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This is a pretty underwhelming release. At least for waiting 16 months since the last phone. I sincerely hope Apple isn't about to do a replay of the Mac. Gr

This is a pretty underwhelming release. At least for waiting 16 months since the last phone. I sincerely hope Apple isn't about to do a replay of the Mac. Great introduction with incredible technology. But a few years into it, begins to stagnate. HW wise this nothing like the iPhone 4. The iPhone 4 was a far superior device over the Galaxy S phones. The Galaxy S II though is pretty close to this. In terms of the raw HW I think I might call it a draw now. The camera is superior on the iPhone I suspect, but the small screen size negates that win. Based on this trend, unless Apple has some aces in its sleeve, over the next year we'll see Android phones clearly pull ahead in HW. SW though iOS still kills Android. Mango and iOS seem to be the ones that have the fundamentals down. I almost think someone needs to throw Android out and start from scratch. The inability for that OS to be stable and the fact that its still sometimes jerky on SGII HW is embarrassing.

dmix 15y ago
You lost me at Mango and iOS being in the same category - and then you want to "throw Android out and start from scratch"?... what? Android is not quite iOS but its a very close second and better than what anyone else has been capable of creating.
- kenjackson 15y ago
  iOS and Mango are in the same class in fundamentals. Use a device with iOS, Mango, and Android. Honestly, try it. The iOS and Mango device respond very similarly to basic things like swipes, pinches, etc... Android is a lot more jittery, even on the SGII HW. The odd thing with Android is that it's not a LOT less jittery on the G1 (although it is). Android is second best in apps. And #1 in terms of market dominance. But if you jump back and forth for a week between the iPhone for and Nexus S, you'll feel a huge difference.
  - MatthewPhillips 15y ago
    I personally don't see much of a difference between the OSes in terms of lag. I know there is a meme that iOS doesn't lag but my iPad lags all the time (and always has). If I do a big sync I have to restart the device because it's unusably laggy. My Nexus One with Gingerbread rarely lags at all. * I don't really like Android that much (or iOS).
    - vacri 15y ago
      I think that there's selection bias at work. I have an android phone, but test software for a company that only has an app for iphone (owner is iphone fan). As a result, I have to frequently borrow other people's iphones to test things with the app - and I find that the amount of missed swipes, jitteriness and responsiveness is very similar between the iphone and my 'lowly' motorola defy. If I have a lot of crap running on the defy, it performs worse, but in normal use, I don't find the touchscreen responsiveness much different between these phones. To be honest though, I'm running CM7 and not the stock image. Still, I see iphone/pad users miss swipes all the time or have to try repinching a few times, but for some reason it registers less on a shiny device.
  - Steko 15y ago
    Dead right on this. The big 2 complaints I hear from iOS to Android users are the stutter and app/content discoverability. Google should be able to plug both of these gaps though and if this release doesn't do it they stand to lose a lot to forked implementations like Amazon's. New Android update next week though. Is it just me or did they really miss a golden opportunity to go head to head before people pre-order 4GS's this week. Google should have counterprogrammed their event for tomorrow.
  - tadfisher 15y ago
    Android was designed when mobile GPUs were an oddity and stylus input was the norm. As such, rendering is mostly done in software and both redraw events and input are handled by the CPU. Mango and iOS were designed with hardware acceleration in mind, and render everything to 3D textures so they can use the GPU to get that smooth feel. The ICS reveal later this month will reveal whether Google has addressed this issue. Most of Honeycomb is already GPU-accelerated, but not all of the performance issues were fixed.
  - adbge 15y ago
