iPhone 5 GeekBench Results

EGSonikku writes "The iPhone 5 has been benchmarked using the GeekBench tool. According to the results, Apple's claim of 2x higher performance over the iPhone 4S seems accurate. The results show the iPhone 5's A6 CPU is dual core and clocked at 1.2GHz, and is paired with 1GB of RAM. Despite the fact that the Samsung Galaxy S3 has a quad core CPU at 1.4GHz, and twice as much RAM, it seems the iPhone 5 is faster than the S3, or any other Android handset." Meanwhile, Samsung has launched a marketing campaign that compares some of the hardware specs and features between the new iPhone 5 and the GS3.

Comments

F apple

[Anonymous Coward]

They suck big d

WGAF?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who Gives A Fuck?

Re:WGAF?

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. No good reason to run out and buy a new phone just because the specs a a bit better.

Re:WGAF?

[Anonymous Coward]

2X is a significant improvement.

Re:WGAF?

[CapuchinSeven]

Yes let's just ignore the fact that all we've heard for years from Android users is how fast the CPU is in their phones and how important it is to them, like it actually matters. Now the shoe is on the other foot it suddenly isn't a reason to buy or upgrade a phone.

Re:WGAF?

[cheesybagel]

The summary is bollocks. The iPhone 5 is faster than the dual-core Galaxy S III. The quad-core Galaxy SIII is faster than the iPhone 5.

Re:WGAF?

[miltonw]

Actually, you weren't listening. We buy Android phones because we want to buy Android phones. Got it?

Re:WGAF?

[tsa]

It's like with PCs. Smartphones are so fast nowadays that whatever you buy is good enough to do 90% of the things people want a smartphone to do. So even a 100% speed increase is no compelling reason to upgrade for most people.

Re:WGAF?

[Sir_Sri]

Smartphones are so fast nowadays that whatever you buy is good enough to do 90% of the things people want a smartphone to do.

That's because smart phones are basically 5 year old PC's with small screens.

But for some people the new network (LTE) will be radically different, especially if the 3G in your area has serious congestion issues.

Re:WGAF?

[Sir_Sri]

This might be because samsung is marketing a dual core and quad core phone under the same brand, despite the obvious difference in capability. That is, without a doubt, my biggest gripe with Samsung in the industry. A Galaxy S III should be the same everywhere, or failing that a Galaxy S III DC, or QC should be clearly the same everywhere. Having different versions of the same product is unnecessarily confusing.

Re:WGAF?

[anethema]

Odd considering the dual core snapdragon S4 is faster than the quad core one in almost every single benchmark. Only the really parallel ones (Which face it, never happens on a smartphone) pull ahead, and even then, just.

Re:WGAF?

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you talking about? The Galaxy S III smokes the iPhone 5

Re:WGAF?

[noh8rz10]

I'll link to this comment when you crow about android phone X beating the iphone 5 on geekbench score.

Re:WGAF?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, but it always could be faster. If your CPU is 10% slower that means every page your web browser renders will take longer, every app you start will take longer and every task switch will take longer. Over time it adds up.

Re:WGAF?

[cheesybagel]

Nothing stings Apple sheep rabid downmodders like the truth. Go back to reading MacRumors losers.

Re:WGAF?

[cslax]

All the US dual core S3's are the same. Except Verizon locked the bootloader. Otherwise the only difference is the network branding.

Re:WGAF?

[cheesybagel]

This test suite apparently has both single-threaded and multi-threaded workloads as you can see if you look at the detailed results. Hence the quad-core gets a higher overall score. It is true that the Qualcomm SnapDragon S4 using the Krait core gets better scores on single-threaded applications because it has a triple issue core compared to the quad-core Samsung Cortex-A9 cores which are double issue. You can see a architectural comparison here. Samsung has taped out Exynos 5250 a couple of months back which has two Cortex-A15 cores and should have even higher single-thread performance than the Krait cores.

Re:WGAF?

[zieroh]

So much rage. So little content.

Re:WGAF?

[BaldingByMicrosoft]

You, sir, have mis-spoken.
When you compare the new iPheone to any Android-based device in real-world conditions, you'll see that the iPhone is much faster.
And by real-world conditions, I mean how fast the scroll list will go bouncy when its flicked really fast. So show me an Android that can do that better!



...


No, pay no attention to the pack of growling, drooling lawyers behind me... C'mon... Show me! I dare ya!

Re:WGAF?

