on iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch 2G

First, the iPhone 3GS:

There seems to be a definite performance boost, in that programs open and close more smoothly and quickly, without the choppiness that I ran into in 3.1.2 and 3.1.3

Multitasking... well it is a nice new feature for all the non-jailbroken phones, but Circuitous was honestly better. For one thing, one could actually monitor how much free RAM the phone had and could even tell the phone to free up more RAM to run more smoothly.

The camera has zoom... unfortunately it is very grainy and has no refocusing functionality. The quality of the camera on the 3GS is not very good to begin with; with zoom it becomes pretty much horrible/unacceptable.

Wallpaper for homescreen... again, another "new" feature for the non-jailbreakers. Winterboard did this and more.

Folders... this is a nice addition. Although jailbreakers also had a folder feature, it was not as nice. Now I don't have as much app clutter as before. Well, technically it's not much different space wise, but before I just hid the icons with Poof, whereas now they are in folders and more accessible.

iBooks... honestly, I think it is worse than Kindle and Stanza as a reading platform. Though apparently it will be able to load PDFs (haven't tried this yet). I think the design/layout/interface is not well organized and takes up too much screen space. As a result, there is less text per screen.

Safari with Google suggestions... a nice, useful little improvement that flew under the radar.

Unified inbox... this is nice - mail from all my e-mail accounts in one place. There were some initial hiccups with Google Sync, but they seem to have been fixed now.

Those are basically the major improvements. iOS 4 and especially the iPhone 4 have been pretty hugely hyped. I expect Apple will sell a ton as they usually do, but I give this OS update a 'B-' for the iPhone 3GS. Clearly it adds a bunch of new features, but several of them were either already developed by third parties that Apple didn't want to let into their App Store or are useless (like the camera zoom). Honestly, if Apple followed their own dumb App Store rules, they would reject iBooks for duplicating functionality of apps like Kindle and Stanza, which are much better anyway. But no, they won't because they can make money on the book sales

The redeeming factors are the performance improvement, folders, google suggestions, and unified inbox. Most of these are actually very small software changes and certainly were due a while back.

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Now, the iPod Touch 2G:

No multitasking. No homescreen wallpaper. Still no way to get battery percentage like on the 3GS. Why did I upgrade my jailbroken iPod which had all of these features?!

At least there are the unified inbox and folders.

Oh and apparently Airplane mode is now a feature. Totally confused by that one, since WiFi is still accessible (as it should be). The only thing Airplane mode does is block wireless data and voice, both of which aren't accessible via the iPod.

Overall, for this device, I give the iOS 4 update a 'D'. Oh well - waiting for a quick 4.0 jailbreak I guess. The currently available one is not worth doing for my iPod since I don't use it very much. And I can't jailbreak my 3GS because it has the newer bootrom. Will have to wait to get back MyWi for tethering