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4

I have recently upgraded my iPhone 3G to iOS4 and there is some noticeable performance issues will some of the basic tasks (text messaging, loading application, etc.)

I have restarted my iPhone and that only resolves the performance issues temporarily.

Is there any way to speed up my iPhone 3G with iOS4 installed?

Update

I have upgraded to iOS version 4.0.1 yesterday and a lot of the performance issues seem to be resolved. I still see some issues with trying to run apps while listening to music/podcasts.

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2  
I've been noticing the same thing on my 3G since upgrading to iOS4. Mail and Messages sometimes take quite a while to fully load. – David Barry Jul 14 '10 at 22:04

5 Answers

up vote 6 down vote

According to this post on Gizmodo you can edit the preferences for the Spotlight search feature for a speed boost:

Go to Settings->General->Home->Search Results (Settings->General->Spotlight Search on later iOS levels), and shut off everything you don't need (I disabled Music, Podcasts, Video and Audiobooks; leaving Contacts, apps, Notes, Mail and Calendar checked). Made my phone a lot quicker, more like it was with v2 (I'm still running v3.1.2, jailbroken).

Before, there was a good 2-4 second lag when exiting or loading an app. Now it's back to it's old speediness

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Thanks, that solved the issue. You should update the path to Settings->General->Home Button->Spotlight Search – Michael Kniskern Jul 29 '10 at 19:51
Thanks very much Rich, huge improvement with this tip. Evernote in particular loads dramatically faster now. – David Barry Jul 29 '10 at 23:46
I did this a while back, and while I think it had some effect, the improvement was not huge. Even with version 4.1, which was supposed to fix this, at least my iPhone 3G is still way more sluggish in most things compared to pre-4.0 versions. – Jonik Sep 17 '10 at 23:03
up vote 3 down vote

Reset the phone to factory defaults and reconfigure it. It's a lot of work but the performance is almost as good as iPhone OS 3.1.

I've just tried this yesterday and I'm very happy with the results. If you use GMail and/or Exchange accounts (or others) to manage e-mails, contacts and calendars you'll only have to reconfigure your apps.

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Can you comment how is the performance after several days and with all the apps again on board? – Eduardo Molteni Jul 29 '10 at 14:53
up vote 2 down vote

Apparently doing a hard reset a couple of times in a row can improve the performance:

Speed Up iPhone 3G + iOS4 with a Hard Reset?

(via Lifehacker)

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3  
The sounds more like a band-aid than a permanent fix. I will try it out and monitor my phone's performance over the next few days. – Michael Kniskern Jul 14 '10 at 23:43
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I still don't get why resetting twice it's better than one reset. – Eduardo Molteni Jul 21 '10 at 20:36
@Eduardo agreed. Resetting more than once sounds like an urban myth. The article doesn't say why that would help. – Andrew Ferrier Sep 3 '12 at 16:50
up vote 1 down vote

I'm wondering if some of the apps are holding onto memory when you close them, at least the ones that are utilizing the new multi-tasking functionality, and slowing it down? Try removing all of those from the multi-task tray thingy and see if that helps.

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Multitasking is not supported on the iPhone 3G. It is only supported on the 3GS and 4. – Michael Kniskern Jul 14 '10 at 22:46
Ah, didn't know that. Thanks. – ThoseDarnKids Jul 15 '10 at 0:34
Does deleting them from the multi-task bar close the app? It seems that if I've been using the phone for a while since a reset, deleting an icon, slids another into view, it seems that there may be 15 or 16 programs running, is there a way to tell the phone, "I'm done with this app, don't put it in the background" without the delete step? Kinda like the difference between minimize and close on the desktop>? – BillN Jul 29 '10 at 15:18
up vote 1 down vote

If you jailbreak, you can disable some unnecessary launch daemons...not a trivial task though. An interesting read, if nothing else lol.

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