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Before I got my iPhone 4, I was running iOS 4.0 on my iPhone 3G, and I hated it. Even without multitasking and a background image, my iPhone 3G ran slower than I could stand for day to day tasks as mundane as sending a text. If you’ve been having the same issue and don’t want to upgrade to an iPhone 3GS or 4, there is a potential fix (outside of simply downgrading your iOS to 3.1.3).

A commenter over on Gizmodo (cleverly named acidrain69) posted an interesting tidbit in the comment section with the details:

Go to Settings- General -Home - Search Results, and shut off everything you don’t need (I disabled Music, Podcasts, Video and Audiobooks; leaving Contacts, apps, Notes, Mail and Calendar checked). Made my phone a lot quicker, more like it was with v2 (I’m still running v3.1.2, jailbroken).

Before, there was a good 2-4 second lag when exiting or loading an app. Now it’s back to it’s old speediness.

Someone on the WSJ forum mentioned a bug in spotlight, but didn’t say how to disable spotlight search. I don’t see an option to disable it entirely.

Basically, these simple instructions disable Spotlight search on the iPhone, for the most part. While this tip wouldn’t be useful if you use Spotlight a lot, if you’re like me, you’ve only used it once or twice. Even though this may only work for some users, it’s certainly easy enough to try out for a day or so considering it doesn’t require hacking.

Try it out, and let us know if you get the same results as other iPhone 3G owners are.

Via [Life Hacker]