Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Major reasons to start iOS 5 as a NEW iPhone

S

stewart715

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 2, 2008
459
7
I've tested iOS 5 from an iOS 4 backup and as a new iPhone and have noticed a few major things. When you use iOS 5 as a new iPhone you get (for whatever reason):

-faster app opening time
-faster response time between and in apps
-smoother transitions
-MUCH better battery life

I've also noticed that turning of sending data to apple for dev purposes helps save battery life.

Has anyone else experienced this? Maybe there are some inconsitencies and reduncancies that makes iOS 4 data a CPU/Memory hog.
 
I can definitely concur with you on this! I installed iOS 5 on day one of its release and restored from a backup. The phone was sluggish, and my battery was decreasing by about 2% every half an hour in standby. I did a clean install and I can't really fault the OS at this moment in time!... Apart from getting two notifications every time I receive a Whatsapp... It's beta though I suppose :eek:
 
It is also nice to start fresh with a brand new stock UI. Forces me to re-evaluate all the apps I have and the junk that accumulates over time.
 
i dont want to set it up as a new iphone as i would lose everything on there!

i will take the slight battery hit (its actually not much worse than when i was on 4.3.3).
 
If you set up as a new phone, is there any way to preserve text messages and bookmarks and app data?
 
With all major OS releases I think it's best to DFU restore and set up as new, but that's just my mentality - whether it makes a difference or not, I'm not sure.
 
I think this is true regardless of iOS version. When you start over from scratch on any rev it's going to be 'cleaner' to start with. It likely will eventually get to the same point again though.
 
boss.king said:
If you set up as a new phone, is there any way to preserve text messages and bookmarks and app data?
Click to expand...

i am wondering the same thing, and its probably something i should know by now......

what about photos and app data? (particularly whatsapp).
 
Pez555 said:
i am wondering the same thing, and its probably something i should know by now......

what about photos and app data? (particularly whatsapp).
Click to expand...

You can easily preserve your text messages if you are jailbroken. The new software will also need to be jb to restore the text messages. Although, you might be able to use redsnow to boot into a jb state without fully jb the phone once you get iOS 5 on there. Then you could slip the text message db file in and reboot. Photos, contacts, etc can all be saved by syncing. The only thing youll lose is app data. Some app data can be saved the same way as saving the text messages.

To save the texts, use redsnow to boot into a tethered jb mode. Then use a program called ifunbox to browse the phones file system. Navigate to var/mobile/library/sms/ and copy the file sms.db. For other apps, navigate to their folders and copy contents you want to save, ususally everything in the Documents folder. Put on iOS 5, and put the files back in the same places.
 
kre62 said:
You can easily preserve your text messages if you are jailbroken. The new software will also need to be jb to restore the text messages. Although, you might be able to use redsnow to boot into a jb state without fully jb the phone once you get iOS 5 on there. Then you could slip the text message db file in and reboot. Photos, contacts, etc can all be saved by syncing. The only thing youll lose is app data. Some app data can be saved the same way as saving the text messages.

To save the texts, use redsnow to boot into a tethered jb mode. Then use a program called ifunbox to browse the phones file system. Navigate to var/mobile/library/sms/ and copy the file sms.db. For other apps, navigate to their folders and copy contents you want to save, ususally everything in the Documents folder. Put on iOS 5, and put the files back in the same places.
Click to expand...

detailed response....thanks for that! i dont fancy jailbreaking at the moment anyway, quite happy with everything as it is, battery life is only slightly worse anyway so its not that much of a big deal.

the thing i want to preserve the most are my photos, i have nearly 1000 and would hate to lose any of them.......doesn't itunes store photos or something? and if you set up as new it will add them back in when you sync? hmmm
 
But setting up as a "new" phone sucks... You lose all of your texts, photos, app data, everything...
 
I restored form a back up and my battery was bad the first day but I let it die all the way then recharged it and now my battery's just fine so go figure
 
If I wouldn't lose all of my app data. I have days worth of gameplay saved on that thing. Apple really needs to fix that. Major issue in not being able to save game data separately. They'll never be considered a major player in the mobile gaming market until that happens imo.
 
With regards to the battery life reason, I wonder if what's really going on is that the phone has a configuration or log file somewhere that tracks battery life/usage, and those values are still calibrated for iOS 4 when you restore instead of start fresh? I have no technical evidence to back this up, and it's pure speculation, but it seems the likeliest reason for better performance on a fresh install is that there's some bit of cached/stored data that it has to rebuild from scratch when it doesn't have a backed up one to fall back on.

This would explain why battery performance could be worse when restoring from back up. Like another poster in this thread, I restored from back up and experienced terrible battery life initially, but after letting it die just once and recharging to full, it's already almost back to full performance. It would make sense that once given a few full charge cycles to recalibrate itself, the battery performance would return to "normal" levels.

Of course, this could also all just be a load of crap, but perhaps somebody who knows more about this could weigh in either way.
 
solidus430 said:
With regards to the battery life reason, I wonder if what's really going on is that the phone has a configuration or log file somewhere that tracks battery life/usage, and those values are still calibrated for iOS 4 when you restore instead of start fresh? I have no technical evidence to back this up, and it's pure speculation, but it seems the likeliest reason for better performance on a fresh install is that there's some bit of cached/stored data that it has to rebuild from scratch when it doesn't have a backed up one to fall back on.

This would explain why battery performance could be worse when restoring from back up. Like another poster in this thread, I restored from back up and experienced terrible battery life initially, but after letting it die just once and recharging to full, it's already almost back to full performance. It would make sense that once given a few full charge cycles to recalibrate itself, the battery performance would return to "normal" levels.

Of course, this could also all just be a load of crap, but perhaps somebody who knows more about this could weigh in either way.
Click to expand...

That was my suspicion as well... My experience with new phones (or reformatted phones) is that battery life initially starts out terrible (at least to us), and after a few full charges, the phone becomes calibrated with how much actual battery life it has, rather than how much battery life it thinks it has.
 
The cloud is supposed to back up SMS (in addition to contacts, calendar, etc) - so if you start your phone as a new device, shouldn't the cloud still populate your old SMS messages onto the newly wiped OS (or new device) on iOS 5?

Once the cloud goes live, of course.
 
It's the first beta. Not that Apple ignored performance and battery efficency, but those things generally are worked out later in the development cycle.
 
DDustiNN said:
But setting up as a "new" phone sucks... You lose all of your texts, photos, app data, everything...
Click to expand...

I hope that Apple implements something in the future that selectively lets you transfer data while setting up as a new phone. At least you can [easily] transfer pictures if you are on a PC. I still haven't figure out how to do it in OS X.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

Anyone that doesn't do fresh install is blowing it.
 
i might be going off my base here but wouldnt using something like iPhoneExplorer (software that lets you browse through every file on your iPhone when its tethered to your Mac/PC (boo!) ) and copying the files in your SMS/Messaging/Photos folder over to your fresh setup iPhone get the data back?

just my AUS$0.02
 
LOL about battery life. i installed iOS 5 and set it up as a new phone, i put the iPhone 4 at 37% before i slept, by this morning when i woke up, the iPhone's dead.

but i wouldn't worry too much because it's still in the beta version.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back