    > The iOS and Mango device respond very similarly to > basic things like swipes, pinches, etc... Android > is a lot more jittery, even on the SGII HW. Before I ditched my iPhone 3G for an Atrix, the device was barely usable. It didn't just stutter, it would hang for upwards of a minute when opening certain apps (maps, I'm looking at you), and it's not like the device was defective as I've used others and had an identical experience. Now, maybe the 4G offers a smoother experience than Android (no GC + hardware acceleration?), I don't know, but the 3G experience was sure as hell nothing to write home about. I can say, however, that my Atrix is noticeably more responsive after switching from Motorola's firmware to Cynanogen Mod, but -- again -- I don't know how it compares to a 4G.
    - ghshephard 15y ago
      iPhone 3G came out in 2008 - nice, because it was new - but yes, had lots of lag - better than the competition (at the time). 3GS gave it a bit of a boost. iPhone 4 was the first (in my experience) iPhone to significantly reduce lag/latency in most areas - the shutter speed was it's achilles heel (it sucks). I'm upgrading to the 4S for one reason only - Supposed zero shutter lag.
      - vacri 15y ago
        perhaps try the camera out in a story before forking over the cash first :)
- euroclydon 15y ago
  There was an article posted here a while back comparing Android's screen painting to IOS. Basically, Android behaves like every other OS's screen painting API, where when the screen needs to scroll, the whole thing must be re-rendered, but iOS renders the whole screen and uses a view camera to pan the screen beneath, hence fast scrolling. (Please forgive my poor use of terminology. I'm sure someone else can do a much better job of explaining this.)
  - tadfisher 15y ago
    You're pretty much right. Apple renders their entire UI to OpenGL textures, and uses their nice GPU and scene manipulation to get the incredibly smooth feel. Android, up until Honeycomb, renders the UI in software, which ties up the UI thread with redraw events as well as input detection. You'll see the limitations of Apple's model in mobile Safari: scrolling too fast gets you to unrendered sections of the page, which must be rendered and filled in software; as well as pinch zooming, where you get a blurry zoomed texture for a moment or two while the software re-renders the page and updates the texture.
jberryman 15y ago
Sorry, what is mango?
- chetan51 15y ago
  Windows Phone OS
- Toddward 15y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Phone_7.5 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Phone_7.5
- Steko 15y ago
  Windows Phone 7 RC 1
clistctrl 15y ago
I would guess they're banking on LTE for the iPhone 5... so in that step up you'll see a much bigger upgrade, but as a technology LTE is probably a bit immature for Apple's standards.
- evilduck 15y ago
  Unless data caps get overhauled with LTE rollouts (hahaha, right), it's impossible for me to get excited about stupid fast connections you can only use at full throttle for about 45 minutes per month. Sprint just capped their WiMax phone tethering and modems, they'll surely cap the phones themselves when load increases.
  - clistctrl 15y ago
    Well I think in LTE the number of resource elements assigned to a UE will vary depending on the other phones connected to the eNodeB. So in theory it's not a problem anyways, because everyone will have an iPhone ;)
- gte910h 15y ago
  LTE is still ridiculously power hungry in every device that has it. I'd like to see them avoid it until it gets a bit more under control
  - clistctrl 15y ago
    If it's not a unique disadvantage, do you really think it will affect sales? To overcome it I suppose they would need to find a more power efficient processor. MIMO is kind of a power hungry application what with the calculating a new spatial correlation matrix every few milliseconds. It would seem like the limitation will be universal to all other phones unless a phone manufacture buys some chip manufacturer with a mythical chip that solves the problem then keeps the tech to themselves.
    - gte910h 15y ago
      >will it effect sales? Sure it will: People will use it if it's there. If they don't put it in, people won't use it and will continue to laud the iPhone's battery life.
Steko 15y ago
"The Galaxy S II though is pretty close to this. In terms of the raw HW I think I might call it a draw now." I'm pretty sure the SGX543MP2 blows everything else out of water currently: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4686/samsung-galaxy-s-2-international-review-the-best-redefined/17 http://www.anandtech.com/show/4686/samsung-galaxy-s-2-intern... The offscreen numbers are resolution independent and as far as I can tell the 4GS should be near identical with the ipad. Basically no one is going to surpass the 4GS hardware until Q2 2012 when 28/32 nm phones are shipping and the iphone 5's chip will already be on display in the ipad 3. A lot of people expected the 4GS/5's A5 to have one GPU disabled but I guess they can just turn it off dynamically for battery and somehow handle the heat when it's needed.
