iOS 4 on the iPhone 3G sucks. I can say this from experience, as I have a bogged-down, slow as dirt iPhone 3G sitting beside me right now. I loaded up iOS 4 on the thing a week or two ago, and after tweaking and fiddling with the darn thing since then, I’ve been unable to increase performance. If you have an iPhone 3G and want the latest and greatest Apple OS on it, HOLD OFF. Help may be coming.

In a recent report from The Wall Street Journal, Apple is busy looking into the no doubt thousands of reports of poor iOS 4 performance on the iPhone 3G. Again, speaking from experience, app crashes and slow-as-molasses performance are just two side effects of installing iOS 4 on the 3G.

If you’ve already made the update to iOS 4, and want nothing more than to get back to a build with the performance levels you’re used to… the good folks at lifehacker have published a must-read guide. It will step you through the process of downgrading your iPhone 3G’s OS to 3.1.3 from version 4. The instructions are clear, heck, there’s even videos of each step to help walk you through the process. Check out the guide right here.

Again, if you’re on an iPhone 3G and are running iOS 4, you’re probably experiencing some issues. To fix these issues, try the downgrade via the guide above. If you haven’t upgraded yet, DON’T. Your daily life will be much calmer as a result, not having to fight a laggy iPhone 3G all day. In the meantime, know in the back of your mind that Apple is addressing these issues… quite honestly, whether they fix the issues or not, I don’t really care… chances are I’m upgrading to an iPhone 4 anyway. But for those that are going to stick it out with the iPhone 3G, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that these performance issues get fixed.