I got 2 years of use with my 3G. Bought it in 2008 and after iOS 4.0.1 (2010) it was an unusable, laggy mess. I searched high and low for an answer but there really wasn't one other than "downgrade, but Apple isn't cool with that". I ran into the abandoned issue with my Captivate, but it was relatively easy to flash a custom ROM based off ASOP Gingerbread: download ROM Manager from the market, download a rom, and flash.