The iPhone 3G is quite fast with iOS 4.2

Hello iPhone users, one of the most frequent questions we get is whether iOS 4.2 is "safe" to install on the iPhone 3G. This question stems from what happened with the release of iOS 4.0, which rendered iPhone 3Gs almost unusable due to its extreme slowness… which could only be partially fixed by doing things like disabling some indexing and search services such as Spotlight.

Although this little trick made the entire interface a bit more usable, the truth is that the iPhone 3G suddenly became a device that looked much older than it actually was, almost useless. iOS 4.1 improved things considerably, but it still felt rather… clunky, to put it mildly; iOS 3.1.3 was undoubtedly much smoother and faster. That's why now, just days before the release of the third major version of iOS 4, which is hitting our iTunes stores, many are asking again… should I update my iPhone 3G to iOS 4.2?

Well, the answer is in the video, where you can see, for the first minute, an iPhone 3G with iOS 3.1.3 working quite well, and then the same iPhone 3G with iOS 4.2 GM. As you can see, there's good news: iOS 4.2 works quite well, very fast and without problems.

Let's remember that the iPhone 3G is a mobile phone whose platform was also used for the first GSM iPhone, the one presented in 2007, and therefore has only 128Mb of RAM… four times less than an iPhone 4, and half of an iPhone 3GS.