[atlasdropperofworlds]

That's because smart phones are basically 5 year old PC's with small screens.

Try 10 year old PCs. I have a Core 2 Quad here that's pretty much 5 years old and is still 5x faster than any phone in the geekbench data. Linpack is 1000x slower on any ARM than it is on a current x86 too.

Re:WGAF?

[Anonymous Coward]

But for some people the new network (LTE) will be radically different, especially if the 3G in your area has serious congestion issues.

Until all of five people start using LTE and that, too, is congested. Wireless is the future.

--
This has been a paid advertisement by the fiber optics lobby.

Re:WGAF?

[Sir_Sri]

Right, but the south koreans get quad core, some countries get different amounts of RAM etc.

If all you heard was the launch announcement of 'quad core*' and ignored the asterix of different countries getting different products you'd be confused by the whole thing.

As a developer by the way, this is a fucking nightmare. I work at a university, so we have, every year and every christmas people with phones from all over the world trying to use our mobile app. We need to test on the indian version, the korean version the chinese versions, the hong kong version, the taiwanese version, etc. etc. etc. And we need someone to keep track of what all the different versions are. I know the guys at big blue bubble in town who make mobile games have a big lab but I think they only care about europe and north america rather than everywhere else too.

Re:WGAF?

[scsirob]

Why so? Do you speak or listen twice as fast now? Can you text twice as fast?
Stop calling it a phone when the main goal is general computing.

Re:WGAF?

[gnasher719]

Try 10 year old PCs. I have a Core 2 Quad here that's pretty much 5 years old and is still 5x faster than any phone in the geekbench data. Linpack is 1000x slower on any ARM than it is on a current x86 too.

Jack Dongarra published a paper how he got about 800 MFlops out of an iPad 2, using only one core, and estimates that about 1.5 GFlops should be possible. The iPhone 5 chip should run a lot faster. And no current x86 does 1500 GFlops.

Re:WGAF?

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly! And year ago top Android phones included hardware, what is at low budget phones today so there is no need to buy "latest" because the current models already have enough and lots of more hardware features.

It is like someone should buy those quad-core, 16GB RAM and SLI-system desktop computers with two 30" display for grandma who just wants to pay bills online and use email, because "it isn't never enough!". And of course she needs at least 4 TB storage space for her emails....

Re:WGAF?

[atlasdropperofworlds]

I've seen that claim. There is a youtube video where linpack on iOS gets 800 MFLOPS. Linpack for android gets 70 Mflops for a comparably clocked ARM. My desktop gets 40 GFLOPS (hence the 1000x - or three orders of magnitude at least). My video cards are rated at over 1 TFLOP dpfp each. My laptop can do about 25 GFLOPS. Perhaps linpack for iOS is more representative of what the hardware can do, but it still doesn't hold a candle to a desktop/laptop.

Re:WGAF?

[pmontra]

This is an S3 scoring 2283 on GeekBench. It seems they have only one data point for the iPhone 5 (here, but more will follow) vs many datapoints for the S3 (here). Note that there are two versions of the S3 (1.4 and 1.8 GHz) plus a lot of variability in each version. The slower 1.4 GHz S3 scores 950, the faster one 2,059. The 1.8 GHz version ranges between 1,233 and 2,283. I really don't know what could make all of that difference within the same version, maybe other apps running in parallel with the benchmark? We'll see if there is similar variance for the iPhone 5. The iPhone 4S ranged from 455 to 851.

Where the iPhone 5 bests the Galaxy is in the performances of the memory. The custom CPU makes the difference. The S3 compensates with the extra cores.

Re:WGAF?

[Anonymous Coward]

But for some people the new network (LTE) will be radically different, especially if the 3G in your area has serious congestion issues.

"Awesome look at these speeds!!"

30 seconds later, a text message is received

"Sorry, but you have reached your data cap, if you continue using your data you will be charged $10 per gb."

In all seriousness, data caps really ruin having super fast speeds. At a conservative speed of 12mBps you would run through a 5gb data cap in 7 minutes of downloading.

Re:WGAF?

[Anonymous Coward]

The sheep seem to be interested in the bait. Here sheepy sheepy...

Re:WGAF?

[thegarbz]

Actually they are quite distinct models, the problem is they all have the same common name. Just like you can buy a Dell Latitude 4500 and then select one of about 20 different configurations for processor, ram, hdd, etc The Galaxy S III comes with *different* models for different countries, and in the USA case different carriers.

