Friday
Apr092010
Should you install the iPhone 4.0 Beta firmware?
Friday, April 9, 2010 at 7:05AM 
Update: After playing around with all my apps a bit more, i can now say the issue with the buggy apps is much much worse than i originally thought. I would now strongly advise against installing this update. If you have updated to 4.0 and want to downgrade, here's how.
After yesterday's announcement i logged into my Apple developer account and installed the iphone 4.0 beta firmware. It's been almost 24 hours, and i can say it's definitely a mixed bag so far. While there are some awesome features like unified inbox & folders, there are some things you should know if you want to be an early adopter:
Cautions
- Photos app is buggy. I.E opening "Places" crashes the app for me consistently.
- Visual Voicemail doesn't work anymore (i'm with Rogers in Canada, your mileage may vary)
- I'm seeing new bugs (probably due to the presence of the new APIs) in my existing/previously perfect apps. I.E Tweetie 2 crashes whenever i try to do a Twitter search. It's pretty rare though. Most if not all apps work perfectly fine after installing.
- If you are going to setup Folders know that if you change anything regarding the apps selected to sync to your iphone within iTunes it will remove all your folders since iTunes knows nothing about Folders.
- Apps seem to stay open until you close them using the new multitasking footer. Double tapping the home button exposes the open apps and tapping/holding allows you to close an app. Discovered this when i started to run into memory issues.
- 4.0 updates the baseband, so you can't revert back to 3.x (this is 4 life people)
I've probably missed a few, but these were the major ones.
Reader Comments (11)
Thanks for the heads up. Have you tried the Exchange support yet for Mail, Contacts and Calendaring?
Yup - and it seems to rock so far. The threaded conversations are awesome.
Visual voicemail does work.
It is possible to downgrade from 4.0 back to 3.x if you are not happy, it does upgrade the baseband which will put you in a recovery mode loop, you can fix this by following this article :-
http://bagblog.wordpress.com/2010/04/09/downgrading-iphone-3gs-from-os-4-x-beta-to-os-3-x
Brandon i'm with Rogers in Canada - maybe it depends on your carrier? I tried rebooting, clearing out my saved messages - nothing seemed to work.
Bagwaa - thanks for the instructions on that, totally saved my bacon.
David - Thanks for this post. I was going to upgrade, but after reading your post, I'm going to wait until Summer.
David - I have the chance of installing the iPhone OS 4.0 Beta on my iPhone 3Gs that has been factory unlocked by Apple. I am currently using it with TMobile in the US. Would that cause any problems?
I think I might just wait til the second beta comes out and hopefully an updated iTunes, with 3.0 betas I didn't install the first one, the rest ran fine for me, I hope this is repeated.
David, the visual voicemail could be your carrier. As i know jailbroken phones do not support this feature on other carriers, besisdes att, so it could be that indeed.
JP- There isnt an unlock released, so you wouldnt be able to use 4.0 with T mobile yet.
Brandon- My iPhone was unlocked directly by Apple as I bought it in Europe and the carrier lost exclusivity. Which is why I thought this would work because I have no jailbreak or third party unlocks needed.