In this guide I want to help you to choose the right firmware for your device with the speed in mind. I already test all firmware from 1.1.4 to 3.2.1 (the latest firmware as I write this article) on my iPhone 2G.
The speed factors are as below:
- Switching between pages.
- Keyboard speed (while typing text messages)
- Application execution times (I know that is mainly depends on the CPU speed)
1.x
There is nothing to say about 1.x family because there is no AppStore on this family, So JUST FORGET IT!
2.x
If you remember the early versions of 2.x family (2.0, 2.0.1, 2.0.2, 2.1) is full of bugs so everyone decide to upgrade to newer version as soon as Apple release them. But by the releases of 2.2 the game changes. It’s stable, fast and accurate in action and also if you jailbreak it, it will bring all the good things that you need to enjoy your iPhone such as AppStore, Copy/Paste (clippy), Video recording (Cycorder), Bluetooth file transfer (iBluetooth), Background application (Backgrounder), etc.
3.x
The main feature of OS 3 is the “Push notification”. Actually there is no more notable things in this version (you can find full list here), all the things that they add to this version was previously resolved by jailbreakers. Beside that if you have to unlock your 2G using any kind of PWNing tools you will lose the Push ability, after that you will found a way called “push fix” by Dev-Team that bring push to your 2G but when you enable it, first of all your device will works very slowly and also you will get lots of false push alerts. The speed impact of the 3.x family on 2G was very ridicules, I think Apple intentionally do this in order to force 2G users to buy an iPhone 3GS. It may also happens because of jailbreaking.
Conclusion
If you want to have a fast iPhone 2G I suggest you to use OS 2.2 (if you already upgrade to 3.x you can easily downgrade it, i will post something about that in near future).
If you upgrade to 3.1.2 :
- Overall speed reduction
- Battery life Get
- Some Cydia application did not work properly in all situations such as iBluetooth
If don’t upgrade to 3.1.2 (stay on 2.2)
- There is no Push Notification
- You can’t arrange app icons using iTunes
- You can’t play multiplayer games (the games that runs on more than 2 iPhone)
- SMS delivery report (actually I did not test it on 2.x)
