Today has got to be the furthest I have travelled and returned home within one day… I got up at 6am to get the train to the airport, flew to to Tokyo and got the train into town, then in the evening was back at the airport flying back and getting home to Sapporo just now at 11pm! ”What did you forget?” you might ask… But forgetfulness wasn’t the reason for the trip. The whole event was a highly organised and coordinated trip to go to the British Embassy (they only have an embassy in Tokyo and consulate in Osaka) to apply to get a CNI (Certificate of No Impediment) which will let Emily and I apply to get married here in Japan. According to the website I had to attend an “Interview” at the embassy, which I had to apply for (an application so I could apply to get the document I need to apply to get married…), but the whole ordeal took a matter of minutes, with the short walk down the hallway to the next room to pay the fees I was in and out of the embassy in around 30 minutes! All that travelling for 30 minutes!!
But hopefully it will be worth it! I took stamps for them so they could send me the certificate in the post rather than going back again to get it, and I got a form that I need to fill in and post back to pay for the actual certificate as I won’t be there to pay for it on the day of issue. Strangely they wouldn’t let me pay for it while I was there and had the cash, but rather I have to send it. We had a brief discussion about how I could just go outside and fill in the forms and post them in that very day which would only take a day or two off the actual time the embassy was responsible for my money… So I will maybe wait a little while before sending the form in, until that point I was quite impressed by the efficiency of the embassy, but not being able to pay in advance was a sharp jerk back to the reality that the small patch of land I was on was technically British (is it?) and I wasn’t not eager to please and super efficient Japan for that half an hour! Hopefully it will process and work and I won’t have to rush back to Tokyo with a few days to spare before we actually get married…
Anyway! A few days ago I upgraded my (already ageing) iPhone 3G to iOS 4.0 and it was lovely for a little while. But today’s trip to Tokyo tested it to the limit. I was listening to music and catching up with podcasts (and Bill’s latest messages from First!) while finding my way with maps and GPS, looking up train times online, writing texts and an email or two, tweeting the odd tweet and even watching a YouTube video or two at some points of non-activity. This was normally not an issue, it could do all of these things fine, and probably still can as long as two don’t happen at once! But after a short time using it, it started to be unbearable. It was very slow responding to key presses, particularly on Japanese input, it ground to a halt more than a few times apps were crashing left right and centre and even once it needed an all out reboot!
So long story (slightly) short: I want to go back!!
But it isn’t easy. From looking around it seems that I will basically have to go through the “jailbreak” process to install the older version 3.1.3 of the operating system… So my question is, should I just jailbreak it? My reasons for not doing it before were that it just seemed like too much hassle, and the little risk involved was probably not worth any of the benefits…
But if I am going to have to do it anyway to get back to functionality maybe I should just do it? Has anyone out there jailbroken their iPhone 3G and have any experience? Good experiences? Bad experiences? What are the risks and what are the main benefits? Would Softbank go nuts on me? If I went to the apple store (urgh) would they restore me back to 3.1.3 or tell me I should be glad to have 4.0?
I jailbroke the iPhone 3G when i had it, it’s fine, so long as you don’t install backgrounder (which allows multi tasking) as it will bring you back to the same position you’re in now..
If you do jailbreak, download sbsettings, it allows you to swipe the status bar at the top to get a set grid of icons, allowing you quick access to settings like wifi, gps, screen brightness and toggle 3G on and off
Using sbsettings, and killing wifi/gps and 3G when i didn’t need it (and dropping the screen brightness) saved me some serious battery time.
I’ve since moved on to the iPhone 4 (totally worth the upgrade if you can, and if you have the funds) and the whole iOS 4 works lovely on it.
Don’t forget to back everything up.. Even numbers.. I’ve had the fun of forgetting to do that
Also good luck with getting the necessaries for getting married
I am going to do a fresh restore of 4.0 to see if it helps… if not I am going back to 3…
@Mike: So you would recommend Jailbreaking?
The only thing that would be quite useful that is obvious to me would be tethering as I don’t think the church I will work at has internet… and I think softbank would probably ask questions if internet usage went sky rocketing!
Other benefits are really unknown to me at this stage… Customization doesn’t get me too excited really…
Multitasking isn’t what is making iOS 4 slow, it isn’t enabled for the 3G…
All my numbers, mails etc are synced with my google acct… Don’t you cloud your data?! :-p
Interestingly, Robert Jailbroke with his 3G, but with iOS 4, and made a small change to activate apple multi-tasking (the application state freeze, api style one) and that made his phone pretty unusable..
I’d recommend Jailbreaking, but It only appealed to me as a way to get the iPhone to do some things I needed it to..
About a week before I got rid of the 3G I tried to jailbreak 3.1.3 (to get WiFi tethering for my iPad), and couldn’t, RedSn0w wouldn’t actually modify the ipsw file for some reason, maybe you’ll have more luck.. just make sure and do a full itunes backup, and make a duplicated of it (the new jailbreak process involves taking a backup, and modifying the backup), I’ve never had any problems I couldn’t get around.
Definatly get SBSettings though, its the only reason I’d actually still be tempted to JB my iPhone 4..
So it seems I can’t downgrade my iPhone’s OS…
Turns out Apple use a signing system that means that they have to officially allow every firmware (phone OS sort of) update to the device. Once they release a new version (4.0) they stop signing off the older version (3.1.3 and below). So if you update to the new version you can’t “update” (downgrade) to the older one as Apple says “NO!!”
This sign off uses unique IDs from each individual iPhone to give a unique response for that particular phone. So some clever chap can’t just synthesise the response from Apple’s server it seems…
The workaround was to grab a sign off before the new version was released, but I didn’t know this before the new version was released… Note that is released, not updated. Also I have noticed that in restoring from a backup it also updates your firmware to the latest. So if you need to restore from a backup in iTunes and don’t have these signing offs, you will be kindly upgraded to the latest version.
I guess this is probably PR’d as to keep your device optimal and secure… But more likely is to make you stop using that old 3G and get your wallet out for a nice shiny new iPhone 4…