Look at the model numbers. The International version is GT-I9300 and has the quad core. As has the GT-I9305 for the Australian Telstra carrier which also supports LTE. It's only the United States and Japan which have about 6 different models to suit various carriers, and differ in LTE radios, HSDPA vs CDMA2000, and also have the dual core processor.

In the rest of the world you get one model that works everywhere and don't need to worry about the convoluted mess of the telephone industry in the USA. Though admittedly the rest of the world is catching up with the USA stupidity by rolling out largely incompatible LTE networks.

Re:WGAF?

[StripedCow]

whatever you buy is good enough to do 90% of the things people want a smartphone to do

Yes, Apple should have worked instead on bandwidth and battery capacity and longevity.
It is clear they are in urgent need of a new mastermind.

Re:WGAF?

[Anonymous Coward]

You buy Andriod phones because it would hurt your faux-alpha-geek image to buy something so mainstream and 'hip' as the iPhone

Re:WGAF?

[Sir_Sri]

They do.

I'm in canada and we have this problem with wired networks. where I live today I have a 250 GB cap and 50Mb/s. 100 bucks a month mind you, but it gets the job done.

next week I have to move home with my mother for a month, her monthly caps is 25 GB. So that will be eaten through by the end of the first week. She's going to be stuck with a lot of overages.

Re:WGAF?

[matty619]

Having different versions of the same product is unnecessarily confusing.

How is it any different than 16 GB vs 32 GB iPhones?

Re:WGAF?

[Cinder6]

That's storage, not processing power. An app will run the same on a 16GB iPhone 5 as it does on a 32GB iPhone 5--unless, of course, your app is >16GB, in which case Apple wouldn't even let you release it and nobody would want to download it.

Re:WGAF?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, we buy Android phones because we are tech savvy. The only people who buy iPhone, the Fisher-Price of phones, are clueless plebs.

Re:WGAF?

[hazydave]

Any Android running Jellybean can do that just as well. Anything you can actually perceive as being faster, rather than measuring via some kind of benchmark, has very little to do with processor speed, and everything to do with user interface latency. In other words, it's a matter of tuning. Apple's been pretty good about that, though they still fail in places where they should be using multitasking/multiprocessing but aren't.

Android, on the other hand, didn't seem to spend much of an effort on some of the "finesse" issues in Android until fairly recently. Android Ice Cream Sandwich made a great deal of progress on deciding just what Android's supposed to look like (eg, the "magazine" UI that showed up first on Google's web site, rather than just a mish-mosh of Palm, WinCE, Blackberry, and iOS ideas), and improved latency issues nicely. The most recent release, Jellybean, has tweaked latency, eliminated deadlocks, etc. so that it's every bit as good as iOS.

The key here is that humans are just slow. If the OS isn't responding as fast as you need it, that's an algorithm problem, not a CPU speed problem. If you have any doubts, find an old Amiga and try AmigaOS on a 1980's CPU that's not fast enough to be considered as an I/O processor on a modern smartphone SOC. It'll make desktop Windows seem slow, within limits (eg, you're not going to get any H.264 videos playing). This fully illustrates my point... AmigaOS was a realtime OS, and the UI manager ran at a much higher priority than nearly anything else. So there was never any waiting on an app or anything else -- the user was the most important thing in the system. So it seems really, really fast, even on a slow processor. There's no hard reason any modern device, PC or portable, should have a "slow" UI.

Re:WGAF?

[Uberbah]

We buy Android phones because we want to buy Android phones. Got it?

That's your problem....we got it just fine. And the reason why many geeks buy Android phones? Because they evaluate products by billeted lists, and one of the more noticeable ones has tilted the other way, if only briefly.

Duuh.

Re:WGAF?

[miltonw]

Top of the "billeted" list for us: A device that is open and is modifiable by the owner in any way the owner wants. In other words, the owner actually OWNS the device and is in complete control of the device. That means Android.

I'm sure you still don't get it and probably aren't the type of person who ever will. That's why you think it's only about the "specs".

You will not understand why I will not tolerate waiting for the phone company to decide when, if ever, they update the O/S. You will not understand why I will not tolerate the phone company or phone manufacturer reaching into MY device and adding or removing programs without my OK. You will not understand why I will not tolerate the phone company or manufacturer telling me I cannot have some perfectly safe program or feature "just because".

Your ignorance is understandable and excusable but don't pretend you "know why" we make our decisions.

