iOS 7.1 will help your iPhone 4 load apps a bit quicker.

(Credit: Sarah Tew/CNET)

Good news for iPhone 4 owners: Apple ‘s iOS 7.1 update, released earlier this week, should make your handset feel a little snappier.

The bad news: It still won’t run as fast as it did on iOS 6.

So writes Ars Technica, which conducted basic iPhone 4 performance tests with iOS 6.1.3, iOS 7, and 7.1. Specifically, the blog clocked load times for various stock apps like Camera, Messages, and Mail, and also the time to complete a cold boot.

The results: iOS 7.1 boots a bit more quickly than iOS 7 (43.1 seconds versus 45.1 seconds), but still slower than iOS 6 (31.1 seconds). As for apps, they also load a bit faster, though in mere tenths of a second in most cases. The biggest gain was found in Messages, which took 2.8 seconds to load under iOS 7 but just 1.5 seconds under iOS 7.1.

Here are the full results of the tests: