Improve Performance and Battery Life for IPhone 3G/3GS (IOS 4.x)

Since the time Apple released a major new version of IOS for the IPhone a few months back namely IOS 4.0 users with the older IPhone 3G had numerous performance problems after installation of the new OS. Since then with every new iteration such as 4.1 (and now upcoming 4.2) it is claimed that many of these performance issues are going to be resolved. However, despite Apple claims newer version of the IOS still run slower on the older IPhone 3G devices (as compared to 3.x releases of IOS) and may I add even IPhone 3GS users might feel the heat as well. As in my experience even on IPhone 3GS sometimes for no apparent reason GUI becomes very sluggish to respond and at that time only viable option is to restart the device. But then after some time you have to repeat the same cycle again.

One thing I noticed is that if you try to put minimum number of applications in the background with the IOS 4.x multitasking – the better. As you continue to use the applications (games also) they start to accumulate in the background (resident in memory) and in fact you can view them in the app switcher if home button is double tapped. It is a pity that there is no apparent option to disable this behavior (to automatically put applications in the background)! In addition these resident applications are also eating up memory. So my suggestion is that if you are experiencing slowdown on your IPhone then you might try to force quitting the applications from the Application switcher tab. This should help to improve the responsiveness of the IPhone. I have tried this with IPhone 3GS and it improves the situation. It should also help on the older IPhone 3G devices as well may be even more so.

The same tip is also valid to get some extra juice from your IPhone battery. In my experience some communication/messaging related applications are particularly resource intensive for example Skype, Nimbuzz and Fring etc. So try to force quite them if you don’t need them in the background running all the time. To increase battery life I found it is also useful to decrease the screen brightness a bit from the Settings.

So these are few tips that I had and wanted to share to increase the responsiveness and battery life of the older IOS 4.x based devices. So if you found some effective tips for these issues please do share here!