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Speed up your iPhone

iPhone 3.0 was said to be faster than any of its predecessors and it surely did seem faster after the first install. However, with the time, it came back to its sluggish self.  I’m sure most of you must have felt the same and wished that there was some way to improve the performance. Well, there is a way to do it now, if you have a jailbroken phone and are ready to take some calculated risks.

One of the users um35h on xSellize forum has performed a little experiment to identify unnecessary demons and delete them to free up some memory space and improve the performance of the device. He has been updating the list of safe to remove demons, which when deleted create a little or no impact on how the Phone and its apps behave in terms of functionality, but improve the over all performance. A lot of other users have also tried it on their own devices and have got varied results . Some people could get up to 10-15 MB of additional free memory, while the others were still at the same level.

Another interesting tip was to delete the unused language files from the apps. There are as many as 30 ‘.lproj’ files for different languages in each of the default iPhone apps. Normally, a user would use only one language out of the bunch, hence, the others ones can be removed without an issue. Deleting the other language files would make the app parse less number of files at the start-up, making it load faster.

To carry out these hacks, one has to get an access to iPhone file system, which is pretty easy to do on a JailBroken device. There are apps such as iFile which can give you an access right from within the device, or one can SSH using a computer to gain access and delete the stuff. There are detailed instruction on how to carry out these hacks (and how to be safe, in case anything goes wrong) on the forum here.

I haven’t tried any of these  yet, but if any of you daring souls, carry out this experiment, please update us here too.

Image courtesy: interestingkid

Tags: hack, iPhone, Jailbreak, speed up

iPhone 3GS in India

The new iPhone 3GS has been officially announced. Its a new improved version of the iPhone 3G, which was launched last year. India was one of the last few countries to get the iPhone and it still stands at the same spot.

iPhone 3G generated a lot of buzz all across the globe last year. It however, failed to convert the hype to sales in India. It was a revolutionary device with the latest and best technology implemented in smartest way. But features that appeal to an Indian consumer the most, such as cut-copy-paste, MMS, Video recording, bluetooth etc. were missing. The deal-breaker, however, was the price. It got priced almost 3 times the price of a regular phone. It was rejected outright in the Indian market and was dubbed as a high profile good for nothing show off gadget.

This year, Apple is back with a better hardware and an OS upgrade with a huge array of new features, including those which were missing earlier. It has a better battery life now and is almost twice as fast. There is a new version with double the storage capacity too. In short, Apple has more or less fixed up all the major drawbacks that were present in the earlier releases.

The prices for the new version is in tune with the last year’s prices, its $299 for 32GB and $199 for the 16GB versions. These are the reduced prices, with a 2 year contract with AT&T, applicable only in the US. Now, there is no 8GB iPhone 3GS (yet), but there is a 8GB iPhone 3G which is now available at $99 only (with a two year contract, of course).

For the Indian market too, I think, the pricing would be similar to last year’s pricing, 30K for 16GB and 36K for 32GB models. There is no intimation for the price drop for the iPhone 3G yet, but it can happen in August, when the new version is launched. However, I believe the lowest the prices for the old version would get is around 24-26K (it at least seems so from the pricing  for the unlocked device in the US).

With the OS 3.0 and 3GS, Apple has got everything right for the phone and its features. However, the price still remains a major concern. If Apple can manage to bring down the price to a 20-22k range, that is when, I think, the Indian masses would start considering it as an option.
One can’t really expect the latest 3GS line to be made available in anything lower than the 30K mark, but the 8GB 3G version can surely hit the mark. Though, it wouldn’t get video recording features with it, but if its priced right, it would still make a good competition for the other phones in the market.

But that would be only ‘if’ Apple actually reduces the price, else it would continue to remain just a show-off gadget in the Indian market, like the earlier version.

Image : Gizmodo.

Tags: 3GS, Airtel, India, iPhone, pricing

Happy Fool’s Day

Like every year this year too Fool’s Day was celebrated with a lot of enthusiasm. The only difference this year was that this time my primary targets were my twitter friends. But, as you know twitter has a reputation of having the most smart people on it, most of my tricks failed badly.

Nevertheless, I still had a good time cooking up these pranks. Here are the ones that I tried playing on with.

1. Akhil Bharatiya Vanar Sena (ABVS) protesting against Fool’s Day celebrations, calling it against Indian Culture.

This was the first story which I cooked up. I created a fake news paper clip using a fake clip generator site. As that pic was too easy to identify as fake, I took a pic from my mobile phone camera to make it look authentic and posted up on twitpic.

Some guys took a notice of this and retweeted it. Some people made fun of the guys protesting against such event and laughed at it. Though, no one caught it as fake, but it did not create much buzz either.

2. “Twitter now recognizes your password“.
I then tried reusing an old trick by tweeting that if you happen to type your password in a tweet it converts them to dots and doesn’t display it.

This one also caught some attention but I think it was too risky for any one to take a chance and give away the password trying it. Some of the smart tweeps also caught me on this one. In all, it failed without much life.

3. Next up was my idea for the twitter’s new Background and Theme copy commands. I tweeted that now it was now possible to copy someone’s theme/background by just sending a tweet in the format “COPYBG <username> or COPYTH <username>”. But this one also fell flat.

I was very disappointed when this one didn’t work. I thought that this would sound genuine and some tweeps might give it a try, but sadly enough, it wasn’t even noticed.

When this failed, I moved back and decided that this would be end to all the pranks for this year.But the way I am, couldnt take defeat so easily . I gave my final shot with the big story

4. “Ajmal Kasab found dead in Arthur Road prison“. I posted this as a RT from @ibnlive to make it sound authentic, and as expected, I soon got some quick responses, some rubbishing the news  and some with a fair amount of belief on it. To make this more effective, I added a fake snapshot of Kasab’s article from ibn’s site too.

This snapshot really got the heads turning . I had left a fair amount to scope for people to identify it as a fake (see Arthur Road spelling). Some smart people did identify this as a prank and spread the news. This probably was the most successful of the lot and got almost 200 hits in 15 mins.

So this was all I had in my box for this year. Taking a cue from this year’s performance, I’ve already started planning for next year. What am I planning? something bigger and smarter.. Beware.. I’m gonna get you..

Tags: April Fool, Fool's Day, Fun, Life, twitter