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Can erasing your iPhone's memory improve performance?
If you erase and restore your iPhone, does performance improve?
I won't bore you with the gory details, but recently I had cause to erase my iPhone. And by "erase," I mean venture into the Reset menu and tap "Erase All Content and Settings."
Leading up to this, my iPhone 3G was running like a snail through molasses. In recent months it had grown weirdly sluggish. I'd pick up my daughter's iPod Touch and be shocked at how much faster it was.
After the nerve-racking process of wiping the 3G and letting iTunes restore the backup (it was the first time in a year of iPhone ownership that I'd had to do this), I noticed something: It seemed peppier. A lot peppier.
I'm not sure why, but this definitely begs the question: Should iPhone owners perform this step every few months? Does the wipe-restore process somehow defrag the device and thereby optimize performance?
I honestly don't know, but I reckon you, our brilliant readers, can offer some insight. Am I crazy? Imagining things? Or right on the money? (That'd be nice for a change.) Share your thoughts in the comments.
Rick Broida, a technology writer for nearly 20 years, is the author of more than a dozen books. In addition to writing CNET's The Cheapskate blog, he oversees BNET's Business Hacks. Rick is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CBS Interactive. Disclosure. Deals found on The Cheapskate are subject to availability, expiration, and other terms determined by sellers. Follow Rick on Twitter at cheapskateblog.
While the upside to sandboxing every app with its own /documents or data directory protects you from having one app steal information from another, it also prohibits you from backing up your data in a manner to make it handy to restore in reinstall of the OS. Despite being a handheld unix computer, they've really dumbed down the iPhone for the lowest denominator of users, with no easy options for more knowledgeable users to get things done more efficiently.
You like being baited along like a sheep to slaughter? You do know that Apple is the biggest xerox company going right now, they innovate nothing, and overhype everything.
Overpriced, overhyped and bad copies of existing platforms, why? Why would you even defend this?
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by Kiai808
November 20, 2009 2:12 PM PST
- There's an app called Free Memory from ressessionapps.com that I have which clears all non essential background apps. Normally your supposed to have 40-50 megs of ram free. My phone was running sluggish and someone suggested this app. when I first ran this app, it said I had 3 megs free. after running the app, I had like 45 megs free and my phone was fast again. now I free up memory every day. So perhaps freeing the memory is enough instead of wiping your phone all the time.
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