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Posts Tagged ‘iOS4’

Unknown iOS4 Features You Should Know

June 30th, 2010 3 comments
As soon as Apple released iOS4, blogs have began posting their reviews, impressions and 101 guides on it. These posts and reviews emphasized many excellent features like Folders for Applications, Unified Mail Box, Threaded Email (similar to how Gmail works), Multitasking, iBooks and a few others.
Here are three features that are less known but very useful:
  • Photo resizing when sending a photo attached to an email. Options include: small, medium, large and original size.
  • Copy a phone number and paste it into the dialer. No need to memorize or write a number on a piece of paper and then key it in. All you need to do is copy a phone number into the clipboard, then open the phone app, switch to the dialer tab and put your finger on the number display area until the Paste menu becomes visible. Voilà.
  • Character count in text message compose window. Very useful for the ones who don’t have an unlimited text messaging plan and want to make sure a text message does not exceed 160 chars

Posted via email from Jay Meydad’s Posterous



Categories: How-To, iPhone, Tips Tags: , , , ,

How To Speed Up iPhone’s iOS4 Upgrade Process By 90%

June 22nd, 2010 1 comment

Yesterday Apple released the much anticipated iOS4 and I decided to upgrade my iPhone 3G to it.

The upgrade process is managed by iTunes and has three steps:
1. Backup existing data files
2. Download the ~350MB OS file
3. Copy & install files to the iPhone

For some unknown reason, the backup process takes a long longer than a typical backups that happen whenever you sync your phone. It could even take 2-3 hours (!) if you have lots of data on your device.

While I was doing it, the progress bar moved very very slow and gives the feeling that the process is hung. In addition, whenever you get a phone call the process terminates and you have to restart it.

After spending about 3-4 hours on 2-3 failed tries I tried a work-around that worked well and cut up the backup process time by 90%. If you are one of the many
who are experiencing the same issue, you might want to give it a try:

Before backup & upgrade, sync your iPhone one more time with minimal amount of data one it. This means that you have to delete all music, video, photos and apps that are on it (but leave mail, calendar, notes and other important settings). The steps for doing that are:

1. Connect your iPhone to your computer but DO NOT start the upgrade process
2. Select the Apps, Music, Videos, Photos tabs and uncheck the main Sync checkbox
3. Then sync your one more time iPhone. This will free up most of the disk space on your iPhone. Once this sync is completed you should see it in the Capacity bar that is displayed on the Summary tab
4. Finally, start the Upgrade process by clicking on “Check for Update” button in iTunes’s iPhone’s Summary tab
5. Backup should take about 5 minutes and the entire upgrade process should be over within 20 minutes.

Welcome to iOS4. Enjoy.



Categories: How-To, Mobile, Tips Tags: , , , , , ,