Oh Noes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Cue the fandroid bitch fest in 3..2..1...

Re:Oh Noes!

[atlasdropperofworlds]

There seem to be plenty of S3's in their database that still beat the iP5. There are dual and quad core variants of the S3. Though it doesn't matter because it seems the S3 is actually still faster according to the current, real data on their site.

Re:Oh Noes!

[Anonymous Coward]

2433 points - 1800 MHz. Somebody overclocked their phone, nice one. :-D

Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[magarity]

I'd rather it were the same thickness as the old model if the battery would last longer. Who exactly is it that thinks so they're so horribly thick?

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[_Shorty-dammit]

I've said the same thing for years about both phones and laptops. Sooner or later they're of a size that is small enough, and continually making components smaller should simply give us more room for more battery capacity. Even if this iPhone 5 gives us similar, or one can hope for slightly better, battery performance compared to the previous model. But one can only imagine how much better it would be if it were still the same size, and all the shrunken components would give us a battery capacity twice that of the previous model.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple. Isn't that all that matters? They're pushing the limits of the product in the attempt to make it more successful. And the thinner/lighter formula has been just that.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[js3]

I'd rather it were the same thickness as the old model if the battery would last longer. Who exactly is it that thinks so they're so horribly thick?

Everyone I've seen with an iPhone has a ridicilously huge rubber case protecting the fragile thing. You should see the one my girlfriends mom has. You would think she was using a phone from early 2000. Why is thin such a big deal when everyone has a case that makes it NOT thin?

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Anonymous Coward]

umm, anyone who actually wears tight jeans? are you a fucking rapper or something?

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[relyimah]

The only issue I have with the thickness of the phone is the fact that it is made thicker by the "Otter Box" (or similar) case that is almost mandatory for someone like me that drops their phone occasionally....Although I do agree that it does not make /that/ big a difference that it would sway me either way....

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[CastrTroy]

Well, despite the Macbook Air being extemely small. They have dedicated a fair amount of size to the battery. Check out this picture to see just how much space the battery takes up in the Macbook Air. I only wish my HP thickbook used the same percentage of the volume for the batteries. I'd be able to work an entire day without charging. I'd gladly go without the optical drive if they could replace the entire thing with a battery.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, please, maybe because the "everyone" you claim isn't actually true. Lots of people (myself included) like to keep their devices naked. Why should I have a fat device just because your grandma has no taste.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[beltsbear]

I have dropped my caseless iphone 4 and 4s at least 5 times each (yes I am clumsy) without breakage. It is not fragile even with glass on both sides. The main way gorilla glass is broken is a drop on to concrete, even asphalt seems not to do it at hand height. Almost half the people I work with have the iPhone 4 or 4s, out of maybe 10 phones I have seen one broken from a drop. I have had Samsung phones that break on the first drop and Erikson that took only a few drops. None of my Moto's ever broke from droppage.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[cognoscentus]

Amen to that - my old Razr V2 was virtually indestructible.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Zuriel]

And, of course, there's the indestructible Nokia.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, want to go for a beer sometime? I'll show you my caseless iPhone 4S - the very same iPhone 4S that has fallen onto concrete twice, and whose screen, glass back, etc are still completely intact. In fact, the *only* evidence of damage is a *very* slight denting (perhaps a total of 1 mm deformation) in one corner.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[hawguy]

Well, despite the Macbook Air being extemely small. They have dedicated a fair amount of size to the battery. Check out this picture to see just how much space the battery takes up in the Macbook Air. I only wish my HP thickbook used the same percentage of the volume for the batteries. I'd be able to work an entire day without charging. I'd gladly go without the optical drive if they could replace the entire thing with a battery.

I thought all the laptop vendors had something similar to Lenovo's "Ultrabay" battery that lets you swap out the CD-ROM drive for a battery? I know I've seen a Dell that has the same thing. HP doesn't?

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, I dropped my iPhone over 12 feet down once. From a balcony to the lower balcony. All I had on it was a very very thin rubberized case. On top of the typical 4-5 foot drops I do a few times a month.

I did get unlucky and drop it face first onto a pointy rock last week though, and that did in the screen. Thanks to Applecare plus, for $50 and 15 minutes at the Apple store I got I brand new phone.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Osty]

Why is everybody dropping their phones? How does this happen? After years of smartphone use, and over a decade of cell phone use, I've only ever dropped one phone (an old Nokia, circa 2000; ended up with a loose battery connection that would occasionally cause dropped calls if it shifted mid-call).

