out of curiousity, what were you experiencing different....?
Doing the manual install, my WiFi speeds seemed to improve fairly noticably.
3G/4G was a different story. My 3G/4G sigmals werent as strong, I would drop out of any signal at all, into roaming often. This is in places that I have had signal for over 2 years on my Palm Pre and with the Nexus S.
Even when I had signal, my 3G/4G speeds seemed quite a bit slower. I dont have any speed test data to back this up.
I called into sprint about 5 days into this mess and told them about it. They mentioned something about a hard reset. I think they did that on their end. I dont know what exactly they did, if anything at all, but my 3G/4G speed increased dramatically after that. I could now hold a signal in the usual places and my speeds were as fast as they were before on 3G/4G. I never had the issues before the update that others complained of.
It seems to me that Sprint reset something on my profile. I cant say for sure if thats what happened. But it sure seems like it. that or a huge coincidence.