Recently headspark got a couple of older iPhones for app testing purposes and among them was the famous 3G model,with 4.2.1 firmware. What struck us was that the system was running so slow, it was barely useable at times. Getting into the messages app would take a lot of time, dialing was sluggish, and the overall performance far from perfect. So what’s the plan to fix that? Many people think that the best way is to downgrade it to 3.1.3 or 3.0 firmware and then it’ll work. Sure it had less features, but at least it worked well, right?
Well sure, you can do that, but if you jailbreak or unlock it might not be the best idea. And even if you don’t, why skipping on all the new features that came with 4.0 ?
Luckily there IS a way of simply turning off the two main reasons your iPhone 3G runs so slow: Multitasking and Wallpaper under the icons. Multitasking is obvious – for a device with less RAM it’s probably not the best idea, right? But why the wallpaper? Surely the device can handle displaying a small image without a huge memory loss? Yeah, it probably would, but when you have a wallpaper enabled (the one behind the icons), the icons generate a real-time shadow effect on that wallpaper and the app names so they’re readable on any kind of wallpaper. And that shadow is taking our processing power that could be used elsewhere. So here’s how to fix those two things:
Here’s what to do
1. First go and download iPhone Explorer app. It’s a simple tool that you can use to get to your iPhone’s filesystem.
2. Open the app and connect your iPhone. It should recognize it and display two (or more) folders.
3. Go to root\System\Library\CoreServices\SpringBoard.app\ and look for N82AP.plist file
4. Copy the file N82AP.plist to your desktop and edit it with a text editor. You’re looking for two lines to alter:
<key>homescreen-wallpaper</key> <true/>
and
<key>multitasking</key> <true/>
Change “true” to “false” in both cases, save the file and copy it back to the folder. Click on replace, restart your iphone and feel the difference!