Hey, just so you know ... this post is now about 13 years and 9 months old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

I upgraded my iPhone 3GS to iOS4 when it first came out two weeks ago and since then have been running into small annoyances/bugs.

First, though, the good news:

• scrolling through podcasts is finally smooth and fast (no more jerkiness!)
• taking pictures is noticeably faster (although loading the camera app for the first time is still slow)
• folders: I was able to condense my 6 pages of apps down to just 2 … nice!

Now, the annoyances I’ve encountered:

• push notifications (and phone calls) interrupt video playback: this is annoying because I have to dismiss the notification and then tap Play to start the video again. In the prior version (3.1.3), video playback would either continue through a push notification, or resume automatically after I finished a phone call.
• the orientation sensor gets confused sometimes: if I have the my iPhone in landscape mode and go into a screen that is portrait-only (like the podcast directory) without changing the phone’s physical orientation, it won’t go back into landscape mode until I flip it into portrait orientation and then back into landscape. The old release seemed to re-query the sensor and would automatically flip back and forth without the need to physically change the phone’s orientation.
• using my headset to resume playback sometimes starts playing the wrong thing: quite a few times if I’ve had video playing and pressed the Home button on my iPhone to switch to a different app, video playback stops (as it should). Usually I can just click the button on my headset to resume audio playback in the background. With iOS4, though, more often than not, the iPhone starts playing something other than what was previously playing, requiring me to go into the iPod app and manually restarting what I was previously watching/listening to.
• my IMTasks app will no longer sync with my Exchange account: the developer is waiting for Apple to address this, which will hopefully be soon.

I suspect most of the problems I’ve run into are related to how iOS4 handles multitasking and background applications (in a word: poorly). What worries me is that I can’t seem to find other people on the internet reporting these same problems (except for the IMTasks syncing), which gives me little hope these will be addressed in a future 4.x update. Apple has stopped signing the old 3.1.3 firmware so I can’t downgrade, and I still don’t wait to jailbreak, so I’m stuck with iOS4 such as it is. This is the first time since I got my iPhone almost 7 months ago that I’ve been unhappy with it.

Oh well. In the meantime, here are the cool iOS4 tips and tricks you need to know.