Next-Gen iPhone & iPhone Nano Speculation

[ltcommander.data]

True but that can also be said about any other mobile OS.

I guess the difference is that Apple only has to worry about 3 smartphone devices representing 3 SoC, 2 microarchitectures, and 2 RAM sizes with the iPhone 4S being the priority. That'll likely mean more manpower per device. Plus, they don't have to worry about OEM or carrier bloat/"value-add" and there is less delay customers actually getting the update to see improvements.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

You're thinking like a youngster (and insulting her intelligence in the process.)

She has a Canon SD1100 camera right now. She knows full well where the mini-USB cable needs to be plugged in, but it's a damn small connector which makes it difficult to see the correct orientation with tired eyes. And it's covered with a nasty piece of hard plastic that difficult to pry open with healthy hands, let alone 70y old ones.

Funny question: if all that is so hard to achieve, how the hell does she charge the camera?

It also requires plugging in the USB cable into the computer: a large 10y old desktop that stands on the ground under the table, which makes it hard to get to. (Yes, you could keep the cable hanging out there at all times, but that's terribly untidy, which bothers her more than not being able to transfer pictures.) The alternative of removing the SD card is just as cumbersome.

Or, for the price of an iphone 4s, you can buy:

1) Nokia N8

+2) A brand new netbook, more powerful than the cumbersome 10 year-old desktop (which BTW can be recicled) and with easy-to-reach USB ports.

+3) A new 20" TFT monitor, so the small screen in the netbook doesn't become a hindrance

And if all that comes together, we'd still have to synchronize over the phone.

The current solution is much simpler: I gave her a large enough SSD card to store months worth of pictures and fly over here every once in a while to visit and copy over everything to her PC etc.
(...)
It gets shared with your other devices (iPad, iPhoto etc.) It's still not ideal, but getting stuff from the device to her computer has always been the biggest issue. After that, I take over with remote login.
(...)
Except that, AFAIK, it doesn't share yet to Facebook etc. It shares between your own personal devices instead. That said, the turd case is something I hope they will solve eventually.

For one: you have to do it for all pictures individually (at least how you described it.)
For two: you need to remember to do it.


Don't underestimate the barrier of one additional click/action. Amazon with one-click (and Apple with iTunes) learned that very early on.

Initially I hoped to have fixed the photo upload problem by installing an EyeFi. It's wonderful when it works, but you need to keep the camera powered on the study desk next to the computer on to make it do its magic. One hurdle too much.

Going by the previous iPad 2 commercials where parents can stream live video of their children to grandparents through FaceTime, Apple's use case for grandparents may not be as much simplifying them getting photos on their computers, but them being able to see pictures family members took easily. For example, parents take pictures of their children and the grandparents merely have to click Photos on their iPad and it's there. Or even better, they are sitting on their couch and just need to go to their AppleTV and click Photos and it's there in a medium (TV) that they easily understand, flipping through them with a remote control. No need for email or signing in/up for websites or computers. Just sitting on their couch with a remote control. Of course you'd have to have set up the AppleTV for them before hand, but after setup use is simpler.

Then you're not talking about sharing, you're talking about syncing.
You can do all that with SugarSync that supports Android, Symbian^3, Blackberry, iOS, Mac and PC.

Yes, that transparent file sharing with OTA syncing in mobile devices hasn't been invented by apple.

We've been able to do that for quite some time now, using those ugly, horrible, out-of-fashion, cheap Android and Symbian phones and equally poor-tasted PCs.

Maybe it's because it's 5:39 AM here, but I think you have the meaning of condone backwards.

Yes, it's backwards

 

[Ailuros]

Could we at least try to get on topic if you gentlemen don't mind?

 

[RudeCurve]

Apple still have the mindshare built-up by three successful generations of iPhones so seeing such huge numbers of pre-orders for the iP4S is no surprise. Android phones are still very much playing catch-up in the market but the pace of advance is now very high and, for the first time the high-end Android devices will have considerably more processing power than the top end iPhone (3D capabilities aside) - the SGSII has 50% more CPU power than the iPhone. Will the stronger GPU in the iPhone plus the mindshare be enough to overcome this shortfall? I'd tend to doubt it.

I can't see any way in which this won't adversely impact iPhone sales in the longer term. The iPhone may have the cachet of being considered the best device for now but, once people compare this to the new high-end Android phones which are flooding the market, this will inevitably change. Although of a high-resolution, the 3.5" screen just looks very small in comparison to all the 4"+ Android phones now available and the Atrix I recently bought quite cheaply now has a better specification in most respects than Apple's yet to be released 'halo' device.