Maybe rather than a case people should get the Nokia Lumia 920 and wear grippy gloves, since the 920's screen can be used with gloves on.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus Christ put your pants back on. Nobody wants to see your naked device, even if it is fat. And leave his poor grandma alone.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe he's a hot chick?

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[djdanlib]

I have a friend who dropped her iPhone off the kitchen counter and that impact shattered the glass. She's done this twice, once with an iPhone 4 and once with an iPhone 4S. I think I'll take my chances with a better-constructed device.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[JackAxe]

You sir, are lucky. This is to the extent that one of my friend's iPhone 4 broke and he was using Apple's free bumper case on it:

The first time he dropped it on cement, the back fractured, which was about a year after owning it.

Now it gets better, in that time, he had somehow slightly contorted the metal band around it.

Now after breaking the back, he finally went out and bought a 3rd party case that would hide the back damage. After putting on the new case, the sturdiness of its design helped to straighten his phone, which then caused front screen to crack. :)

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Gothmolly]

Any reasonable laptop has a 2nd battery that replaces the optical drive. Maybe you shouldn't have bought an HP.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[beltsbear]

The video below takes 4 drops on concrete before it breaks. There is an element of luck. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7-OBoDFeDY

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't use a case on my S3, because it makes the phone less thin. People with iPhones buy them because they like pretty phones, so obviously they would do things to make them prettier rather than "better". As in, form first, function last. ;)

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[peragrin]

I dropped my iphone 3G 4 times twice onto concrete without any ill effects.

One of the times the phone was in my jacket pocket literally while I was on a ladder I must have bounced or moved just right as I felt it slide out and heard the thunk.

One of the times that wasn't on concrete I was carrying a heavy load up a flight of stairs I had to adjust my grip and as I did the phone slipped out of a different pocket. it sort of cartwheeled down the stairs too.

I don't use rubbers on my phones. That phone worked just fine for 3 years before I finally upgraded.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Overzeetop]

Apparently, they're fashion statements first, and investment protection devices second. Most people seem to feel they need one to express themselves through their phone. Still, when a pristine iPhone 4 is going for close to $300 on ebay, and a brand new one is $150-200 (subsidized) - it may just be worth keeping your phone looking new. OTOH, if you're phone is only going to be worth $60-80 in 2 years, it may not matter.

Then again, maybe iPhone users are just clumsier than most Android users...ever think of that?

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[magarity]

Why is everybody dropping their phones? How does this happen?

I know someone in China who had his iphone in his back pocket when he went to use one of those squat style toilets. Time to buy a new iphone...

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[PNutts]

Why is everybody dropping their phones? How does this happen? After years of smartphone use, and over a decade of cell phone use, I've only ever dropped one phone (an old Nokia, circa 2000; ended up with a loose battery connection that would occasionally cause dropped calls if it shifted mid-call).

Maybe rather than a case people should get the Nokia Lumia 920 and wear grippy gloves, since the 920's screen can be used with gloves on.

Looking at your ID I assume you are an old guy like me. :) The difference is 10 years ago we used our cell phones for phone calls. Aside from an outlier realtor or on-the-go professional that usage didn't add up to a lot of minutes during the day, and often for me there were many days between calls. Fast forward to today where "our" noses are buried in the phone most of the day. It's constantly in and out of our hands for social networking, music, news, texting, reading, pictures, whatever. And folks aren't stopping what they're doing to do all that. I see phones in use driving, walking, jogging, bike riding besides the normal multitasking during a meal or other more mundane activities (including the "dropped it in a toilet" horror stories). I'll also add the the current form factor (thin and wide) is more prone to an accidental ejection from a hand than the thicker candy-bar or slider styles. My lawn? Get off it.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[WhackAttack]

Stole my comment ;P

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[SScorpio]

Yes they do, but neither HP or Dell's Ultrabooks even have a optical drive.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you a dwarf or something? The only possible conclusion I can come to is that your phone drops 1 and a half feet and mine drops about 4 feet.

iphone4 drop test

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7-OBoDFeDY

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Osty]

I'm definitely an old fart (when did that happen?), but I use my smartphone for smartphone stuff like apps and whatever. I guess the difference is I don't grease up my hands with butter before trying to use it, or something. I just don't get it.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's ok. It seems that there are a lot of fandroids out there who would rather have used the saved room on something about 0.7% of all consumers will ever use like an HDMI port.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[noh8rz10]

and yet you still posted :(

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[flappinbooger]

I'd rather it were the same thickness as the old model if the battery would last longer. Who exactly is it that thinks so they're so horribly thick?

