It's pretty much as reliable as the sun: a new iPhone OS update generally leads to at least
a handful of issues. But iPhone OS 3.1, which was made available
on September 9th, seems worse than most. We've seen tip after tip pour in, and we've watched Apple's support forums grow increasingly ugly with irate iPhone users dealing with horrid battery life, random shut downs and the occasional screen freeze. A few of our own have also experienced some of these quirks, though others have escaped without a scratch. So, we're putting it to you all -- has the latest iPhone update borked your handset? If so, in what way?
Has iPhone OS 3.1 screwed up your phone?| Totally! I've got all sorts of problems! | 12929 (22.6%) |
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| Eh, it messed up a few things, but nothing too major. | 9333 (16.3%) |
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| Nope! My update has led to no issues that I know of. | 17531 (30.7%) |
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| Can I get a Donut up in here, or what? | 17323 (30.3%) |
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posted September 17th 2009 10:41AM
I just got a new iPod Touch today. It is a 3rd generation and came with firmware 3.1. I am shocked by how quickly the battery life has been running out. It has flattened twice in approximately 5 hours of use! I assumed that it was because the battery was new, but it may be the firmware. ITunes is offering me a firmware update to 3.1.1 though, so I may download that tomorrow!
Screwed it up? If by screwing it up you mean enabling MMS functionality on AT&T US, then yes, it screwed it up.
My 3g had been randomly freezing and switching off since the update. I'd been mulling over getting a 3gs or an android based phone as an upgrade, but this behaviour by apple of breaking its prev gen hardware through an update, disabling a feature to sell more phones has and the Google voice drama has kind of turned me off apple.
Btw posting from a new htc magic - games aren't as good but love the OS as a whole! (I have consoles for gaming anyway)
3G keeps turning off even with a full charge. Have to do a hard reboot to turn it back on. Letting the battery drain did nothing to help, neither did a full restore.
holy ive got friggin really bad problem, all my movies encoded with handbrake (and some podcast videos) DONT work on 3.1. they did on 3.0 tho, i just get a message saying "cannot be played on this iphone" but they work on other peoples stuff
maybe itunes 9, i have no way to tell right now
I have practically the opposite experience as the vocal minority here. I had battery life problems on my 3GS, which I upgraded from a prior 3G rather than doing a fresh setup (I have data I do not want to lose) and since the update my battery life has literally doubled, particularly in the idle scenarios where before it would use 40% of my battery life sitting doing nothing over night, now it uses maybe 15%
I have a couple apps that don't work anymore but that's to be expected, one of them was running like a pile of dog crap since the 3G S came out anyway (Sway) and despite my loving that game, I had already completed it so it's no biggie.
Thoroughly enjoying the genius mixes, and other various improvements. Though it's a minor upgrade, I say Apple's scored another good one.
I can cope with most of the issues I'm finding with my touch till the next update but theres one issue that I can't copy with which is the scrolling through the podcast list is slow and jerky
Scrolling albums / audiobooks is nice and smooth, but the jerky podcast menu only becomes smooth when I remove my 1000 song tracks from my touch
My 3g experience its first screen freeze today. I had to reset my device. My gf's 3g has been constantly getting screen freezes is rather annoying. Unfortunately we are beyond our 1 year warranty so we have to put up with it. All our apps, most noticeably SMS, have been slower having to wait 15-20 seconds to load up but that started when we upgraded to 3.0.
3.1 is the first problem I've had since I got my 3G on release date. My phone shuts itself off more than once a day. It's getting really frustrating. I did a clean reinstall and I thought it'd helped, but a day later it started doing it again.
iTunes 9 isn't any better though. Super buggy and crashes all the time. Blah! Come on Apple! Let's do some quality testing first!
