If iOS4 on a 3G sucks… downgrade to 3.1.3 and get happy aga

--> goto iOS 3.1.3
Many of the 3G users out there have a problem – after upgrading to iOS 4 (4.0.1 / 4.0.2) their iDevice didn’t act as expected anymore. It got slow – painfully slow.
The reason so far is clear – there is a new hardware on the market, the iPhone4. And this device is much faster than the 3G. So Apple restricted the functionality of iOS4 on these devices to a lower level (no multitasking, no background image… but the device was still slow. Sometimes it really is hard to believe that this piece of SW found it’s way out of the holy rooms of Apple to our 3G devices…
In the meanwhile Apple picked up the issue and it seems that they are really working on this issue to get it solved – iOS 4.1 is on it’s way… if we can believe in all the posts on twitter / blogs over the last days. But what can you do if you need NOW a solution for your problems?
First way:
- restrict the amount of downloaded mails to a minimum (if you are downloading e.g. 200 mails – shrink it to 25 mails)
- stop spotlight searching / indexing your stuff on the iPhone by deselecting all checkmarks in the spotlight search preferences (located at ‘Settings’, ‘General’, ‘Home Button’, ‘Spotlight Search’)
These tips works without touching your iOS4 installation – just setting it up in a different way. But – if this is still not working for you, you will have to revert to the good, old ‘iOS 3.1.3’.
Second way:
- download the iOS 3.1.3 version here
- connect your iPhone to your computer and open iTunes
- put the iPhone into the maintenance mode by pressing the ‘power on/off’ and the ‘home’-button for several seconds.
The display will show the ‘Slide to power off’ message – but keep holding the buttons here until the display switches to black;
Now release the ‘power on / off’ button – but keep holding the ‘home’-button - iTunes will show you that your device is now in ‘Maintenance mode’ – release now the ‘home’-button and confirm this by clicking ‘OK’
- Load now the downloaded iOS 3.1.3 image by clicking on the ‘Restore’-button while holding the ‘Alt’ key on your keyboard (Mac / PC);
select the downloaded ‘ipsw’ file in the displayed file-dialog - downgrading will start and goes ahead for several minutes – during this time a error ‘1015’ will be displayed but can be ignored
- after finishing the downgrading process you will have to exit the ‘maintenance mode’ – therefor use this little Mac application ‘RecBoot‘
I don’t know if there’s a version for windows – google for it, I’m on a mac 😉 - after downloading RecBoot you have to start the app ‘RecBoot Exit only’ within the RecBoot folder
- click the ‘Exit Recovery Mode’ button
- Finished
Don’t restore a backup if it’s not a 3.1.3 backup! Use this opportunity to clean up your device 🙂
This way of restoring the older version is only available for the iPhone 3G – the 3GS is using special keys and therefor going back to a prior version is not so easy for these devices.
As always on such a guide: use it / do it on your OWN risk!