Everyone I've seen with an iPhone has a ridicilously huge rubber case protecting the fragile thing. You should see the one my girlfriends mom has. You would think she was using a phone from early 2000. Why is thin such a big deal when everyone has a case that makes it NOT thin?

I think for the most part the cases are like undercoating or paint sealing on a new car. Overpriced and unnecessary. I've got a droid3 that's lived in my pocket since new and there aren't any screen scratches. It's been dropped a few times and so on, works fine, looks fine except for a gash on the edge from where it was dropped down into a fold out couch.

Of course, I've seen similar phones that were simply trashed.

Personally I don't plan on ever treating my phones differently by putting it into some phone-condom. Just not the same... lol.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[flappinbooger]

I have dropped my caseless iphone 4 and 4s at least 5 times each (yes I am clumsy) without breakage. It is not fragile even with glass on both sides. The main way gorilla glass is broken is a drop on to concrete, even asphalt seems not to do it at hand height. Almost half the people I work with have the iPhone 4 or 4s, out of maybe 10 phones I have seen one broken from a drop. I have had Samsung phones that break on the first drop and Erikson that took only a few drops. None of my Moto's ever broke from droppage.

x2 on the motorola toughness. I'm inclined to stick with them for the duration, but the S3 is looking mighty fine...

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Fishchip]

I've done it with a longer coat in winter; the pockets were just the right height to fall sideways when I hiked the front up to conduct my, er, business. One day, out at a pub, no urinal, don't feel like sitting down. Hike, tilt, the phone slithers out and falls in the toilet. Yeah, time to buy a new phone.

Funnily enough that's about the only time I've ever dropped a cell phone.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thinner phone means thnner case, something a four year old can figure out.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[flappinbooger]

Why is everybody dropping their phones? How does this happen? After years of smartphone use, and over a decade of cell phone use, I've only ever dropped one phone (an old Nokia, circa 2000; ended up with a loose battery connection that would occasionally cause dropped calls if it shifted mid-call).

Maybe rather than a case people should get the Nokia Lumia 920 and wear grippy gloves, since the 920's screen can be used with gloves on.

The one time I REALLY dropped my droid3, onto concrete with a razor thin layer of laminate, was when I was at the supermarket, distracted and in a hurry, and went to put it into my pocket.

I completed the motion of putting it into the pocket, but instead of the phone actually entering the pocket it grazed the lip of the pocket and slid right on by. And then right on down to the floor.

Of course, being a moto, it was if it never happened.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd rather it were the same thickness as the old model if the battery would last longer. Who exactly is it that thinks so they're so horribly thick?

Everyone I've seen with an iPhone has a ridicilously huge rubber case protecting the fragile thing. You should see the one my girlfriends mom has. You would think she was using a phone from early 2000. Why is thin such a big deal when everyone has a case that makes it NOT thin?

Because the end result is thinner when you put a case around a thinner phone?

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[smash]

2003 called, and wants it's laptop form factor back.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[the_Bionic_lemming]

I drop my phone all the time. I throw it at walls. I dunk it in a glass of water and make bluetooth calls on it.

You should see the looks I get when I wash the phone in the sink.

Course, it's a motorola quantico, much better for my use than a smart phone. I've had a phone fly out of my shirt pocket when riding 55 mph on my motorcycle.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Anonymous Coward]

Toshiba Portege with extended battery. Battery is semi-outside the case, as a support of the laptop. Very light, very nice design. I'm getting 8-10h battery life :)

http://www.toshibadirect.com/td/b2c/adet.to?poid=503433

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't have a case. Neither does my wife. Nor either of my kids. Not my sister-in-law. I guess you've never seen me or my family.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[smash]

Maybe they're less nerdy and go outside and do stuff. :D

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Anonymous Coward]

Smaller can be a godsend. I love the improved battery life and weight of the Toshiba z835. I am mobile quite a bit. The smaller weight is definitely noticeable when carrying it in a bag.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Dahamma]

So one 1 of 10 in your sample was broken? Is that a good statistic?

If you want to use anecdotes my girlfriend has broken two iPhones in 3 years, and she has only dropped it on concrete twice. Two for two. Given most city blocks are about 95% concrete, that's not an uncommon environment.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bring a book with you. Problem solved.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Jeremi]

Why is everybody dropping their phones? How does this happen?

