Fix issue with too many contacts in iPhone caused by Outlook Suggested Contacts. How to disable them from syncing.

I had a client the other day that wonder why he was seeing so many unrecognized contacts on his new iPhone.  I had a quick look at it and it certainly showed many more contacts than are listed as contacts in Outlook.   I immediately thought of the "Suggested Contacts" list that Outlook automatically creates - it builds a list of other people that you've sent mail to or received mail from but haven't necessarily saved to your official contacts lists.  So I went into his Suggested Contacts list in his contacts area of Outlook and that list did appear to be the source of all of the extraneous contacts on his phone.

Luckily, starting with iOS 6, I believe, there is an easy way to prevent this Suggested Contacts list from syncing from Outlook/Exchange to your iPhone or iPad.

On your iPhone, follow these steps...

1. Open the Contacts app  (or go to Phone app and then switch to Contacts area).
2. Click the "Groups" button in the upper left corner of the screen.
3. You'll see a list of different contact groups so you want to un-check the "Suggested Contacts" group. 
4. Click "Done"!

Now it may take a few minutes for everything to sync again but this will remove all of the Suggested Contacts from the iPhone, leaving you with just your actual list of contacts from Outlook.

iPhone or iPad getting slow? Make sure you aren't too low on storage space!

My iPhone 4 had been getting rather slow lately - sluggishly opening apps or switching between apps.  Then I noticed that my storage space was really low! To check, go to Settings->General->Usage.  It will show you the overall space available and then after a minute or two, it'll show a breakdown by app, so you can see which apps are taking up the most space.

In my case, my 32GB iPhone had roughly 300MB's of free space remaining! That's very low! So I got rid of a bunch of apps that I wasn't using and I discovered one of my podcast players was keeping several gigs of old shows even though they should have already been deleted.

Now I have close to 7GB of free space and it feels like my iPhone has gotten a little bit faster and more responsive. YMMV. I know at least in the PC world, if your hard drive is nearly full, you'll run into all sorts of performance issues and other strange errors so I would imagine it's similar in iOS devices.

iTunes has found purchased items on the iPhone that are not present in your iTunes library

My iPhone was running low on space the other day (less than 1GB free and it was starting to get slow and sluggish) so I wanted to do a little house-keeping and delete some stuff that I no longer needed.  I actually had the iPhone plugged into my PC at the time and I was going through and deleting app using iTunes, rather than directly on the iPhone.  (Sometime when you delete an app from your phone, it will still remain in iTunes.)

So after I deleted a bunch of apps, i hit the Sync button in iTunes.  Then this error/warning message popped up. "iTunes has found purchased items on the iPhone "Jason's iPhone" that are not present in your iTunes library. Do you want to transfer these items from this iPhone back to your iTunes library? If you do not transfer these purchased items to your iTunes library, they will be removed from the iPhone."

So it's saying, "Hey, you have things on your phone that aren't in iTunes - do you want me to copy them from the phone back into to iTunes so you don't lose them?"  But in this case, NO, it didn't want to do that. I was trying to delete apps from iTunes AND my iPhone.  So I hit "Don't Transfer".  Now the apps that I had deleted in iTunes were also deleted from my iPhone and I was able to free up a good bit of space.  And my phone seems to be operating a little quicker too - I was down to a few hundred MB of free space and now I have several GB free.

iPhone or iPad App Store list of updates aren't visible. Screen is blank. Can't install updates.

Sometimes when I launch the App Store app on my iPhone 4 with iOS 5.0.1, I'll get the little red indicator showing that there are updates available for my apps on the Updates tab but when I go to that tab, the screen is blank. It doesn't show the updates.

I haven't found a really good fix yet but for a workaround, I just hit the home button to close the Apps Store app and then double-click the home button to pull up the task bar that shows the currently running apps.

You should see App Store sitting there since you just opened it. Press and hold on the icon for App Store. It will start to jiggle and you'll see a red circle with a minus sign.  Click on the red circle. This will kill the App Store app.  Now hit home again to stop the jiggling. Hit home one more time to return to the regular screen.  Now launch the App Store app and you should see your available updates and should be able to install them.

iTunes error "This computer is no longer authorized for apps that are installed on the iPhone. Would you like to authorize this computer for items purchased from the iTunes Store?"

I ran into this issue with my iPhone 4 running IOS 5.0.1.  I plugged my iPhone into my Windows 7 PC to sync with iTunes and half way through the sync process a message popped up and said "This computer is no longer authorized for apps that are installed on the iPhone "Jason's iPhone". Would you like to authorize this computer for items purchased from the iTunes Store?"  Then it says "If you do not authorize this computer, the app E*Trade Mobile" (and 3 other apps) and it's data will be deleted from this iPhone."

