iOS 4.1 brought much-needed stability and performance improvements to the original release; iOS 4.2 brought iOS 4’s features to the iPad, which arguably needed them even more badly than other iOS devices; iOS 4.3 is polishes the original iOS 4 release to a dull sheen without changing anything fundamental to the experience.

For those of you with supported devices, there’s basically no reason not to download the iOS 4.3 update. You might not notice or use each and every one of its enhancements, but it’s certainly not going to break anything. This is just about as mature as iOS 4 is going to get - we may see the odd update to fix security or stability issues or possibly to bring the Verizon iPhone 4 into the fold, but this is likely the end of the line. If you don't like what you see in iOS 4, your best bet is to wait patiently for iOS 5, which we'll probably see more of later this spring.

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  • tipoo - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link

    Yeah...Still sucks though, considering the 8GB Touch they were selling last year was 2'nd gen hardware, thats an awfully quick end of support.
  • PrinceGaz - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link

    I would have thought that iTunes Streaming would be the most useful feature for 8GB 2nd gen iTouch users (like myself). Having only 8GB of space (in practice less than 7GB) onboard for all your music, video, and of course apps means being able to stream music and especially videos/movies from home when in wifi coverage would be a great addition, and one which would certainly be well within the capability of the hardware (it can already stream videos from YouTube, BBC iPlayer, etc).
  • vol7ron - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    Just upgraded... don't really see a difference, except Safari was like "can't open this page" - is that how it's supposed to be faster?
  • bplewis24 - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link

    It's opening the page so fast, your eyes aren't able to process the render... so you only see the subliminal image by default.

    Brandon
  • tipoo - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link

    Its just saving you from porn by not showing any of the web. Its a feature!
  • sprockkets - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link

    "Sorry, iPhone 3GS users, but this feature won’t be available for you."

    Officially, lol.

    "Still MIA is an improved implementation of the AirPrint feature, introduced in iOS 4.2, which was originally intended to allow iOS users to print to any printer shared via iTunes by a PC or Mac. This feature was scaled back at the eleventh hour to support only direct printing to a handful of mostly-new printers built to support the feature. Workarounds exist to get it working with any printer, but official support for any ol’ printer has never materialized, and Apple has never offered much of an explanation."

    One apple nutcase thought it is because HP has the methods of doing so all patented.
  • kigoi - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link

    those sunspider results for the 4.3 iphones are both off their typical scores by about 15%. do they have background processes running?
  • Azsen - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link

    Have the provided a function to close down all the open apps at once? It's so slow having to do it one by one.
  • MobiusStrip - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link

    Have they provided an option to close apps when you "close" them under Mac OS? Nope.

    Apple has some kind of stick up its ass about quitting things. They love to see resources wasted. Never mind the fact that the user manually launched the app, so he should be able to manually quit it just as easily. Otherwise, why not launch every app on the system at startup?

    More Apple hypocrisy.
  • Vadatajs - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link

    What the hell does that have to do with anything? This isn't about OSX.

    Furthermore, Mac OS has always closed applications when you _quit_ them.

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