With iPhone 1.x and 2.x, you could hold down the Home button to “force quit” an application (kill the process) and return to the Home Screen. With iPhone 3.0, however, holding down the Home button now activates Voice Control on the iPhone 3G S.
So, how do you Force Quit under iPhone 3.0? iPhonejunkie3 provides the answer (via EverythingiCafe):
To force quit an application in 3.0, press and hold the sleep/wake button until the slide to power off screen appears, then press and hold the home button until the application quits (about six seconds).
Yes, this does indeed mean holding down Home is now useless on iPhone 1.x and 2.x, but that most likely will only affect jailbreakers and others who have specific reason for not upgrading. Everyone else gets a slightly more complicated, but still functional, Force Quit.
Those of us who rock Mac OS X know all about the “Force Quit”. For Windows users, think killing an application via Task Manager. They’re both ways to shut down non-responsive or otherwise rogue applications from freezing us out or just slowing us down. For iPhone users, well, we don’t have to worry about that, do we? (Remember Apple mocking Windows Mobile for multitask management?)
Well, since MobileSafari, MobileMail, and other Apple apps do multitask and run in the background, it turns out we iPhone owners do still need to worry about it. And with the App Store providing all sorts of new and potentially greedy applications to strain the more limited resources of Mobile OS X, it’s certainly important functionality to have.
So what can we do? Luckily, Apple built in an solution.
Hold down the “Home” button for about 6 seconds. Your resources will then be freed up, and you’ll be dropped back to the Home Screen ready for a fresh, clean start.
Faster and easier than a full reset, it can get you out of an App jam or improve the “snappiness” of your iPhone in general.
Note: if you have tabs open in MobileSafari, the cached pages will be cleared, but fret not, MobileSafari will re-load the pages off the net for you as soon as you relaunch it.
(Thanks to Antony for the screen shots)