(that being said...i do love Apple most of the time)
its been perfect, maybe a tad faster and that screen app rearrangement thing in itunes 9 is a god send!!! my apps are now all beautiful sorted by function. it took me an hour with the onscreen tools -- so would have been a week sortign them on the iphone screen its self
guess im just lucky that all's gone well. I that apple always puts its self under pressure to bring out these software updates the *day* that they show them. They need a more snow leopard approach.. eg we show them to you and we will give you them as soon as they are ready.. maybe 2 weeks maybe 2 months :-)
james
My God...how could these morons in Cupertino put anything out that hits battery life as bad as it sucks right now...come on guys!!!! Head/ass/separate!
haha..omg... just voted that my 3G 3.1 didn't give me major problems. Was reading the comment about 15 second SMS start up. went to time it on my iPhone and my screen froze. had to do hard reset. lol.
wth. why is it so unstable?
it broke my screen, and now has a chip missing.
only joking fixed everything that i was unaware was wrong
Has the same locking up issue since 3.1. I called customer support last night, the guy was very helpful. Ended up going to the Apple Store today and they swapped it for a new phone. Keep the fingers crossed. Any idea what the different model numbers mean?
Well, 3.0 slowed my Touch to a crawl, so if 3.1 doesn't speed it back up, then its a crap update. OS 3.x is like the Vista of iPhone updates.
Ok at time of writing there have been over 30,000 responses (after stripping out the 'donut' responses)
The figures make fairly horrendous reading for Apple.. 53% of people have had a less than perfect update.. and 30% have registered 'Totally' f*cked.
I am not sure we can even take fanboyism as a factor in these results as there are seems to be as many MS monkeys as Apple ones out there so they probably cancel each other out.
Ouch, it has not been a good month for Apple. Rubbish Ipod 'event', great looking Zune HD, and now this. Welcome back to work Steve.
terrible battery life, applications crash more often than usual (anyone experiencing iWiki problems?), I frequently restart my phone (at least once a day) to regain 3G connection even though the status bar on the upper left corner of the screen displays full connection to 3G network, the phone freezes at least once a week, i've experienced the "black screen" issue a few times (the phone is on, but nothing is seen on the display), push notifications are sluggish, push gmail never delivers mail on time, aim application receives push notifications minutes after an IM was sent.
i use the iphone's alarm every morning to get up, and sometimes the phone freezes or goes into its blank screen mode before the alarm has a chance to wake me up (in the past, the alarm was always reliable, the phone never had to be restarted). this update is a POS and has created more problems than solutions. I've never had a problem with apple or their products in the past, but they really dropped the ball on this one. I rarely comment on blogs and forums, but I saw this post as an opportunity to vent. Engadget, please tell these bastards to fix their mistake.
Crappy Battery Life + ATT Service in Chicago has me heading back to Verizon and Windows Mobile soon. I mean for what I am paying I want good service at least.
After the 3.1 update, my iPhone 3G (not 3GS) every now and then cannot wake up from stand by. I have to do a hard reset to get it going again. And during that time when it cannot wake up, all calls/SMS/notifications/alerts does not appear on the phone, but people can still call/SMS me (i.e., the normal tone when waiting for the phone to be picked up is there), so the phone isn't really in a turned off state.
Yeah I have been having a lot of problems. Shorter then normal battery life, touches not registering (especially when I am trying to answer a call), random shut downs, iphone becomes unresponsive for several minutes and during that time the battery starts to get really hot (I actually felt it through my pants on a 95-plus-degree day). The other day my iphone was in my pocket with the screen locked and all of a sudden I heard a song playing and I took out my iphone to see what was going on, and the genius music selector had picked a song and was playing it. I have never even used that option before, and the song it chose sucked. I am not sure how that happened and I am a little worried, I like my iphone and I don't want it to become damaged if the battery over heats or something.
A few minor glitches like my volume slider freaked out on me yesterday, wouldn't slide properly and would slip back to where it had been. But a quick restart ended that issue.
No repeat issues so it's hard to know if anything was caused by the update
My boot up times are better, I have had no random restarts, my battery life is back to normal since 3.0.1 screwed it up so bad, It doesn't drop wifi with wep or wpa anymore, and is generally faster all around. I've been more than happy with this update.
For the most part, my (stock) 3G is still running as it should.
The only I've noticed is when the phone comes out of standby, it sometimes takes a few seconds to see the main menu.
I did a full wipe and restore (and jailbreak :). No issues at all. Battery life seems OK.
