UX and the iPhone 3GS slowdown

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UXDiva has been dormant for the past several months due to the fact that I’ve been busy doing Human Centered Design for a huge enterprise application for Data Center Infrastructure Management. I’ve been busy traveling and doing customer visits, evangelizing UX and down in the nitty-gritty of generating Information Architecture, and wireframes. Since I’ve been traveling more, I’ve come to rely on my iPhone more and more each day. I got excited about using Yelp, Foursquare, and Loopted so my friends could keep up with all of my different destinations. Until my phone started to get very very slow. So slow, that I had to quit using these location social networking apps, because by the time my phone refreshed, I was no longer at that location. I didn’t purchase the new iPhone when it came out, but I did upgrade to the 4.0 OS. This was a really annoying upgrade, as I lost all of my applications. I could get the back, but they each had to be downloaded again. The problem with my iPhone 3GS being very slow continued to persist. Finally one day I was playing an ever so painfully slow game of Words with Friends on my phone, when I noticed the advertisements that were cycling through the banners on the game. And a lightbulb went off. I noticed that each time I played this free version of the game that I had new advertisements being displayed. I realized that when I used these ‘free’ games that they had to call back to their source, and download the new ads. Who knows how many megabytes these advertisements were, but what I did notice, was that synchronizing these adds apparently took precedence over all of the other functions of my telephone. THIS was what was causing my phone to slow down. To be sure I went to the App store and purchased Words with Friends. I then went and deleted the free version. Viola! My iPhone was instantly faster! Lesson learned, that watching advertisements is not the only problem with using free iPhone apps from the App store. Purchasing commonly used applications helps support the developers who write the app, and will also increase the over all speed of your iPhone.