Tag: iPhone

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Cracking open the iPhone 3G

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This never happens but…   I made the mistake of carrying too many things at once, my iPhone being one of them.  I dropped it…   on the tile.  It hurts to remember.

I picked up my phone to find that it was prompting me to insert a sim card.

The annoying no-sim popup.

NO!!! After over 2 years of such careful handling, had I really turned my iPhone into an iPod touch?

I removed the sim card and reinserted it.  Still no luck.  Then it crossed my mind that the top of the phone is where it hit the floor.  Perhaps something was bumped north inside of it.  So I shook it a bit.  Believe it or not it actually worked!  The sim card registered and all was good.  Or so I thought.  Over the next day the sim card warning was on and off.  I didn’t recieve my text messages even when it appeared to have a signal.

I decided I would have to open it up and see if there was anything obviously wrong.  Here’s how it went…

Got the tools. Yah, that's a toy Spiderman suction cup.  Lucky for me, my son is a Spiderman fanatic.
These are the only screws on the body of the iPhone 3G.
I used the suction cup to gently pull the face off the phone. Notice how my thumb was slightly over the edge of the glass to prevent it from popping off quickly.
I gently popped it open. I pulled it open very slowly to discover where the wires exist.
The ribbon wires are at the top of the phone so you want to open it from the bottom.
I had to open the phone all the way to discover how to disconnect the ribbon wires. Apple electronics are always a little different than the rest.
There were 3 ribbon wires. The first 2 unsnapped from the circuit board.
The third ribbon requires you to flip this latch up before it will slide out.
I used the paperclip to pop out the sim card so I could check the connections.
The sim card slides out revealing the 3 sim connection points.
I made sure that the 3 sim connectors were sticking up off the circuit board high enough to make contact with the sim card.

I was amazed by how much finely dusted pocket lint was trapped inside the phone!

I didn’t find anything obviously wrong so I cleaned it out and put it back together.  Yay!  It works!  I’m guessing that one of the “snap-on” connectors was knocked loose from the impact.

One thing about Apple products…   you will always need a tiny screw driver and you’ve got to be really gentle.  When I opened my old school apple mouse to clean it out, tiny parts went flying.  As long as you move slowly and carefully you can see how it’s assembled.  I encourage you to not be afraid of opening up your electronics! It may save you some cash every now and then.  This project really only took me about 30 minutes.

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How to Disable Multitasking on iPhone 3G and 3Gs iOS 4 Without Starting All Over

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Problem: If you were in too big of a hurry to install iOS 4 on your jailbroken iPhone 3G, you might be surprised and disappointed to find out that Apple’s multitasking really doesn’t work well, or at all. After opening a few apps it basically leaves your phone with 2 to 4 MB of memory all the time. As you can imagine, that’s not enough memory to do just about anything without the OS having to free some up. You can manually remove the app freeze states but I found myself constantly doing it and trying to free memory before running anything. What a pain!

You might be asking, how did this happen? I thought multitasking was not supported on the 3G? That is correct.  It’s not supported but it can be enabled by simply flipping a switch in a Springboard plist (startup preferences file). Using the pwnage tool from the iPhone dev team you can enable multitasking during creation of your restore image by checking a checkbox but if you don’t want to build a new restore image, here is a better way.

This also applies to 3Gs owners who are disapointed in Apple’s implementation of “multi-tasking”. I prefer backgrounder to this solution. I would even if I were on a 3Gs.

Backgrounder has been updated for iOS4.  The beauty of this solution is that you can turn it on or off any time you wish.  It also supports more than one type of backgrounding (native, and foreground styles).

Solution:

  1. SFTP in to your phone or use something like iPhone Explorer and Go to /System/Library/CoreServices/SpringBoard.app/
  2. Open the N82AP.plist (for iPhone 3G) or the N88AP.plist (for iPhone 3Gs).  If you are unfamiliar with plist files, they are just XML files. In this case you may need the Apple plist editor (already installed on all macs) since these particular plist files are stored in a binary format rather than text.
  3. Expand the “Capabilities” section and uncheck the “multitasking” boolean property.
  4. Save the file and respring.

There are a few other things you may want to modify in the plist file while you’re in there.  Have a look at the options.  For the sake of speed, I disabled “homescreen-wallpaper” and enabled “launch-application-while-animating” and “load-thumbnails-while-scrolling”.  After making these changes and respringing, my iPhone 3G is running snappy!  There are a few exceptions to this such as the built in camera app. It is definitely slower to start up.  🙁

Can somebody please make an SBSetting Toggle for this?  That would be awesome!

UPDATE: There is an app on the SiNfuL iPhone repo now which will disable multitasking.  It’s called “Disable iOS4 Mutlittasking”.  That’s cool but an SBSettings toggle would still be cooler (even though it requires a respring).