wmeredith 15y ago
With Apple, it's not about specs, it never has been. It's about the UX and I've not seen anything on Android that can match the iPhone 4 much less the 4S. The iPhone 4's specs may be 16 months old, but the iPhone 4 UX is from 2015.
- illumen 15y ago
  Hi, You are completely right. You have not tried a 4S, so you're just making stuff up. Like your comment about time travel. I'm sure that time travel can not be done by the apple people, unless they know Michael J Fox. Which I guess they may know him, considering Steveo (he hates it when I call him that) wears a black turtle neck some times. He also really loved a drink before, but not so much now after that whole incident with the 12 livers he had to take from interns. In summary, your prophetic ideas are astounding and wise past your years. Well, wise past the years of anyone in our generation, and the previous five generations before. One more thing... Steve does wear cool specs though. I think the success of apple is at least 46.34% to do with the CEOs specs. The new vice president in the video didn't put on a good pair for this showing. They were kind of too thin, and not thick and black enough. Really, he should take some fashion classes, because he would have gotten a D- for his outfit this time.
tptacek 15y ago
The iPhone 4 is (apparently) Apple's most successful product launch ever. It has been for me their most useful product ever. I am rarely without it. It's my phone, my music player, my camera, my alarm clock, my kitchen timer, my only game system, and often my web browser. It is also the most solid-feeling, elegant, understated thing Apple has ever sold me. Apart from "faster", "better at connectivity", and "better at taking pictures", where does Apple have to go with this thing? A new chassis design? Why? I agree that this was a boring keynote. But I think it's boring because Apple has got this particular product design nailed. It may not be the best phone we'll ever see, but they're holding 20 and the dealer is showing 6.
- kenjackson 15y ago
  Apart from "faster", "better at connectivity", and "better at taking pictures", where does Apple have to go with this thing? A new chassis design? Why? And that's my fear. The first decade of the 2000s' Apple would answer this question with something you didn't think you needed. But it was a gamechanger. I could imagine Steve Jobs walking out on stage and saying: "We did the Retina Display. We changed displays forever. The iPhone4 is the best display on any phone, and it's been almost a year and a half since we released it. But there's a huge glaring problem with it -- it's 2D." At this point you begin to hear the audience pick up in anticipation. "The world isn't in 2D. You can't appreciate the vibrance of a 3D world fully when projected onto a 2D surface. People have tried 3D though." Steve pulls out a the red/blue paper glasses from his pocket. Tosses it on the floor. The modern 3D TV glasses from his pocket, tosses it on the floor. Pulls out an EVO 3D. Looks at it for a second. Tosses it on the floor. "You don't do something, unless you can do it right. We figured out how to do 3D right." Maybe next year.
  - tptacek 15y ago
    So we're setting the bar for new Apple products at "3D cell phone". Got it. :)
    - joebadmo 15y ago
      Maybe I shouldn't speak for kenjackson, but I don't think 3D was actually the feature he was hoping for, just an example of the kind of industry-changing innovation of which Apple is capable but was completely absent today. And I say this not because I think you missed his point, but in a probably futile attempt to head off discussion about how 3D is stupid.
sambe 15y ago
No doubt this upgrade will get bad press for lacking "wow" factor. Buy the phone, sell the shares. But really, do people care so much about a redesign? Near field what? 3D?! Come on... For 3GS owners like me this is an enormous upgrade, for 4 owners it will still be very noticeable. When you add the iOS 5 improvements & cloud mobile life will be much smoother. Very much like when the 3GS came out.
jsz0 15y ago
If the 4S is using, more or less, the same GPU as the iPad 2 it has at least one major hardware advantage. (there seems to be about 8 different models of Galaxy S so possibly one of these random models has a better GPU than the other?)

