Engineering a New World

Don't try to use big photos as your contact pictures

Well, I’ve just found a sure-fire, always-works way to crash an iPhone 3G:  use a picture for a contact that’s taken at a higher resolution than the iPhone 3G’s internal 2-megapixel camera.

Seemed like innocent entertainment for me when I used a picture of my 7-month-pregnant wife which I had taken on a recent cross-country trip as the contact image for her in my iPhone 3G.   The image was a 4-megapixel image taken with my Minolta DiMage Z2, and I selected it as her contact photo in Windows Contacts, which are synchronized to my iPhone.

Then, the next time my wife called me, my phone refused to pick up, and locked up when trying to answer.  I rebooted it.

Then, she called again, and my phone immediately locked up.  I rebooted it.

Then, after leaving me voicemail, she called again, and the phone sloowwwwwly allowed me to slide and unlock it, but wouldn’t answer.  I had to reboot it again.

I finally realized it was the fact that it was trying to pull up a 4-megapixel image as the contact photo when answering it, and that was what was crashing the phone.  Switching to a small image handled the problem.

So, if any of you run into the same thing, there’s your lame answer.  :)  Sounds like my little iPhone needs some more RAM!