After all my whingeing about the catastrophic effect iOS 4 has on the iPhone 3G’s performance, I’ve become quite adept at downgrading it: I tried 4.0 and downgraded, then 4.0.1, and had to downgrade that. There are a few how-tos out there but I felt that some were too complex and that there were a few issues that weren’t being raised. So here’s my take on it: how to downgrade your 3G from iOS 4.0 or 4.0.1 to OS 3.1.3.

We can’t stress this enough: the downgrade will wipe your iPhone, and once you’re back on OS 3.1.3 you can’t restore data from backups made in iOS 4.0 or 4.0.1. That means if something hasn’t been copied from your iPhone to your computer and you’ve added it since upgrading to 4.0 or 4.0.1, you’ll lose it permanently.

Everybody loves the Old Spice viral campaign. It’s fresh, it’s funny, and it isn’t selling any more Old Spice. In fact, sales have fallen. Oops.

While there is little doubt about the viral hit’s  popularity – the official version has racked up 12.2 million impressions on YouTube - sales of Red Zone After Hours Body Wash have fallen by 7%.

Maybe the problem is, as Jezebel suggests, that it takes more than a funny viral campaign to shift many years of negative connotations, or that the target audience of young women simply don’t buy shower gel for their boyfriends.

The YouTube response vids were still inspired, though.

Update, 25 July: PR Week reports an overall 107% increase in Old Spice body wash sales, based on figures from Procter & Gamble.

Me, on the iPhone 4 Antennagate:

Apple has arguably the most loyal fans of any firm, and if it had addressed their concerns earlier and got them on its side, this supposed scandal would have remained a minor kerfuffle. Look how quickly and how widely fake Jobs emails – “it’s just a phone” – spread. A real one sent to every Apple ID could have stopped the whole thing before it started.

Apple’s holding a press conference to talk about the iPhone 4, presumably to address the ever-worsening signal strength PR mess. I think it’s been blown out of all proportion, but that’s partly Apple’s fault:

Instead of putting their hands up and saying “hey, it’s possible to bridge the antennas at one particular point and that can make the signal drop, but that’s the price you pay for the BEST RECEPTION ON AN IPHONE EVER!” they’ve said that the reason for disappearing bars is “both simple and surprising”.

Presumably it’s simple as in “let’s make something up! Simple!” and surprising as in “we’ll be surprised if anyone believes this”. In Apple PR land an issue that can be fixed with nail polish, a rubber band or a different grip can also be fixed with… software!

Microsoft is “hardcore” about Windows Slates, consumer-focused tablet computers. Me:

The danger here is that Microsoft approaches Windows slate devices from the wrong direction. If Microsoft asks “how can we stuff Windows into an iPad-style device?” rather than “how can we make the most awesome tablet computer ever made, a machine so mind-meltingly incredible that Steve Jobs fills his pants when he sees it?” then all we’ll end up with is a bunch of slightly smaller tablet PCs.

Don’t get me wrong. I like Windows 7, and I quite like tablet PCs. But I like the iPad much, much more. It’s an amazing device, and that’s largely because Apple hasn’t just sawed the keyboard off a MacBook Pro and jumped around the place shouting “and that’s magic!” like a demented Paul Daniels.

It’s easy to mock Apple – and I do – but the App Store’s had an enormous effect on software. So when I say app-y birthday, I mean it.

Being able to pick up apps for a few quid here, a few pence there encourages us to experiment, to forget our favourites when something brighter and better comes along – and that in turn means developers are constantly under pressure to raise their game, to create even better applications. Software hasn’t been this exciting since the online shareware explosion of the nineties.