dmix 15y ago

You lost me at Mango and iOS being in the same category - and then you want to "throw Android out and start from scratch"?... what? Android is not quite iOS but its a very close second and better than what anyone else has been capable of creating.

kenjackson 15y ago
iOS and Mango are in the same class in fundamentals. Use a device with iOS, Mango, and Android. Honestly, try it. The iOS and Mango device respond very similarly to basic things like swipes, pinches, etc... Android is a lot more jittery, even on the SGII HW. The odd thing with Android is that it's not a LOT less jittery on the G1 (although it is). Android is second best in apps. And #1 in terms of market dominance. But if you jump back and forth for a week between the iPhone for and Nexus S, you'll feel a huge difference.
- MatthewPhillips 15y ago
  I personally don't see much of a difference between the OSes in terms of lag. I know there is a meme that iOS doesn't lag but my iPad lags all the time (and always has). If I do a big sync I have to restart the device because it's unusably laggy. My Nexus One with Gingerbread rarely lags at all. * I don't really like Android that much (or iOS).
  - vacri 15y ago
    I think that there's selection bias at work. I have an android phone, but test software for a company that only has an app for iphone (owner is iphone fan). As a result, I have to frequently borrow other people's iphones to test things with the app - and I find that the amount of missed swipes, jitteriness and responsiveness is very similar between the iphone and my 'lowly' motorola defy. If I have a lot of crap running on the defy, it performs worse, but in normal use, I don't find the touchscreen responsiveness much different between these phones. To be honest though, I'm running CM7 and not the stock image. Still, I see iphone/pad users miss swipes all the time or have to try repinching a few times, but for some reason it registers less on a shiny device.
- Steko 15y ago
  Dead right on this. The big 2 complaints I hear from iOS to Android users are the stutter and app/content discoverability. Google should be able to plug both of these gaps though and if this release doesn't do it they stand to lose a lot to forked implementations like Amazon's. New Android update next week though. Is it just me or did they really miss a golden opportunity to go head to head before people pre-order 4GS's this week. Google should have counterprogrammed their event for tomorrow.
- tadfisher 15y ago
  Android was designed when mobile GPUs were an oddity and stylus input was the norm. As such, rendering is mostly done in software and both redraw events and input are handled by the CPU. Mango and iOS were designed with hardware acceleration in mind, and render everything to 3D textures so they can use the GPU to get that smooth feel. The ICS reveal later this month will reveal whether Google has addressed this issue. Most of Honeycomb is already GPU-accelerated, but not all of the performance issues were fixed.
- adbge 15y ago
  > The iOS and Mango device respond very similarly to > basic things like swipes, pinches, etc... Android > is a lot more jittery, even on the SGII HW. Before I ditched my iPhone 3G for an Atrix, the device was barely usable. It didn't just stutter, it would hang for upwards of a minute when opening certain apps (maps, I'm looking at you), and it's not like the device was defective as I've used others and had an identical experience. Now, maybe the 4G offers a smoother experience than Android (no GC + hardware acceleration?), I don't know, but the 3G experience was sure as hell nothing to write home about. I can say, however, that my Atrix is noticeably more responsive after switching from Motorola's firmware to Cynanogen Mod, but -- again -- I don't know how it compares to a 4G.
  - ghshephard 15y ago
    iPhone 3G came out in 2008 - nice, because it was new - but yes, had lots of lag - better than the competition (at the time). 3GS gave it a bit of a boost. iPhone 4 was the first (in my experience) iPhone to significantly reduce lag/latency in most areas - the shutter speed was it's achilles heel (it sucks). I'm upgrading to the 4S for one reason only - Supposed zero shutter lag.
    - vacri 15y ago
      perhaps try the camera out in a story before forking over the cash first :)
euroclydon 15y ago
There was an article posted here a while back comparing Android's screen painting to IOS. Basically, Android behaves like every other OS's screen painting API, where when the screen needs to scroll, the whole thing must be re-rendered, but iOS renders the whole screen and uses a view camera to pan the screen beneath, hence fast scrolling. (Please forgive my poor use of terminology. I'm sure someone else can do a much better job of explaining this.)
- tadfisher 15y ago
  You're pretty much right. Apple renders their entire UI to OpenGL textures, and uses their nice GPU and scene manipulation to get the incredibly smooth feel. Android, up until Honeycomb, renders the UI in software, which ties up the UI thread with redraw events as well as input detection. You'll see the limitations of Apple's model in mobile Safari: scrolling too fast gets you to unrendered sections of the page, which must be rendered and filled in software; as well as pinch zooming, where you get a blurry zoomed texture for a moment or two while the software re-renders the page and updates the texture.

jberryman 15y ago

Sorry, what is mango?

chetan51 15y ago
Windows Phone OS
Toddward 15y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Phone_7.5 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Phone_7.5
Steko 15y ago
Windows Phone 7 RC 1

clistctrl 15y ago

I would guess they're banking on LTE for the iPhone 5... so in that step up you'll see a much bigger upgrade, but as a technology LTE is probably a bit immature for Apple's standards.

evilduck 15y ago
Unless data caps get overhauled with LTE rollouts (hahaha, right), it's impossible for me to get excited about stupid fast connections you can only use at full throttle for about 45 minutes per month. Sprint just capped their WiMax phone tethering and modems, they'll surely cap the phones themselves when load increases.
- clistctrl 15y ago
  Well I think in LTE the number of resource elements assigned to a UE will vary depending on the other phones connected to the eNodeB. So in theory it's not a problem anyways, because everyone will have an iPhone ;)
gte910h 15y ago
LTE is still ridiculously power hungry in every device that has it. I'd like to see them avoid it until it gets a bit more under control
- clistctrl 15y ago
  If it's not a unique disadvantage, do you really think it will affect sales? To overcome it I suppose they would need to find a more power efficient processor. MIMO is kind of a power hungry application what with the calculating a new spatial correlation matrix every few milliseconds. It would seem like the limitation will be universal to all other phones unless a phone manufacture buys some chip manufacturer with a mythical chip that solves the problem then keeps the tech to themselves.
  - gte910h 15y ago
    >will it effect sales? Sure it will: People will use it if it's there. If they don't put it in, people won't use it and will continue to laud the iPhone's battery life.

