod controls available as part of this feature.

Background wallpaper – eventually some basic customisation ability – not overly exciting but it’s another missing feature now sorted

Digital zoom – it is what it is – I’ll never use it

Orientation lock – you can’t lock horizontally

Books – The Stanza app beats it by miles.

I was also disappointed that there’s no additional support for Bluetooth music streaming controls (AVRCP) – it’s still just Play/Pause

I know an iPhone 3G running iOS 4.o isn’t an iPhone 4 and that the performance issues are probably not an issue on the new handset but I’m not excited by it at all. Plus I don’t want to be told I have to hold the phone in a certain way as Steve Jobs told users this week.

I have very tempted to order the HTC Desire and will make a final decision as soon as there is a stable Froyo release available… providing some other handset doesn’t emerge between then and now. I’ve heard rumours that Froyo will be released imminently for the HTC Desire – perhaps next week but I heard the same rumours last week so we will have to wait and see. Google have started rolling out Froyo for the Nexus One.