iPhone 5S impressions

klipsch s5i?

 

I've used Sennheiser MM30is for the last couple of years (on pair #4, my dog finds them fun to chew and my brother finds them fun to borrow and misplace). Cheap, great sound (IMHO of course), inline mic + volume with iPhone compatibility.

 

Some interesting reveals on the latest ios platform glbench results (you'll need to select "best score to see them)

Ipad mini retina shows latest es3.0 driver is 27.21, and latest ios as 7.1
Ipad air shows drivers 27.23 and 27.7, and latest ios as 7.1
iphone5s shows drivers 36 and 37.2, and ios versions of 7.2 AND 8.0

(iphone5s also shows 3 later versions of the gles2.0 drivers that don't appear on the other devices)

Those iphone5s drivers seem to me to be major revisions. Now it could be that some of those tests are fakes somehow, but very interestingly, the iphone5s has a new GL_APPLE extension, "GL_APPLE_clip_distance" that neither the ipad air nor the ipad mini retina have, which would be consistent with newer drivers.

Also, the max texture size is now 16384, up from 4096 on all previous A7 rogue drivers. I'm assuming the glbench database shows all options that have been returned based on different drivers tested, hence why it shows both 16384 and 4096.

Newer drivers might also explain why iphone5s is marginally quicker than the ipad air, when one would expect the air to be somewhat quicker, all other things being equal.

Seems to me that those latest drivers might well be authentic. The big jump in version number would also be consistent with the big jump to ios 8.0.

 

The iOS 8.0 entry, at least, has been in there for a while, if that at all lends to its credibility.

The official release of iOS 7.1 has just made it out, so we'll see how advanced the drivers which actually made it in will turn out to be, especially as the database will now collect more than just the limited few runs it had of 7.1.

 

Just updated to 7.1 and 27.23 is the shipping version of the A7 GPU driver, so there are 3 newer ones in the glbench database

 

iOS 7.0 had made the iPhone 4 choppy when switching/launching apps and sometimes during navigation, which appeared to me to result mostly from its Cortex-A8 not being a good match for that software release. iOS 7.1 has helped to bring at least some of the smoothness back.

Superficially, I've noticed Apple has continued to improve the contrast between various elements of the GUI, like the letters on the keyboard now standing out bolder than before.

The performance tweaks make a big difference on the iPhone 4; the devices that came after that, starting with and including my iPad 2, only feel a little smoother here and there. The improved stability will probably be felt the most on newer devices.

 

Responsiveness on the pass code lock screen feels decent when I'm just testing it right now, but I have no context with which to compare it since I wasn't using a pass code before.

 

I just updated my iPhone 4 to 7.1 and it is very noticeably more fluid and responsive. It's obviously still slow at certain tasks but so far it's been a much less frustrating experience. It had become almost unbearably slow at times and I was close to the point of buying a new one, but now I think I can wait until the next model.

 

My iPhone 4 friend is waiting for iPhone 6 too.

I update my 5s yesterday. Love the speedy Touch ID. It's even more accurate now. Like 99%.
Feels more responsive and quicker overall than iOS 7.0.x.

The new iBeacon feature is interesting. Hopefully they release aftermarket CarPlay headunits soon.

 

How do you access the iBeacon feature?

I know some Apple Stores have the gear in place but who else?

Some of the more high end aftermarket units have things like motorized screens and such but they're costly to buy and costly to install (if you have to get a stereo shop to do it).

Seems like HUD could be useful for this, though it is a distraction.

I got ticketed for holding my iPhone, basically wanting to check the notification screen while stopped at a big intersection. Seems some local police are aggressive about ticketing for a law that talks about not talking on the phone or texting.

So if the display on the phone is put on a screen in the car, presumably the cops couldn't ticket you.

 

It looks like Apple added support for creating a multithreaded OpenGL ES context in iOS 7.1. Hopefully this will improve performance of games/apps once they are updated for it. It's kind of surprising that it took Apple this long to support multithreading unless they primarily intend for it to lay the groundwork for a possible quad core A8 rather than benefiting existing dual core chips.

XCode now also compiles an ARM64 build by default to the universal binary in addition to ARMv7 and ARMv7s rather than being opt-in which should drive 64-bit adoption.

 

I know for sure Macy's in San Francisco has it. I believe quite a few national chains are piloting iBeacon throughout the country. I don't have the list. Too busy to compile it from Google.

Yap. I would like to get one. Love to have the car access my contact list, and destinations.

 

No browser crashes so far for 7.1. Seems like a nice update.

 

I've already had the browser crash on my on my iPad 3. I sure hope that Safari isn't as crash prone on OS X as it is on iOS.

 

My wife is very happy with the update. No iPad mini retina crashes so far.