Give Your Phone a Speed Boost
So how do you speed up that old phone?
We’ve all felt it, as our phones or tablets get older they seem to slow down. Long delays to load apps, the odd screen freeze here and there.
Unfortunately for those not in the know, this may spell the end of the line for that phone. Throw it in the bottom drawer and head out to buy a new one. What a waste. There are a few simple things people with slow iPhones or iPads can do to really give themselves a boost.
Turn off, turn on
The oldest trick in the book. By doing this it gives the phone a chance to reset a little. It shuts down everything that’s not necessary and then restarts only with the essentials.
Get rid of all that junk
Put your phone on a quick diet. Uninstall anything you don’t absolutely need and delete any files you don’t need on your phone. By going into iOS settings ad clicking iPhone storage the app will assist you in doing both these things. Pretty straightforward.
Delete those old messages
How often do you go back and look at old messages? Hardly ever right? Saving them forever seems unnecessary to us. So we would recommend going into the Settings app on your iPhone or iPad, scroll down to ‘messages’, then change ‘Keep messages’ from forever to 30 days, or what ever suits you best.
Clear your browsing history
Safari stores a lot of info in it’s memory that can slow down your phone, or simply the web experience. To clear this out, go to Settings, then Safari and go fo ‘Clear History and Website Data’.
No thanks Siri
Siri’s Spotlight Search is a cool feature, but it sucks the life out of your phone working away in the background, and, honestly, did you ever click on one of those search suggestions they gave? To disable go into Settings, then Siri & Search, then disable both ‘suggestions’ functions.
Stop those apps updating in the background
This can be a real resource sucker. We’re not suggesting you don’t update apps, but set aside some time from time to time and do it when you don’t need your phone for anything else. To stop this happening automatically go to Setting, then iTunes and App Store, then turn all the Automatic Downloads off.
Replace the Battery
This is very easy to do and will breathe new life into your phone instantly. There are a number of places that offer this as a service, just do a little google search, look for someone local and make sure they have a few good reviews on Google before proceeding.
Do a full restore
This is the ultimate way to get the bump you’re after, but can be a bit of a pain. First, make sure your phone or iPad is fully backed up (learn how here https://support.apple.com/en-nz/HT203977). Then reset the phone by going to Settings, scrolling down to Reset and choosing either ‘Reset All Settings’ or ‘Erase All Content and Settings’, the later is the more effective, but you’ll lose everything off the phone and have to restore it all from your backup. Then once you’ve done that, restore from your backup (learn how here https://support.apple.com/en-nz/HT204184)