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update: After 24hours, I’m pretty sure it helped quite a bit. My phone did not slow down to a crawl today nor did iOS start killing my fast app switching backgrounded apps. Will it last? Will it blend? Of course not, it’s VIRTUAL memory!

With the latest iOS 4 supporting multitasking or with any other version of iOS that has been set free from its jail, I’ve noticed that my old, slow iPhone 3g has been having memory issues.

With iOS 3 and multitasking applications such as backgrounder, I could at least manage what app I wanted to leave open in the background. Sure, it took more CPU but at least I could manage it.

With iOS 4 (multitasking enabled using the latest pwnagetools) – many apps will keep using RAM in the background if they support Fast App Switching. As more and more apps get recompiled with iOS 4 and fast app switching enabled, I noticed I needed to reboot my iPhone from time to time or manually close these apps. And as we know, task managers, blowing it, etc…

Here is how I enabled swapping on my iPhone – sorry for not quoting any definite source, the knowledge I found was spread out through many forums and no clear source could be found. In any case, I’m certainly not the one who thought about this.

iOS is a stripped down version of OS X, which supports swapping, obviously. However, the flash in your iPhone is not made to handle thousands of writes and this is why Apple doesn’t do swapping on it. Be warned, this will probably end up killing it. How fast? Hard to say. Considering my 3g is 2 years old and I’m eligible for an upgrade soon, I just don’t really care. Please inspect the file before you upload it and understand what it means – I’m not responsible for you nuking your phone. Back it up in iTunes first, too, just in case you have to restore using DFU Mode.

1. Jailbreak your iPhone ( I recommend pwnagetools )
2. Install OpenSSH From cydia
3. Connect to your iPhone using an SCP client (Cyberduck, WinSCP, Filezilla..)
4. Download this file and rename it from .txt to .plist com.apple.dynamic_pager
5. Upload this file to /System/Library/LaunchDaemons
6. Reboot

You will now notice that even after opening a few apps, available memory reported by SBSettings will remain close to 30-35Mb.

On top of that, if you browse to /var/vm , you will see that it created a swap file.

Before the news strike tomorrow..

Here’s an iPhone 4.0 wish list. In bold are the items I think we may see tomorrow..

Multitasking

Multi-user (or at least a guest mode) for at least the iPad

A filesystem to store files and share them between apps, at least for the iPad

Better push notifications

Ability to set a schedule for ringtones (don’t ring at 3am for Viagra spam please)

File synching for iPhone

Pocket Informant is a wonderful tool on Windows Mobile, and an iPhone version was just released. It doesn’t have all the same bells and whistles (yet), and suffers from the heavy restrictions and lack of functionality in the iPhone OS version 2.

Two particularily annoying restrictions are the fact that it can’t sync with the iPhone’s calendar, which would’ve made it easy to sync with your desktop, and it can’t ring alarms if the app isn’t on. And to think that a decade ago, Pilot 1000s could ring even while the device was off…

To be able to sync my iPhone Pocket Informant to my work Calendar (Outlook) and home Calendar (iCal), and to retain alarms, I use this scheme:

Here is what you will need to do, and in what order.

1. Open a Google Calendar account. It should be noted that this is stored on Google’s servers, so this solution may not be the best if you treat your calendar info as super private or if it contains confidential information. It might also be a very bad idea if you schedule crimes using your iPhone. Read the privacy policy.

2. Backup your iCal and Outlook calendars, or really any other application you will sync with Google Calendar. The calendar will get wiped from your iPhone so make sure that the info is already somewhere else.

3. Download and install the Google Calendar Sync tool. The options are very straightforward:

Enter your Google credentials, and set the sync to 2 way. Test the synchronisation, verify that your Google Calendar now reflects what is in your Outlook calendar.

4. Download and install the Google Calaboration Utility to Configure Google Calendar as CalDAV Calendars in iCal . Again, the options are pretty straightforward, though the first sync will get the data from Google to your iCal in a new calendar. You will to create new appointments in the proper calendar. I’m no big iCal user, I barely use it in fact, so you may know a way of merging your calendars. Test creating an appointment, see if it got created on the Google Calendar, and then force a sync in Outlook and see if it made it there.

5. Buy, download and install Pocket Informant on your iPhone. Under Settings / Sync / Google Calendar, set the Sync to Active, enter your credentials, and force a sync. See if everything is now in Pocket Informant.

6. Disable calendar sync in iTunes. 

7. On  your iPhone, follow these instructions that explain how to setup your Google Calendar to sync over the ActiveSync (Exchange) protocol. This will wipe any calendar info from your iphone. Force a Sync, check if your iPhone calendar got updated. This will give you alarms !

8. Bonus option for jailbroken phones: Install Lock Calendar , available in Cydia, to display calendar info on the lock screen.

You now have a decent calendaring solution for your iPhone, hopefully, some of these steps will be redundant with version 3 of the OS and future Pocket Informant release.

Known issues:

There is obviously a pretty long delay until all parts are up to date. I set the sync on my iPhone to 30minutes (I don’t use push), and to my outlook to 30 minutes, so if I’m not lucky it can take quite a while to be everywhere.

Items added from Pocket Informant with “Alerts” don’t seem to sync properly to Google, and therefore doesn’t get synched back into the iPhone calendar properly. So for now, until a workaround is found (there are quite a few different alert types in PI, maybe one of them works), you’re better off creating items that need alerts somewhere else.

Pocket Informant’s sync is not super reliable right now, should be improved soon.

ToDo:

You can use the same process with a ToodleDo account. I myself simply use Toodledo with the Firefox sidebar, and sync my Toodledo account to Pocket Informant and the Toodledo app for iPhone (Great value, by the way).

After switching to iWeb, I setup my iPhone to get my email on their IMAP server.

I have made a typo when entering my password for outgoing email. After trying to send an email, it kept on retrying, and I didn’t notice. The battery got drain in a matter of hours.

I noticed the mail application saying “1 message unsent”. I fixed my password, sent another message, which worked, but the “stuck” message stayed stuck.

I decided to delete the account completely. Fine, it’s gone!

NO!

Somehow, my Usage stats were EQUAL to my Standby time, and sometimes were not available at all. I could charge the phone, not use it for 2 hours, and it would say Usage = 2hours, Standby = 2 hours. It was obvious something was still trying to send in the background.

If you get a similar behavior ( Usage equal to standby ) , you might want to try doing a restore. That’s what fixed it for me, and it’s pretty straightfoward.

I hope the next firmware fixes that bug, because it could mean that anything else interrupting an outgoing message could drain your battery overnight. It should retry a few times, and prompt you..

PdaNet 1.40 has been released. I’ve been able to connect to various IPSec tunnels using the client on my laptop with this version , which makes connecting easier. You have to make sure you’re using UDP or that transparent tunneling has been disabled. I haven’t got it working with IPSec over TCP. It still fails on one of my VPNs and I can’t really figure out why but I think it might not be related to Pdanet itself..time to apt-get update it !

From the changelog:

Version 1.40

• Implement VPN and UDP support.
• Display a numeric battery meter (you know you want it).
• Resolve a CPU usage issue that drains the battery faster.
• Add a DNS cache for instant lookup, improve initial connection speed.
• Pause UI update when device is sleeping to save power.
• This version is a significant improvement over previous versions.