iOS 4.0 performance on the iPhone 3G

If you’ve got an iPhone 3G, you’ve probably noticed that after upgrading to iOS 4.0, the phone’s performance is, shall we say, less than ideal.

Apart from upgrading to a newer iPhone, here’s two ways I’ve found that help mitigate the problem until iOS 4.1 is released (which is said to fix a lot of these performance problems):

Deactivate Spotlight

Go to Settings->General->Home Button->Spotlight Search, and uncheck all the boxes. Reboot your phone.

This had a bit of an impact on the performance, but it was still very, very sluggish. Also, no Spotlight search, of course.

Cold-reboot your iPhone

Press and hold the Home and the Sleep-Button for about two minutes. Your iPhone will display the power off screen, then start to reboot, and then simply turn off. You may now release the home and sleep buttons.

Now start your iPhone again. The boot process will take much longer than normal (only this one time), but afterwards everything should be noticeably faster.

The “trick” here is that the iPhone normally boots of a disk image, that basically saves the state of the iPhone when it’s shut down. By doing a complete cold reboot, you prevent the phone from creating the disk image, and it has to reload everything from scratch.

This trick comes courtesy via someone on Twitter, but I’m afraid I forgot who it was. Apologies.

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Know any other tricks? Mail me!