Upgraded to iPhone 3G--Overall Device Speed Increase?

[Riemann Zeta]

So I finally decided to take the plunge and upgraded my original to the 3G over the weekend. Interestingly, the 3G model with OS2.2 seems more responsive than the original iPhone. I am not talking about the internet bandwidth--obviously that is faster because the network is faster--I am talking about the responsiveness of the OS and apps themselves. I did a "restore from backup" on the new phone, so my apps, preferences and configuration is also the same (lessening the chance that this is a simple 'reformat speedup').

How is this possible? I thought that the 3G had exactly the same underclocked hardware as the first model, with an almost identical firmware image (save for the 3G modem baseband) and that the 2nd iPod touch contained a newer, far more powerful CPU/VPU chipset (not only a newer part, but less underclocked as well). Hence, the original and the 3G should be absolutely identical in performance, right? What gives?

 

[nickspohn]

Well, you could of gotten all the 2.X updates on your first iPhone. The iPhone processor is very underclocked, which helps save battery. Over time, they have increased the speed of it. But you know, over time this build and code quality has gotten better. Less crashes of things, things work more smoothly, that is the general idea of the firmware updates.

So in other words, nothing hardware was added to increase speed, but yet the software build of the phone was increased.

 

[Riemann Zeta]

I just find it strange that I had an original iPhone with OS2.2 (complete restore, not upgraded from 2.0-->2.1-->...) and now an iPhone 3G with OS2.2 and am finding the 3G model more responsive (not just with internet-related tasks, but overall). Maybe Apple does do a little device-specific tweaking of the firmware.