Yay! My iPhone 4S is snappy again.

When I bought my iPhone 4S almost 20 months ago, I straight away felt how fast it was compared to my old iPhone 3GS. But after a while it became slow. In fact, it got so slow that there have been times that I felt like throwing it out the window or dropping it on the floor and crushing it with my feet. I know, it would only make things worse, thus I controlled myself every time the thought occurred to me.

Things got worse with iOS 6 update. It would work well as soon as I restored or updated the OS, but eventually get slow.

When Evasi0n released the Jailbreak for iOS 6.1, I went ahead with the Jailbreak. I didn't feel that the phone got any slower, but the battery went down the hill. After a few months, I gave up the Jailbreak. But disappointingly, I didn't get better performance nor battery life. I only lost the Jailbreak tweaks that I really loved. At this point, I was using iOS 6.1.3, the latest as of this day.

Then WWDC2013 happened. iOS 7 was introduced and I managed to install the developer preview on my phone without paying for a developer account. (Click here to find out how to do it.) But it ran so horribly slow on my phone. Restarting fixed it for a certain degree, but it was slow - much slower than the slowness I talked about at the top of this post. People with iPhone 5's were not feeling the slowness. Sure, the iPhone 5 is twice as fast as mine, but if people didn't feel the slowness, that's either because it is not slow, or because people are numb. I wanted to believe it was the former. So what I did was, I cleared out all the junk from the phone.
・I had all 1000 pics from Photo streams and disconnected it from the phone.
・I removed all the photos there were in the camera roll.
That's all really. I had already removed the unnecessary apps and I only had the apps that I frequently used.

But it didn't get any faster. Not only that, it was crashing few of the apps that I really needed. One of them was the Pocasts app. Commuting without the Podcast app would be a nightmare. So I wanted to go back to iOS 6.

But I made a mistake this time. I could not restore the backup via iTunes, because the last backup was done from iOS 7 and it was incompatible with iOS 6's backup format. Yes, I believe the older backups were still there in the PC and I could have chosen one of them instead. I only remembered that the next day. But I do not regret what happened. I had to start over from the scratch, BUT for some reason, the phone is very snappy now. I think it was the junk that was in the backup that was causing the lag. I had all the SMS history and call history and the settings of apps that I don't use anymore all copied back to the phone. That junk must have been the cause of the slowness. I have been using the phone for 3 days and there isn't the slightest hint of it running slow. Sure, it is not iPhone 5, but I don't feel that it is laggy anymore. I'm pretty sure that it is not my mind playing tricks.

So what I am going to do from here onwards is, I'm going to keep my the call history clean, SMS history clean (only keep the ones that I want to keep, and delete the rest), sync only 50 emails, clean up the camera roll every day when I get back home and not connect to photo streams. Basically, I'm gonna keep the phone as clean as I can. I'm sure it will become an obsession eventually, but at least I will have a fast phone.

Crysis 3 multiplayer server browser is broken!

When I started playing Crysis 3, there weren't any Japanese servers around because the game had not been released in Japan yet. The game was supposed to be released in Japan on 7th of March and I was hoping to find Japanese servers after that because it would give me good pings. If I connect to servers outside Japan, the lowest pings that I'm getting is about 170ms. When I was playing Crysis 2 on Japanese servers, I was getting absolutely marvelous ping times. There were servers that even gave me ping times below 10ms. Sure, that gave us an advantage I suppose. But it's not out fault.

 

Unfortunately, the server browser is so effed up. I cannot see any Japanese servers. When I filter by geography (Asia, in my case) sometimes not a single server show up. That's kind of hard to believe. We are talking about a whole continent here. Not a single server in Asia? Bah!

 

Then there was a problem at the beginning. All the servers were showing ping times of 2xxxx ms. Very easy to choose a server. I had to stick with servers that gave away the location of them in the server name.

 

 

Crysis 3 multiplayer game play update 13/03/02

It's been more than a week since I've started playing Crysis 3 and I am already so mad that the game hasn't been launched for Japan. There aren't any Japanese servers that I can connect to. Every server that I see are located in a different continent. Consequently the ping times are well above 200ms. The kill replay makes me sad. The opponent had seen me well before I had. Going head to head is almost impossible unless the opponent is having an even worse ping time than I am. :(

There are few Indian servers I see on the server browser screen, but they are not online all the time. Either the server is not online, or the players aren't connected to it. I managed to get around 170ms when they were working and the improvement in lag was pretty noticeable. But some time later I got close to 300ms ping. :/

There is a funny thing with the server browser screen as well. It shows weird ping times. At the beginning, every server was having a 20000ms+ ping time. But when I checked the ping time from within a game, I was showing a the correct values. After the 1.1 update, now it's showing some sane values like 110ms, 190ms, 290ms etc on the server browser screen. 110ms should be fine, right? Well, it's not really 110ms. When I check it from within a game, it's pretty longer than that. I can sometimes feel much longer delays on those servers than the ones I thought was giving around 200ms. Australian servers are giving about 200ms. Those players are monsters and I don't wanna touch those servers unless I'm playing with them rather than against them.

I cannot remember if it was like the same back when Crysis 2 came out. But back then, my priority was to play the single player campaign mode, not the multiplayer mode. I haven't played more than 15 minutes of the single player campaign this time. Perhaps I should change my priorities. I should play the single player now, and resume the multiplayer mode once proper servers appear.

So as of right now, I'm barely keeping a 1.5 K/D ratio in multiplayer mode. (You can check up how I'm doing by clicking the Crysis 3 image on top right hand corner of this blog.) I hope it (K/D) will improve when I play on Japanese servers starting from this month. However, with all the online courses that I have taken up, there isn't enough time to play games. Though, they are almost near conclusion.