In a few months, my iPhone 3G will be three years old. It's been a great phone, despite consistently mediocre service from the AT&T voice and data networks. More than a phone, my iPhone was my first truly portable computer and completely changed the way that computers fit into my life. Having been a professional Microsoft server guy for over a decade, the switch to Apple was a radical and tumultuous one. Looking back on my reaction to the original iPhone, I'm amazed at how much I missed the point entirely:

Making a phone with no buttons is fucking brilliant, Steve Jobs. Touch screens never wear out or crack or anything.

The iPhone is bigger than the SLVR and the Chocolate and has no keys. Apple's track record with battery life on the iPod ranged from shit to OK, but cell phone battery life is much more vital to people day in and day out. And if the touch screens are flaky, this could be a huge flop.

Wow, how wrong I was.

See, I was still thinking of "smartphone" as a phone that does some computer-like things. Steve Jobs and the Apple crew realized that a great smartphone would be a portable computer that had, among other things, a phone application. That idea really did change everything.

I was impressed with the first iPhone, but held out for the second version. I wanted third-party apps, 3G data and a GPS chip and the iPhone 3G delivered on all accounts. And I've been happy with my iPhone 3G until now.

Yesterday, Apple released version 4.3 of iOS. It has lots of great new features, including Wi-Fi personal hotspot and a faster version of the Safari web browser. But the new operating system won't run on my iPhone 3G. After a little over two years, it's just too old. I'm not upset at Apple. I think this is just the new rate of change in mobile computing. Two years and upgrade.

With only a few months until the iPhone 5 is sure to be released, I'm not about to jump to the iPhone 4 right now. But, I will be pre-ordering the iPhone 5 on Verizon as soon as it's available.

My last blog post is now listed as a reference on the Wikipedia page for the iPhone 3G. So, is that a big deal? I could have just put the link there myself (I didn't).

I feel pretty good about it, because I posted a tip that fixes a fairly widespread problem that people are having. It drove a lot of traffic (for me) to my blog. So, it was gratifying that someone on Wikipedia chose my blog post as the representative reference on the issue. It gave me a sense that what I wrote has some credibility.

But the more I think about it, the more the whole thing seems bizarre.

Can Wikipedia give credibility to my post, when Wikipedia itself is relying on my post to be credible?

I think I've fallen down the rabbit hole.

If you're like me, you upgraded your iPhone 3G to iOS4 as soon as it was available. Sure, multitasking wasn't supported on the 3G, but features like app folders and integrated mailbox were too cool to pass up. Like me (and many others), maybe you also noticed that after the upgrade your iPhone 3G was slow, unresponsive, lagging and prone to app crashes. Well, I came across a tip that fixed all my performance issues. Thought I'd pass it along. Maybe it will help you, too:

1. Turn off Spotlight Search: Go to Settings | General | Home Button | Spotlight Search, and uncheck everything
2. Reboot your iPhone 3G: Just a normal power down and restart
3. Turn Spotlight Search back on: Go back to same screen as step 1, and re-check everything you unchecked in Step 1

I'm not sure if there is corruption or a compatibility issue with the Spotlight Search database. Whatever the issue is, this did the trick for me. YMMV, but give it a try. It can't hurt.

UPDATE: I've been reading more about this issue, and wanted to add a bit of information about my upgrade process. It was not a smooth upgrade by any means. In order to get iOS 4.0 working in the first place, I had to first sync my iPhone 3G, and do a backup. Then I had to do a restore install of iOS 4.0 and sync my apps and data back to the iPhone. After that, I did a hard reboot of the 3G. I didn't do the above steps for Spotlight Search until some time after I upgraded again to iOS 4.0.1. Some people have been saying that the restore install and/or hard reboots have improved their iPhone 3G performance. My performance definitely did not improve until after I turned Spotlight Search off and back on. However, it's possible that the restore install and/or hard reboot played a role in fixing my phone as well.

Let me know in the comments if it works for you, too.

I've been looking for a way to consolidate push out messages and links to all of my various social media accounts like Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed and my personal blog at DaveKawalec.com. It looks like Posterous might fit the bill. It seems to be great for those things that are bit shorter than a blog post and longer than a tweet. My friend Frank is using Posterous to host his blog (www.frankneill.com/), and I love what Guy Kawasaki is doing with Holy Kaw (http://holykaw.alltop.com/) through Posterous. So, I figure it's time to give it a shot.

I think I've disabled most of the other auto-post mechanisms that link my stuff together now. But, if you see a few duplicate posts here and there, please forgive me while I work out the kinks.

- Dave