I can only assume that the iP4S is a stopgap device which will be replaced by a more powerful iP5 in 6 months or so because it will really look quite unimpressive compared to the forthcoming 'ultra' phones with 720p screens such as the Nexus Prime and the LG device which have been announced.

It will also be interesting to see what ICS brings to the Android playing field. Android is still catching up with iOS in many respects but ICS ought to be a big leap forward over Gingerbread after the distraction of Honeycomb.

This is not the mindset from the majority of phone customers out there. People don't buy phones because it has more "GHz" in the "CPU" than XYZ phone...

Most people couldn't care less what clock frequency the "CPU" runs at other than "it's fast enough to deliver the intended user experience". Even I don't care about clock frequency of competing Android phones even though I will be looking forword to an upgraded CPU in my next iPhone.

The only people who really cares about "CPU clock frequency advantage" when looking for a phone are tech geek nerds on forums like this one who are overcompensating and make up a tiny percentage of the overall buying public....

Why does the average smart phone buyer care if X phone scores a few % better than Y phone on Z benchmark?

All of this reminds me of the Intel vs AMD performance battle nonsense that 90% of PC buyers don't give a shit about....or the 16-bit vs 32-bit console wars.

Now with all of that said I do expect to see Apple increasing the screen size of their top of the line iPhone in the near future. I think a 4" 16:9 screen would be the next logical step at least that's what I'm hoping for. At 4" it would still be able to fit within the current iPhone's chassis dimensions so it would not change ergonomics too much but at the same time make for a better visual experience. I'm pretty sure Apple is just waiting for the right time when price and supply of these larger screens reach the sweet spot so that they could be used without increasing the price of the iPhone 5...

 

[wco81]

Looks like they underclocked the CPU in order to get better battery life.

Is that a tradeoff most people will make?

 

[cjo]

Looks like they underclocked the CPU in order to get better battery life.

Is that a tradeoff most people will make?

Yes

 

[Mariner]

Looks like they underclocked the CPU in order to get better battery life.

Is that a tradeoff most people will make?

As RudeCurve mentions in his post above, most people won't have a clue.

I remain pretty unimpressed with the iP4S hardware, the excellent GPU aside - all that graphical power with just a teeny screen to show it on. What a waste!

Apple is obviously betting the farm on the software side of things (as well as the Apple 'cachet') to make the sales. All the claims about how many more iOS apps are available aren't really of much relevance as there are plenty of Android apps which are comparable with the iOS ones. Any clever new apps (on either platform), will soon be ported or duplicated on the other.

However, Siri could be Apple's ace in the hole for this generation and it appears to me that they are betting the farm on this technology to make the iP4S the must-have device. How well it will end up working, I don't know. It needs to be a good improvement over Google's current Voice Search and Actions stuff. I wonder if Google are looking to improve on the Voice search technology in ICS?

As an aside, I also wonder if we'll see Jailbroken iPhone4s hacked to support Siri? I know the older Siri app worked on the basic iPhone4 but I wonder if the newer version requires more processing power than can be supplied?

 

[Lazy8s]

Clock speed is the same proportion as their last tablet : phone release (iPad/iPhone 4). From a GPU perspective, matches up pretty well to the difference in resolution.

The scale will become more challenging for them to cover once they improve the pixel density on iPad.

 

[Lazy8s]

Siri voice recognition all happens on Apple's side. On that note, the Dragon Go app, available for any iOS device, does a lot of what Siri can do but is more limited to web applications/services for its voice commands versus controlling device apps extensively like Siri.

You can say "what's the weather like?" and it'll bring up the current forecast on Accuweather's site, or you can ask for directions to the Empire State Building which points it to Google Maps (which is one of the few instances in iOS which then acts as a command to trigger the built-in Maps app and load the route on there.) It actually does link to certain apps (asking it to play music by a certain artist can control Pandora to start streaming a station), but it can't control the built-in utilities for reading texts or setting appointments.

 

[Pressure]

Looks like they underclocked the CPU in order to get better battery life.

Is that a tradeoff most people will make?

Uhm ... the only comparison would be to the iPad 2 but the iPhone 4S is still twice as fast as the iPhone 4.

There really isn't a trade-off in 2 times the CPU performance and 7 times the graphic performance.

 

[wco81]

Uhm ... the only comparison would be to the iPad 2 but the iPhone 4S is still twice as fast as the iPhone 4.

There really isn't a trade-off in 2 times the CPU performance and 7 times the graphic performance.

I meant in comparison to other brands.

Look at how commonly they have oversized optional battery packs for Android phones.

As for Siri, looks like the voice recognition processing is done on the server, so it needs a data connection.