I had the same issues as many, with what seemed like tons of background processes going on, halting almost any input from me, and draining my battery in a quarter of the time as usual, even with little or no use with the handset.
I was ready to march down to apple to demand a fix or a new device, but I rang the branch first, just because it's 50miles to the nearest apple store. The guy at the other end of the line told me (on mac) to - Finder, My admin name (the little house icon), Library, iTunes, iPhone software updates, then to delete any files found there, then to open iTunes with the phone connected, choose to restore the phone, then iTunes realises it doesn't have the software and proceeds to download it again, then it's installed and choose to restore from the previous backup. After half an hour of that business my phones back to it's good old self.
I was told sometimes with so many people downloading at once (I upgraded straight after the keynote) the file can become corrupt, either that or the original file put up had an issue.
Hope this helps someone else struggling not to throw their beautiful phone out of the window.
iTunes 9 and iPhone 3.1 won't synch some of my smart playlists. Otherwise 3.1 seems OK.
I own a non-Jailbroken 3G [S]
and use it with both my home PC and studio Mac.
I use 'manually manage music and videos' because I like to move Podcasts from both machines…
and so after update half of iTunes new features are now broken to me because I don't wish to wipe my phone.
for e.g. I've purchased many free and paid apps, shovelware and games to my phone
If I want to sync my apps with either machine (I've never connected it to any other itunes library) to use the app arranger
iTunes informs me I must wipe all apps and their data to accomplish this.
It plain sucks, I'm gonna try the Apple support forums possibly the store or phone as well, to see if they can fix it.
but in the meantime I feel like the 'Apple Control' on the iPhone is breaking alot of features for me.
Totally ruin the Tethering Hack with iPhone 3G on 3.1, and iTunes 9.
I really hate Apple right now... they mess with my Palm Pre, and my iTouch in one swipe! Ok... I understand their issues with the Palm Pre syncing with iTunes and I find the back and forth battle rather hilarious actually... but my Touch is an Apple product! GEEZ... my battery drains in an hour and randomly shuts off after this update. I might as well skip it across a lake and find my Walkman in the attic.
Ok, it's not great, but I'm glad to see other users experiencing crazy battery life. I literally will go to the grocery store and come home and will have 20% charge left. What's going to happen when mms comes? Will my phone be on the verge of death? I have a 3G and I'm starting to get p-o'd over the apple support team's suggestion of you should restore again, let's restore one more time. What about iphone users who aren't tech savvy? With this phone when it's good it's really good and when it's bad its horribly bad. I'm happy I live close to a mall with an apple store.
The navigation buttons in safari are constantly disabled. And no it's not opening up links in a new web page. It's displaying links in the same web page and the back button is always disabled (as well as the forward button).
3.1 gives me bad battery life, strange behavior on resuming itunes playback with headset button (sometimes does sometimes doesnt), sometimes it doesn't call out, strange delays here in there opening apps, occasional freezing needing restart - it took me two resets and a google search to realize 3.1 was the problem.
besides most of my apps say 3.0 tested, not 3.1 tested. i'll wait till this stuff is sorted.
i want to go back to 3.0 but i can't anymore. my backup w/ all my apps is on 3.1
My battery lasts for days, regardless of OS update... Dimming the brightness down to 15% or less makes a world of difference
My 3G in my iPhone 3G doesn't work and i cant receive or make calls. I have been using edge and its sucks, but it gets the job done.
Since I upgraded (sic!) to 3.1, I started to experience deep sh...:
- phone turns off without notice
- iTunes won't play ANY music
- impossible to pass a phone call more than 60 seconds long.
WORST UPGRADE EXPERIENCE EVER.
Marvelousely ridiculous and upsetting, Apple!
Serioulsy considering churning to Android.
My new iPod touch will NOT update!
3.1.2 fixes the issue that was keeping your phone from waking up. I found out...AFTER I already upgraded to a 3GS because my 3G was out of warranty.
You can probably get Safari working correctly again by forcing it to purge its session data:
-Launch Safari
-Hold the Power button at the top until the Shut Down screen appears
-Hold the screen for several seconds (10+) until the screen disappears.
YOU WILL LOSE ANY PAGES YOU HAD OPEN