All Articles Tagged speed

Jeremy and Chad both gave excellent, compelling reasons for why they ARE SO or ARE NOT upgrading to the iPhone 3G S. For certain, intelligent people will have different yet equally valid reasons for choosing to upgrade, or not to upgrade. For myself?

Apple had me at speed.

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Looks like DaringFireball.net nailed it: the S in iPhone 3G S stands for speed. Faster processors (we’re guessing both CPU and GPU in line with new ARM and PowerVR chips), new OpenGL ES 2.0 implementation (no word on OpenCL yet, which leverages GPUs and CPUs).

HSPA cell downloads are also boosted up to 7.2 Mbps, where available.

Missing in the speed-boost department, however, was any word on support for 802.11n Wi-Fi according to the Tech Specs.

Guess we’re waiting on fourth gen for that?

Welcome to From the Forums, a regular post here at TiPb that gives you, our readers, the chance to get involved in our ever growing community. To get yourself started please register, it will only take a moment of your time, we promise. Now that’s out of the way, lets dive right into some of the better threads for today.

Our first thread today comes to us from iLoveiPhones and she brought up a good topic regarding data prices for our iPhones. Will the data prices rise, stay the same, or can we possibly see different pricing tiers? Personally we feel we may just start to see different pricing tiers. Granted high data prices don’t seem to be slowing people from buying the iPhone but lower data prices could open the flood gates.

Next thread was started a while back by ExBBUser and he wanted to know, what are you top 5 App Store apps? This one has been highlighted here before but with the App Store hitting the one billion mark, why not toss this thread back into the mix?

Sticking with the theme of iPhone apps, cjvitek started a nice little thread titled iPhone CrApp List. It’s simply a thread that you can go to and relieve your frustration on a app you may have purchased just to find out it is pretty pathetic… we have all had this happen at some point or another so share your experience.

Our last thread today is one that I started a while back but with the rumors of AT&T beefing up their 3G network in preparation for the next iPhone, how fast or slow is your 3G data speed? Test your speed out and feel free to post a screen shot in your reply. (Just make sure you have 10 posts to be sure you can post any images.)

See you on the forums!

We’d mentioned previously that AT&T is upgrading the ole rabbit-eared 3G network for Apple’s upcoming next generation iPhone, and WMExperts covered it yesterday, but it’s worth surfacing the details:

AT&T Mobility VP Scott McElroy says software updates will double the downstream speed to 7.2 megabits per second and are already being tested in two markets [...] But AT&T’s looking past that and toward HSPA+, which will increase speeds to 21 Mb/s. And looking even further into the future, tests with the 4G LTE standard should begin sometime next year.

A helpful commenter, Will, gave us the skinny on those phat pipes after the last podcast:

• Plain ‘ol 3G refers to the original WCDMA specs which gives a max throughput of 384 kbps.
• 3.5G in the UMTS world commonly refers to HSDPA which is already up and running.
• “3.75G” - 3GPP Revision 6 - HSDPA (max of 14.4Mbps) and HSUPA (max of 5.76Mbps), known together as HSPA
• “3.9G” - 3GPP Revision 7 - HSDPA (max of 42Mbps) and HSUPA (max of 11Mbps), known as HSPA+

Thanks Will. Well, by any other name, we hope these upgrades not only give iPhone users blazing fast speeds, but better reliability. Doesn’t matter how fast you go if you can’t connect, right?

Apple Insider reports that AT&T is trying to increase the coverage, reliability, and speed of it’s 3G network in anticipation of Apple’s next gen iPhone hardware coming this summer (perhaps to be introduced, like last year, at WWDC in June?).

AT&T’s current 3G supports up to 3.6Mb/s, though AT&T has said they have the infrastructure to go to 7.2Mb/s, with 14.4 and 20Mb/s feasible within a couple of years. As for the iPhone specifically:

Apple has been evaluating a portion of the network upgrade already accessible to its engineers for testing purposes and is genuinely impressed with its speed. A person familiar with the situation commented that Apple iPhone engineers have “never gotten pages to load as fast as they were loading on the new routers.”

This would follow on AT&T’s EDGE “plus” upgrade before the original iPhone 2G launched, and their acceleration of HSPA last year before the iPhone 3G debuted.

So, stronger, better, faster, longer… Sounds good, but can they deliver?

On other mobile platforms (hi Windows Mobile!) we often spend quite a bit of time comparing the processors of different models, seeing which one is faster and seeing what happens when you set the clock speed of a given phone to a higher number. It’s “fun,” see, because not only can clock speed be radically different from phone to phone, but so can performance even on devices with similar clock speeds.

The nice thing about the iPhone: not doing that. Well, until now. MacRumors reports that the 2nd gen iPod Touch, though it sports the same processor as its siblings, actually has a clock speed of 532MHz compared to the rest at 412MHz. The result is that certain apps like TouchSports Tennis run much better on the iPod Touch 2nd Gen. Which ultimately meant that the developer had to optimize their app for the iPhone, iPhone 3G, and iPod Touch 1st Gen. All three actually perform differently with the game, with the original iPod touch falling furthest behind.

