I've been continuing to follow along with possible "fixes" for the ios4 slowdown issue with the old 3G and apparently
Apple is going to investigate the problems.
Anyway, I found some sites that suggest turning off Spotlight Search, followed by a double hard reset to mitigate some of the slowdowns. I've done this and it hasn't really helped much. Other suggestions are to turn off the Lyric display in the iPod app.
Nothing has helped. My 3G will reliably hang every 30 minutes or so of use.
What's most frustrating is that my iPhone4 order was canceled shortly after midnight a few days ago. I've been waiting well over a month and I'd gotten as far as the "Ships in 3-5 days" thing on my order status when the it was suddenly canceled. I called, of course, when I finally noticed. Despite Apple very quickly charging me (over a month ago, well ahead of the shipment, mind you), they canceled, and didn't give me an satisfactory answer or reason as to why. Turns out my insta-charge was going to be refunded within several "days." Um, no. I was bounced around to various people and eventually got ahold of a sympathetic person. He promised that my order will "almost definitely" be shipping within the next 2-3 weeks (this was last week). And on top of it, the best he could do was have the phone shipped to an Apple store. It was with no small amount of difficulty that I got him to have it shipped to the closest Apple store to me, which is a 20-minute drive. An e-mail will be sent to me and I have 24 hours to pick up the phone.
The other day, I bought 2 gigs of RAM from Crucial. Shortly after I placed the order, I was e-mailed that the memory was out of stock and when I wrote back asking about when it might be shipped, the rep told me it would be 7-10 days. I had paid a few bucks extra to get the 3-5 days shipping (or whatever it was--inside of a week) and before I was even able to ask about that, the rep said he was going to refund that shipping. It's just a couple of bucks, but I appreciate the gesture. And it turns out the sticks actually shipped sooner than expected and will be here on Monday via UPS. And I found that out from an actual
phone call. A call made by Crucial.
Apple has my money. I don't have a phone. They are also shipping the phones to other countries now. That's nice, but I really feel that all outstanding domestic orders should have been fulfilled first. This is easily the longest I have ever waited for an online order of any kind and I've been buying things online since 1997.
I expect it's simply an issue of Apple running out of stock. I can understand that.
What I don't like is being charged the full amount before my item was shipped. No other company I've ever dealt with online charges me the full amount before the item ships. At the most, it's involved a deposit, but even that is rare (when buying computers). My iPhone's free shipping to my home has turned into free shipping to the nearest Apple store. An inconvenience, but at this point I'd even be willing to drive to Jersey to pick up the thing.