With the release of the iPhone 3GS, Apple demoed and promised a few features such as video recording and editing, voice control, faster Safari and more. They also stressed that this is the fastest and most powerful iPhone yet, as per their tagline for the 3GS. What Apple usually tends to hide is the actual specs sheet in terms of processor, RAM, graphics etc. But thanks to the internet and some curious minds and accidental hands (T-Mobile) it was revealed shortly after the release of the phone. In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past few weeks, it has been revealed that the iPhone 3GS boasts an ARM Cortex A8 600 MHz processor and PowerVR SGX graphics. It also has been upgraded to 256 MB of RAM from 128 MB on previous iPhones. I just got my unit yesterday (a bit late I know) and I have started to play around with it. Jailbreaking took about 5 minutes and so I entered the world of free apps and mods from Cydia. I decided to run some apps and games and push the 3GS’s processor to max out the memory. A video of the multitasking can be seen below.

The OS itself reserves about 100 MB of RAM (up from the 3G and 2G which take up about 75 MB thus making this much faster). That left about 150 MB of RAM to my use. I loaded up a few apps and games and everything worked seamlessly. I was able to let the games and apps run in the background using the Backgrounder mobile substrate add on from Cydia. When returning to a game, there was very minor difference in performance but still much better than the 3G, nonetheless. I loaded Weathereye, Random Facts, Chalky, Google app, and Phone and Mail was already running as apps, for games I used Assassin’s Creed, MGS Touch and Real Racing, all three of which are rich in graphics and use a lot of memory.

Here is how you can get it like that in the video:

1. Jailbreak iPhone
2. From Cydia download backgrounder, mQuickDo and SBSettings
3. In an app hold the home button for 2 seconds to enable backgrounding
4. Either open the backgrounded app from springboard or use mQuickDo’s app switcher to open it