Then is gives me buttons for Authorize, Don't Authorize or Cancel.   I didn't want to simply hit Authorize, because as you may know, you are only allowed to have 5 computers authorized for any particular iTunes account.  And since this was the only PC that I use iTunes on, something was clearly wrong and I didn't want to waste one of my authorizations.  I'd rather fix the actual problem.  So I hit the Cancel button on the error.

You could first have a look at this article from Apple, but it didn't really help in my case.  http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1389

My guess is that it is related to the fact that I ended up with two different iTunes accounts because I was a Mobile Me customer.  I've had an iTunes account for a couple years and then I signed up for Mobile Me account (the predicesor to iCloud) and created a new account with an @me.com address.   Then when Mobile Me merged into iCloud last year, the @me.com account also became an iTunes account.  So now I've got two iTunes accounts and Apple doesn't provide any way to merge these into one.

So it turns out that I had downloaded a few apps onto my iPhone using the @me.com account without really thinking about the consequences.  It looks like this decision is finally catching up to me.

So I went back to my iPhone and deleted the first app that the error mentioned - E*Trade Mobile.  Then I started the sync process again in iTunes. The same error came up and mentioned a different app this time, because E*Trade Mobile was gone.  I hit Cancel again and then deleted the app that it mentioned from my iPhone. I repeated this process 4 more times until I had deleted all of the apps on my phone that were mentioned in the error message. I'm assuming these were the few apps I had downloaded to the iPhone using the @me.com account instead of my normal iTunes account.

Then it was able to sync without any issues. And I had made a list of the apps that I deleted so I simply re-installed them using the proper iTunes account.

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iPad or iPhone home button becomes sluggish or doesn't respond. How to fix!

I read a tip the other day that is suppose to restore "home" button on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch back to normal working condition, should it ever become hard to press or slow to respond to your double-clicks, etc.

1. Launch an Apple default app such as the "Stocks" app.
2. Hold in the power button on the top edge of your device until you see the "Slide to power off" screen. Then let go of the power button.
3. Now hold down the home button and it will kill the Stocks app and the "Slide to power off" screen will disappear.

Apparently this is supposed to somehow reset or re-calibrate the home button.  My home button was already working fine so I can't say if it works or not. Though many other folks have said that this DOES work.  Let me know!

Some fixes for slow Youtube app on iPhone and iPad over WiFi connection

Update! : The original Apple built-in app for YouTube has been removed as of iOS 6.  Be sure to go to the App Store and get the new official YouTube app from Google.   This new app is much nicer though it does still seem to suffer from the same ol' problem of slow loading videos.  

One issue that I've run into many times that doesn't seem to have a 100% solid fix is dealing with the really slow loading of YouTube videos using the native YouTube app on iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches. Sometimes it's really slow over a WiFi connection but it will work fine on the much slower 3G connection.  Seems backwards.  The theory is that the native YouTube app is pulling in whatever the highest quality HD version of that particular video is - so it might be loading a very large 720p or 1080p video, which can take some time.

One workaround is to skip the native YouTube app provided by Apple and instead use the m.youtube.com mobile site. The site defaults to "high quality" but doesn't pull in the really large HD versions of videos so it loads faster in theory. Plus it has some nice searching and sorting features that are not present in the native app.

As far as fixing the native app, I've tried all sort of suggestions.  One popular suggestion is to change the DNS servers that your WiFi connection is using.  People have suggested using Google's DNS servers (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) or some other DNS provider like OpenDNS.  I've also seen people recommend changing channels on your WiFi router or disabling Wireless N and only using Wireless G networks, but there is no way I'm turning off Wireless N just to get some dumb videos to load faster!

But the one thing that DOES seem to work for me is to clear the cache for your Safari browser.  I'm not sure how this is related to slow loading YouTube videos but it does work for me most of the time - at least better than any other fixes I've tried.

How to clear your Safari cache:

1. Go to Settings app
2. Scroll down and click on Safari
3. Click on Clear Cache
4. Confirm that you want to Clear Cache on next window

Update! : In the latest version of iOS, it seems that the "Clear Cache" button doesn't exist now so you need to hit "Clear Cookies and Data" instead.

Now try your YouTube videos and see if they load any faster.  If it's not working immediately, you might want to trying forcing the YouTube app and/or Safari app to close. (Double-click home button to bring up running apps list. Hold finger on Youtube or Safari until it starts to wiggle. Hit the red X to kill it.)   Or you could also try rebooting the phone.  

I hope this helps!  Please comment if it works for you.  Or do me a favor and click on an ad or two. :)