Older devices could run Siri but maybe they limited to the 4s to limit the load on the VR processing servers? Not to mention giving people a reason to upgrade to the 4s, of course.

 

[pcchen]

I meant in comparison to other brands.

Look at how commonly they have oversized optional battery packs for Android phones.

As for Siri, looks like the voice recognition processing is done on the server, so it needs a data connection.

Older devices could run Siri but maybe they limited to the 4s to limit the load on the VR processing servers? Not to mention giving people a reason to upgrade to the 4s, of course.

There could be some processing is done locally so it doesn't put so much loads on the server (IIRC when Siri was released first on iPhone 3GS, they said they have to "cut some corners" due to lack of CPU speed). After all, good voice recognition needs good quality voices, and it's probably not a good idea to send something such as GSM quality (~ 8kbps). That may explains why it's limited to A5.

Of course, if this is the sole reason, iPad 2 should be able to use Siri too, but Apple is probably not going to make this happen very soon.

 

[Rys]

I think Arun's correct in that it requires the higher quality noise-cancelling mics on the phones in order to feed the software side the best quality audio to chew on. I don't believe A5 is the gating factor, rather the mic quality. Still hoping that iPhone 4 will get it at some point, but if the mic and audio processing hardware in the 4S did change, as suspected, it might require that hardware minspec and rule iPhone 4 and iPad 2 out (sadly).

You could argue that it's maybe an artificial limit, but there is likely a quality requirement here that Apple want for the best experience. After all, first impressions for this are very important for Siri to take off.

 

[Lazy8s]

Voice dictation/controls have always fascinated me, so I've tested over time multiple services including Vlingo, Google's voice search, and Dragon Dictation across multiple devices including the original iPhone, multiple HTC Android phones, and the iPad 2, sometimes dictating large paragraphs at a time, and the accuracy is always very high (around 90%) and consistent. Limiting Siri to the iPhone 4S was certainly done just to give the phone an exclusive selling point.

With the accuracy and range of other voice recognition services, I don't even think Siri would be too hard to copy. Dragon already lets you perform searches with naturally phrased questions. Implementing it as deeply into the OS and apps, and also its contextual conversation flow (so that you don't have to repeat the original command if Siri comes back with a clarifying statement/question), is really what sets Siri apart right now.

I was actually very impressed with the voice recognition on-board iPhone 4 for controlling the iPod functionality and making calls. Accuracy is noticeably lower than the services which process server-side and therefore may not yet be suitable for a headlining feature like Siri, but I feel the disparity is relatively marginal and could've been covered just by working on it some with a larger vocabulary and refinement.

 

[Lazy8s]

iFixit teardown confirms only 512 MB RAM and their naming of the baseband as MDM6610.

 

[ltcommander.data]

http://www.rockstargames.com/newswi...uto-iii-10th-anniversary-edition-for-sel.html

So Rockstar is celebrating the 10th anniversary of GTA III by porting it to select mobile devices. What's notable is that this looks like the first Apple A5 only game for iOS. Any speculation about what makes this 10 year old game unsupportable for Apple A4 devices? It isn't RAM requirements otherwise the iPhone 4 would be supported too. GPU limitations could presumably be worked around with draw distance scaling and a non-Retina codepath. Which leaves CPU limitations. Is a 800MHz or 1GHz ARM Cortex A8 really far behind what the PS2 had or is it likely that Rockstar is using some type of emulator that is adding overhead?

 

[idsn6]

Galaxy on Fire II HD and Machinarium are earlier A5-only examples. Given that the Mac version of GTA III uses Cider, I assume the mobile versions are limited to the high-end for the same reason as Machinarium: cheap ports running on a suboptimal compatibility layer.

 

[ltcommander.data]

Galaxy on Fire II HD and Machinarium are earlier A5-only examples. Given that the Mac version of GTA III uses Cider, I assume the mobile versions are limited to the high-end for the same reason as Machinarium: cheap ports running on a suboptimal compatibility layer.

I don't really count Galaxy on Fire II HD since there are versions of that game that run on older devices, even if they are implemented as a separate app, so I consider it scalable. I didn't know about Machinarium.

Hopefully GTA III won't actually be using some form of mobile Cider. If they are only interested in the minimum amount of work and aren't willing to modify their code, I'd imagine the controls are going to be atrocious. Plus the mission structure was never designed for quick mobile gameplay.

 

[Lazy8s]

Yeah, I don't expect a high amount of optimization considering the number of different hardware platforms they're supporting within the initial list of targeted devices (and what's with their mention of an Evo 2? Either a typo referring to some other Evo or they just revealed a new phone for HTC.)

 

[Pressure]

Machinarium is a bad example as it has been ported with Adobe Air...the game is originally made for Flash.