Man, oh man. I do have a love hate relationship with my iPhone…It is essential for me to run my business, yet it.is.so.slow. I’m still using a 3GS and it’s only an 8gb version, so at times I want to pitch it…especially when my 8 year old said it was too slow for her to look up a word for her homework. Gah!

So, I went to my best friend google and started to search as to why my phone is so slow and how I could improve the situation. Low and behold, I discovered a few things…this might be old news to most of you, but if I can help one person, then it was worth posting.

1. An 8gb iPhone ends up only being a 6.2gb phone because the operating system you need to run your phone takes up a crazy amount of space. I dunno, I guess I’m naive, but I thought the operating system wasn’t included in the usage… (I can see my brother shaking his head as we speak…).

2. I came across this fantastic article and it really helped explain things. I’ve listed some of the highlights below, but it is a good and quick read 🙂

3. I actually don’t have that many apps on my phone so I couldn’t figure out why they were taking up so much space…according to the article mentioned, it’s music and videos that are the killer…So, my sons pirate birthday party playlist got the axe! Tip: I thought you had to resync your phone to remove the songs that you don’t want. Nope, you just go to the song and swipe your finger right and magically a little delete button shows up! Ahhhh! The angels sang 🙂 Other apps may be small in size, but their documents and data take up a lot of space. For instance, my Ottawa Public Library app is only 3.5mb in size, but it’s documents and data is 279mb. This is the information that is stored on the app, but I can’t really see a way around that as I don’t want to delete anything or I’d forever be getting late charges! Just take a peak and this might explain why some apps are taking up more room than others and then delete the ones you don’t use.

4. Next up was my Safari app…if you’ve never cleared your history, cookies and data, DO IT! I think that cleared up 1GB on it’s own!!

5. And finally, since we all love taking a million and one photos with our phones (*raises hand* guilty!), spend a little time cleaning off your phone and backing up those photos. AND PRINT THEM. (Stepping off of soapbox now…) In addition, I took off photo stream…it was driving me bonkers as I’d have 3 versions of 1 image. One in the camera roll (where I took the photo), one in the library, where I sorted it too and then another in the photostream as it backs itself up there. I think I got that right. It messes with my brains. I miss film. That is all.

My phone definitely has more free space now, but, sadly it is still slow. I think that has more to do with running the latest operating system on an older phone than anything, but maybe I’m wrong. If you know the answer to this burning question or have any other cool tips and tricks, please feel free to comment below! I’d love to know if there’s something major I’m missing!

Hope this helped!
Shona xo

ps. The cool cover on my iPhone is a hard shell from getuncommon.com. It is AWEOME! I have dropped this phone more times than I care to admit, but that hard shell has protected it beautifully! Oh! And I miss my son’s baby surfer dude hair…sigh…