Slashdot Mirror


iPhone Gets Better Battery, Scratch Resistant Glass

Dekortage writes "Prior to its much-hyped launch on June 29, Apple has announced upgrades to its battery life (almost 40% more than originally announced) and scratch resistance (using "optical quality glass" rather than plastics). The announcement also includes a comparison chart pitting the iPhone against smartphones from Nokia, Samsung, Palm, and Blackberry."

5 of 527 comments (clear)

  1. One one upgrade I'm interested in.... by JakiChan · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    If AJAX is truly only going to be the way to develop apps for the phone then give us 3G. Sorry, I'm not gonna do ajax surfing over a lousy GPRS connection...

    --
    "Where quality is like a dead stinking rat - you just can't miss it."
  2. Re:Worst comparison chart EVER by Rakshasa+Taisab · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Are you saying you have larger balls?

    --
    - These characters were randomly selected.
  3. You abuse the mod system by Gary+W.+Longsine · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    Furthermore, you're not proud of it. If you were proud of it, you would post under your account.

    --
    If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
  4. Re:Look at the phones. Battery life was a secret. by dfghjk · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    "The OS is the only difference I can think of, both mac notebooks and pc notebooks are using pretty much the same hardware..."

    Not in the case of your iBook. Apple, and its users, are known to exaggerate their battery life just as they exaggerated the performance of PowerPC processors. Now that Apple uses Intel, battery life and processor performance are quite similar between Mac and PC.

    "Unless you can give me an example proving otherwise, I'm going to continue believing that it's OS X vs Windows/Linux that makes mac notebooks have longer battery life."

    I think you're going to do that regardless. ;-)

    "I don't have a mac-intel notebook to test windows on, but my iBook only gets 2 hours if I'm lucky under ubuntu, while it gets at a minimum 4 hours under OS X."

    Lord knows you wouldn't want to test on relevant hardware before making your sweeping claims. I suppose that proves OS X for iPhone offers power management as good as other smartphones?

    "The iPhone has a much faster CPU than the machines OS X was originally designed to run on (back in 1985)."

    It does? Where are the specs for that? Have you run benchmarks? What does speed have to do with battery life? OS X existed in 1985?

    "They won't have needed to do many optimizations at all to get OS X running beautifully on such "slow" hardware, which means they're working with code that has had over 20 years to mature."

    I have no earthly idea what you are talking about, but OS X is nowhere near 20 years old with much of it relatively brand new. The iPhone's UI is entirely new and has never shipped in a product. The touchscreen hardware and the cellular radios are both brand new hardware to Apple and OS X.

    Just what does it mean to run "beautifully" and how does that relate to power management? When OS X was first released in 1999 it didn't even run beautifully on even the newest Mac hardware of the time. I think you need to come out of your dreamworld now.

  5. Re:Look at the phones. Battery life was a secret. by abhi_beckert · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    "Not in the case of your iBook. Apple, and its users, are known to exaggerate their battery life just as they exaggerated the performance of PowerPC processors. Now that Apple uses Intel, battery life and processor performance are quite similar between Mac and PC.

    I think you're going to do that regardless. ;-)"

    Lets not even go into bias, if you're not willing to take my word for the battery life I get on a machine I've been using daily for 3 years, that's up to you.

    "Lord knows you wouldn't want to test on relevant hardware before making your sweeping claims. I suppose that proves OS X for iPhone offers power management as good as other smartphones?"

    I never said it was a perfect claim, I was just giving you what evidence I have to suggest OS X has better power management than windows. You are correct to point out that I could be wrong, since I haven't had a chance to properly test the battery life of an intel-based mac notebook. I have a friend with a first-gen mac book pro, and it's battery life is shit. However apple's estimate of the current release of his machine is twice as long as it was when he purchased his, so his experiences aren't really valid anymore.

    "It does? Where are the specs for that? Have you run benchmarks?"

    There was a website at some point that listed the specs, I don't have it handy. No I haven't run benchmarks. However assuming the iPhone's has a current generation mobile cpu, it will probably similar speed to my sister's G3 iMac*, which also runs OS X perfectly.

    "OS X existed in 1985?

    I have no earthly idea what you are talking about, but OS X is nowhere near 20 years old with much of it relatively brand new. The iPhone's UI is entirely new and has never shipped in a product. The touchscreen hardware and the cellular radios are both brand new hardware to Apple and OS X."

    According to wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT), work began on OS X some time between 1984 and 1987 (based on skim reading the article), which would put OS X somewhere between 20 and 22 years old. I write mac software in my spare time, and I can assure you that the API's developed in those years are the API's of choice for any software that doesn't need to be cross platform, and even that will likely change soon (the NeXT OS, was way ahead of it's time. It had features that still don't exist in the latest releases of windows/mac/linux). Certainly, it's not the same OS anymore as it was then, but the core of it is the same.

    Certainly, some features like touch-screen are new, but others like check-spelling-as-you-type are ancient.

    * no, I haven't run bench tests on that either. Which is why I said "probably".