iOS4 was horribly slow for me, until I jailbroke and enabled multitasking (NOT the background - this slows things down a lot)... Multitasking made stuff a bit snappier again, until you have too many apps open, then you have to manually kill them for some reason. This is weird, since normally these apps should have been suspended to disk? Maybe it has to do with the cache-size of apps that stay in memory, which is a bit too big to fit in the 3G's 128mb RAM?
This could also improve things: doing a hard reboot (holding home + lock until it reboots - don't slide to power off) and when +- 15 seconds in the reboot process (with the apple on the screen), hard reboot again. I saw someone suggest that this would clear all saved app states and speed up things too. Not sure if this is true, I jailbroke my phone too quickly after that to be sure this would have helped somethings.
I do know that multitasking clearly enables you to access applications that you use a lot a lot quicker. I usually keep my phone & messages apps open at all time, and kill the rest.
I doubt Apple "waits", they prefer to limit them-self to a focussed feature set "done right". Apparently - the entire iPhone 1st gen was designed and developed by a very very small team. This helps consistency, and avoids having some parts of the team not knowing what another part is doing. If they then - like they did for the iPhone - start with a clean API and environment with future expandability in mind, you start out with a solid architecture on which they can build. The downside however is that the initial product has a very small/basic feature-set. Upside is, its core features are (mostly) "done right" and behave consistently. A ton of features, which the competition already has, are missing, but nobody uses them there because of complexity or weird behavior.
Copy-paste is actually a perfect example here. I have had many smartphones and PDAs (iPaq, Nokia communicator, Sony-Ericsson P910, P990 and a few others) - and in none of them I actually ever used the copy-paste (if it was there), or at least certainly not as much as I do now on my iPhone. Worst clipboard implementation I've ever seen was that when I copied text in a one application, apparently it was placed on the clipboard as UTF8 or Ansi text. No problem so far - but apparently, if your target app then only accepted ascii text - too bad, no copy-paste. Try explaining that-one to a normal user, good luck... I then prefer the focussed on core-features, "no clipboard" approach instead of a confusing, non-working or unreliable feature you end up not using at all.
Now I'm not an Apple fanboy, but I do have an iPhone (only Apple product I own). I'll be the last to say that it's perfect and everything is entirely "done right", but from what I've seen - from a user-point of view - it's without a doubt the best thing out-there. Yes there are on paper "better phones" with "more features" which are "more open", but whatever, it just works. On PC I might be considered a power-user, but my phone is a vital part of my life. I don't want to mess around on it too much - it has to simply work. I did consider buying an Android phone for the sole purpose of playing with it, but I simply don't have the time for that at the moment. I might still do this in the future, after having played with 1.5, 1.6, 2.1 and 2.2 on various models of friends - I have to say, I'm impressed by the technical improvements, but still - the user-experience is just horrible. There are some cool ideas, like the notifications - but the execution is mind-blowing irritating after a while. It feels to me as a linux desktop 10 years ago: editing your config file with vi is easy. Designed by an engineer, for an engineer.
This could also improve things: doing a hard reboot (holding home + lock until it reboots - don't slide to power off) and when +- 15 seconds in the reboot process (with the apple on the screen), hard reboot again. I saw someone suggest that this would clear all saved app states and speed up things too. Not sure if this is true, I jailbroke my phone too quickly after that to be sure this would have helped somethings.
I do know that multitasking clearly enables you to access applications that you use a lot a lot quicker. I usually keep my phone & messages apps open at all time, and kill the rest.