Steko 15y ago

"The Galaxy S II though is pretty close to this. In terms of the raw HW I think I might call it a draw now." I'm pretty sure the SGX543MP2 blows everything else out of water currently: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4686/samsung-galaxy-s-2-international-review-the-best-redefined/17 http://www.anandtech.com/show/4686/samsung-galaxy-s-2-intern... The offscreen numbers are resolution independent and as far as I can tell the 4GS should be near identical with the ipad. Basically no one is going to surpass the 4GS hardware until Q2 2012 when 28/32 nm phones are shipping and the iphone 5's chip will already be on display in the ipad 3. A lot of people expected the 4GS/5's A5 to have one GPU disabled but I guess they can just turn it off dynamically for battery and somehow handle the heat when it's needed.

wmeredith 15y ago

With Apple, it's not about specs, it never has been. It's about the UX and I've not seen anything on Android that can match the iPhone 4 much less the 4S. The iPhone 4's specs may be 16 months old, but the iPhone 4 UX is from 2015.

illumen 15y ago
Hi, You are completely right. You have not tried a 4S, so you're just making stuff up. Like your comment about time travel. I'm sure that time travel can not be done by the apple people, unless they know Michael J Fox. Which I guess they may know him, considering Steveo (he hates it when I call him that) wears a black turtle neck some times. He also really loved a drink before, but not so much now after that whole incident with the 12 livers he had to take from interns. In summary, your prophetic ideas are astounding and wise past your years. Well, wise past the years of anyone in our generation, and the previous five generations before. One more thing... Steve does wear cool specs though. I think the success of apple is at least 46.34% to do with the CEOs specs. The new vice president in the video didn't put on a good pair for this showing. They were kind of too thin, and not thick and black enough. Really, he should take some fashion classes, because he would have gotten a D- for his outfit this time.

tptacek 15y ago

The iPhone 4 is (apparently) Apple's most successful product launch ever. It has been for me their most useful product ever. I am rarely without it. It's my phone, my music player, my camera, my alarm clock, my kitchen timer, my only game system, and often my web browser. It is also the most solid-feeling, elegant, understated thing Apple has ever sold me. Apart from "faster", "better at connectivity", and "better at taking pictures", where does Apple have to go with this thing? A new chassis design? Why? I agree that this was a boring keynote. But I think it's boring because Apple has got this particular product design nailed. It may not be the best phone we'll ever see, but they're holding 20 and the dealer is showing 6.

kenjackson 15y ago
Apart from "faster", "better at connectivity", and "better at taking pictures", where does Apple have to go with this thing? A new chassis design? Why? And that's my fear. The first decade of the 2000s' Apple would answer this question with something you didn't think you needed. But it was a gamechanger. I could imagine Steve Jobs walking out on stage and saying: "We did the Retina Display. We changed displays forever. The iPhone4 is the best display on any phone, and it's been almost a year and a half since we released it. But there's a huge glaring problem with it -- it's 2D." At this point you begin to hear the audience pick up in anticipation. "The world isn't in 2D. You can't appreciate the vibrance of a 3D world fully when projected onto a 2D surface. People have tried 3D though." Steve pulls out a the red/blue paper glasses from his pocket. Tosses it on the floor. The modern 3D TV glasses from his pocket, tosses it on the floor. Pulls out an EVO 3D. Looks at it for a second. Tosses it on the floor. "You don't do something, unless you can do it right. We figured out how to do 3D right." Maybe next year.
- tptacek 15y ago
  So we're setting the bar for new Apple products at "3D cell phone". Got it. :)
  - joebadmo 15y ago
    Maybe I shouldn't speak for kenjackson, but I don't think 3D was actually the feature he was hoping for, just an example of the kind of industry-changing innovation of which Apple is capable but was completely absent today. And I say this not because I think you missed his point, but in a probably futile attempt to head off discussion about how 3D is stupid.

sambe 15y ago

No doubt this upgrade will get bad press for lacking "wow" factor. Buy the phone, sell the shares. But really, do people care so much about a redesign? Near field what? 3D?! Come on... For 3GS owners like me this is an enormous upgrade, for 4 owners it will still be very noticeable. When you add the iOS 5 improvements & cloud mobile life will be much smoother. Very much like when the 3GS came out.

jsz0 15y ago

If the 4S is using, more or less, the same GPU as the iPad 2 it has at least one major hardware advantage. (there seems to be about 8 different models of Galaxy S so possibly one of these random models has a better GPU than the other?)