i'm honestly getting to a point where I'm just going to launch this phone off my balcony ...

If I press the 'Message' icon it takes around 12 or 13 seconds to actually open the message function.

If i'm listening to music on the iPod function the music regularly jumps and skips.

Many apps will actually take 2 or 3 attempts before they run.

It has also been known to just lock up completely from time to to time.

I fully understand that the 3G is fairly limited in terms of processing and running multiple apps but this is getting ridiculous - overall it runs very, very slowly.

I bought it 2nd hand locked to O2 so I jailbroke it so that I could unlock it to use on Orange, which I have been doing for a while now.

I've tried disabling spotlight search and doing a few hard resets but nothing changes. I'm left with either restoring it, re-jailbreaking and re-unlocking or just downgrading to 3.1.3 or something like that.

Or just putting it on eBay and using the money towards something else until i upgrade next year. i've got about 1.2gb free on it at the moment.

any thoughts most welcome. - cheers

I would restore it to 3.13 and set it up as new phone,OS4 really slows the 3G down and you cant use a lot of the features anyway.

http://www.iphoneheat.com/2010/02/do...re-3-1-3-ipsw/

This is your problem. There's reason Apple didn't enable multi-tasking on the 3G. The multi-tasking implemented by jailbreaks is very poorly written and the 3G just can't stay on top of what it's being asked to do.

Mate having the same issues with my 3G, I put 3.1.3 on it and its still a dog, apps have become more resource intensive,

Thanks for the replies. I can't do a great deal until Thursday this week as I don't currently have a landline so no Internet - that's being put in on Thursday.

i'm wondering if I should downgrade to 3.1.3 and see if Orange will 'officially' unlock it for me so I won't have to jailbreak it. Unlocking is the only reason for jailbreaking it as I've actually bought and paid for all my apps to this point.

One other thing I've noticed that happens is that I can be sitting at home, the phone no more than arms length away at any one time and it'll alert me that I've missed a call - that I never heard in the first place !!

(I confess one time that happened I did have the phone on vibrate, but that was just once )

You should be fine when it gets to 3.1 software and orange should unlock it for you for free, O2 unlocked my iphone 4 for free so I dont see why not

just spoken to orange and they apparently don't unlock handsets from other networks, only orange.

and I can't afford to pay O2 to unlock it either so I guess I have no choice but to re-jailbreak it after I downgrade the OS

It's only £15 for O2 to unlock it on pay as you go. Or if you know someone with an O2 contract sim, get them to use if for a couple of days and O2 will unlock for free

£15 for me, at the moment, is still steep. i moved house two weeks ago and I'm very, very poor at the moment

Not sure I know anyone on O2 but I'll ask around.

Fair enough. If you do know someone on O2 they'll have to have their sim in the phone at the time they fill out the unlocking form until they get a text message saying the phone is unlocked. Normally takes a couple of days

Better still try and get on o2's webchat thing on their support pages they can do it there and then and it takes 24 hours. thats how i did it

that might be a better idea actually. i've juggled the finances a bit and i might be able to spring for the £15 quid after all.

if i can get it done inside 24 hours then i'll do it for sure. any longer and i'll have to think about it.

cheers for the info

Yeah hover round their support pages and a popup should appear. Let me know how you get on

I'm actually getting quite tempted to just exchange
it for something else after going into a CEX today and also looking on their website.

They'll give me £150 quid exchange for it as-is which gives me a few interesting options.

£90 for an unlocked Orange San-Francisco with £60 quid left to spend on stuff in CEX (Blurays I imagine!)

Straight swap for a Nokia N8

£5 extra for a HTC Desire

£35 extra for a HTC 7 phone

Any one of those would be perfectly acceptable for another 12 months. What would y'all do if faced with that situation?

Obviously I'm not ruling out re-flashing the iPhone with the stock firmware and getting O2 to properly unlock it either.

One of the htc's is the only other viable option in my opinion. I love cex

I'd have the Desire out of that lot myself.

To be honest, you would have to get the 3G back to iPhone OS 2 to get it running smoothly. If you roll it back to 3 it will be nippy for a while, but it soon slows down to a crawl! (This has been my experience anyway!) You will struggle to get many apps to work with it and it will likely cause you more stress than it's worth. £150 is a decent price for 2 and a half year old tech IMO and I would bite their hand off! Also check how much more you would get for an unlocked handset - sometimes it's worth paying for the unlock for a higher trade-in price.

I would go for the Desire personally too. Certainly wouldn't go for the San Francisco. Don't get me wrong, it is a great little phone, but if you're going for a real power upgrade, the SF doesn't really fit the bill. I wouldn't touch Symbian with a barge pole and I'm not a fan of Windows Phone 7 either. (Just my personal opinion)

However, there are a couple of possible caveats:

The price you are quoting is for a HTC on Orange at grade C. Although grade C handsets will be fully functional they can be in a bit of a bad way sometimes in terms of scratches and bumps etc. I'm not sure how much of an issue this is to you.

Your bigger issue however, might be getting hold of a Desire locked to Orange grade C (CEXs website indicates there isn't many about!) You might be able to get one ordered in to you local store from somewhere else though.

Mark, all I'm really looking for is a decent-ish handset to get me through the next 12 months, so I'm not really looking for any kind of major upgrade.

I like the sound of the SF because I can flash it with some custom roms and install the zx spectrum emulator on it.

if all goes to plan, I should be in a position next year to buy an iPhone 4 outright so I can hopefully negotiate a good upgrade deal with orange, possibly stepping down to sim-only.

I guess if I do swap it for the SF and spend the rest of the credit on films and gadgets then I limit my options if I want to swap again in the next 12 months.

I also need to take into account if the desire is one of the handsets with the same rebooting issue that ultimately killed my old one.

Anyway, the man from CEX also told me that there was a new OS update for the iPhone that was 4.3 something or
other, so just wondering if that would make a difference if I updated and had the phone 'properly' unlocked?

If I had the HTC 7 then I could obviously exchange it for something else if it came along.

Well the SF is certainly a decent handset! As you say there a great custom roms available for it and a free / near free unlock too (Adding value when you trade in).

If you purchase the Desire and it turns out to be faulty, CEX do offer a 12 month warranty, so you shouldn't have any issues if you're not planning to have it more than 12 months.

I wouldn't have thought the iOS 4.3 update is going to make much difference to your 3G - I'm not even sure if it is compatible! It's just not got enough RAM or processing power to cope with iOS 4, or even 3 particularly well.

well I checked the CEX website again earlier and found out that if I pay £15 quid to get it properly unlocked it adds £37 quid in exchange value and takes it to £187.

So I definitely think the 1st order of business is to do that. Who knows? I might find after a week or two it's running ok.

Anyway, I've got a hospital appointment in London on May the 18th with the travelling covered by the NHS so that'll be my deadline to decide one way or the other because there's a CEX just off tottenham court road that (currently) has the unlocked SF for £90 quid so I can take advantage of being in London to get it if i do decide on that handset.