It’s a bummer, because as apps become more powerful and get closer to testing the limits of the platform, developers will discover that the ’single target’ advantage of the iPhone/iPod Touch platform may go away. We’re not talking about having to code for as many devices as you do with Windows Mobile or BlackBerry, of course, but it’s still worth noting.

Why not clock up the iPhone 3G. In a couple of words: “battery life.” In a lot of words, well, battery life plus when you have WiFi, bluetooth, Quad-band edge and Tri-band WDCMA (that’s GSM 3G to you) all packed together, they have to be finely tuned. Just changing the clock speed could be enough to ruin a whole raft of things beyond battery life. With smartphones, we live in a world where the choice of paint can radically alter signal strength, so it’s no stretch to say the changes in heat, radiation, etc. associated with a faster clock speed could potentially cause problems. Plus, again, battery life people.

It probably wouldn’t completely screw with everything if Apple upped the clock speed — people change clock speeds all the time on WinMo — but it can happen and it’s a bigger deal as they get packed more tightly together. These radios are packed pretty tightly in the iPhone 3G.

Dieter just told us about Crackberry Kevin’s uber-frustrating experiences trying to pit the iPhone 3G and Blackberry Bold head to head in the browser war to end all browser wars. But — silver lining — for iPhone users, not only did we snag bragging rights, but a handy tip as well!

Unlike the Blackberry Bold, the iPhone defaults to having Javascript enabled. As anyone who’s waited — and waited — for an overstuffed Facebook profile to load already knows, Javascript can be heavy lifting for a browser. For WebApps, it’s a necessary sacrifice, but if all you want is casual browsing, you can turn Javascript off and send MobileSafari into turbo mode.

Here’s how:

From the iPhone home screen, tap Settings. Scroll down and tap the Safari button. Under Security, slide Javascript to Off.

There you go, you’ve just switched to light, clean HTML and CSS mode (still technically “just the internet” — unless you’re in the UK…). In Crackberry.com’s tests, it made a big difference on some sites. Let us know how it works for you!

(Thanks to Crackberry Kevin!)

Here’s the backstory to what you’re looking at, above: Mobile Computing posted up a video showing that the iPhone 3G obliterated the BlackBerry Bold in a download & render test of web browsers (We just covered this, oh, hours ago). Fun stuff, except as our friends at CrackBerry noted (and MC added too) - it wasn’t a fair fight. The Bold probably wasn’t actually using WiFi and also most of the Bolds out there have pre-release ROMS on them, so the finals might be a stitch faster.

So a loyal CB reader pitched in and posted a video of the Bold loading the same page again, but this time actually using WiFi, it came in a little bit faster.

At TiPb, though, we figured it still looked slow. But since the Bold probably had a pre-release OS on it, we figured we’d hobble the iPhone 3G as well. So above, Loyal Moderator Bad Ash pits the BlackBerry Bold on WiFi against the iPhone 3G on EDGE.

Yeah, it’s closer, but we’re still ahead by 4 seconds or so. Tie the iPhone 3G’s WiFi hand behind its back, fine. Tie it’s 3G hand back there too, fine. The iPhone 3G still seems to win out — and we look forward to being able to say that about the final Bold ROM too. Hey — you guys still have (slightly) more reliable push email, so there’s that.

Between the time you click a link and a web page finishes loading on your iPhone, there are many factors that ultimately decide just how fast that process will be, including connection speed (2.5 G EDGE/3G HSDPA/WiFi) CPU speed, and rendering engine. Like desktop Safari, Mobile Safari uses Apple’s open source WebKit rendering engine, and it seems like for 2.0, WebKit has gotten its turbo on, especially in handling Javascript. Says Daring Fireball:

For all the hubbub regarding the new App Store, most “iPhone software” runs in the web browser. But improvements in WebKit performance often help native iPhone app performance, too — a slew of my favorite native iPhone apps have built-in WebKit browsers (e.g., NetNewsWire, Twitterrific, Instapaper, and Cocktails). When WebKit performance improves, any app that uses WebKit improves, and WebKit improved a lot between iPhone 1.1.4 and 2.0.0

The original iPhone on 1.0 was already fast compared to some 3G phones because of the speed of its CPU and the optimization of its WebKit engine. Now it’s getting silly fast. And I don’t think we’ve even gotten the extra nitro from the new Safari 4 and SquirelFish tech yet either?

Check out Daring Fireball for the graphs and stats…

Just prior to the original iPhone’s release, AT&T’s operation “Fine Edge” brought faster, stronger, better 2.5 / 2.75G speed to the GSM masses. This year, in a strangely reminiscent move, reports are coming in that AT&T is showing their 3G HSPA network the same type of love:

For the past few months we’ve been seeing average download speeds between 500 - 800 kbps with a spike here and there. This morning’s tests however, are yielding between 1400 - 1500 kbps.

Gee, could another iPhone release be on the horizon?

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