Partly because people are careless and/or clumsy, but it's mainly because people are constantly pulling out their phones and messing with them.

Back in the day, when cell phones were actually used solely as phones, a person might receive (or make) a call on his cell phone a few times a day. Now that cell phones are essentially portable computers that also happen to make calls, people (myself included) will reflexively pull them out (to check email, Facebook, browse web pages, play games, etc) whenever 30 seconds of otherwise-idle time occurs. That means that people are pulling out (and putting away) their cell phones dozens or even hundreds of times per day. Given so many opportunities to slip up and fumble your phone, eventually the law of statistics will catch up with you. (It hasn't happened to me yet, but that's mostly due to dumb luck, I think)

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Anonymous Coward]

If the phone wasn't thin it would be too big in a case.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Jeremi]

I think for the most part the cases are like undercoating or paint sealing on a new car. Overpriced and unnecessary.

Perhaps even counterproductive. I kept my (original) iPhone in a case for the duration, and by the end the iPhone's back-side finish was all scratched up anyway, from rubbing against the case (or more likely, some dirt/dust/something that got between the phone and the case).

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've dropped every one of my three iPhones dozens of times, with ne'er a scratch. Sounds like your friend was really unlucky. Or has sharp, protruding concrete corners littering her kitchen floor.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[jimbo]

It creeps up on ya.

Never dropped a phone either, from my Nokia 2110 to my iPhone 4S. A buddy once had a Nokia 3110 fall out of his pocket while skydiving - turns out they're not entirely indestructible, just close.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[exomondo]

And the thinner/lighter formula has been just that.

Except 'the new ipad' where it was thicker and heavier.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Cimexus]

Yeah the iPhone does enjoy good resale value. I've been through several iterations of them now and each time made sure they were in a case + screen protector from day 1. Typically a new iPhone is $900ish (outright price, not on contract), and I can sell it again after a year for $600ish, or after two years for $300-400ish. That's not bad really for a piece of consumer electronics (most of which depreciate at ridiculous rates).

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[exomondo]

I have dropped my caseless iphone 4 and 4s at least 5 times each (yes I am clumsy) without breakage. It is not fragile even with glass on both sides. The main way gorilla glass is broken is a drop on to concrete, even asphalt seems not to do it at hand height. Almost half the people I work with have the iPhone 4 or 4s, out of maybe 10 phones I have seen one broken from a drop. I have had Samsung phones that break on the first drop and Erikson that took only a few drops. None of my Moto's ever broke from droppage.

My iphone4 fell out of an ultralight onto a construction site where it was run over by a steamroller and it was fine, but a cotton-wool ball touched up against my samsung and the screen shattered.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[aliquis]

I've thrown my Ericsson z300i from inside the living room through the hall into the furtest wall of the bed room hitting the bed head board denting it.

I wouldn't try that with an iPhone (or any expensive smart phone.)

Maybe they can handle it, maybe they don't =P

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[rsborg]

I have a friend who dropped her iPhone off the kitchen counter and that impact shattered the glass. She's done this twice, once with an iPhone 4 and once with an iPhone 4S. I think I'll take my chances with a better-constructed device.

Jeebus, what does she have on the kitchen floor - Concrete or Marble? I've dropped my naked 4S on linoleum, hardwood and ceramic tile from about hand or counter height and it did fine (some scuffage, but nothing eye-popping).

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this mean that the patent of 'making phone silent by whacking' is not obvious?

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Anonymous Coward]

The grocer called, and wants hi's apostrophe back.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[davester666]

Dropped my iPad out of it's padded case [foolishly didn't have it zipped up] onto asphalt, falling about 3 feet. It hit on a corner, resulting in the glass cracking. Everything still worked fine, only there was a hairline crack in the glass.

And fortunately, it was an original iPad, so it was both cheap and easy to replace the glass and touch sensor [it's WAY easier to replace both at the same time than just the glass]. An iPad 2 or later would probably have required a trip to the Apple Store.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Y-Crate]

Of course, being a moto, it was if it never happened.

That was their policy on phone calls, if I remember correctly.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[SimonTheSoundMan]

The Razr was notorious for falling apart and the outside screen cracking. I lost count how many keyboards fell out of friend's phones.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[hotfireball]

When Samsung will again copy Apple and make their Galaxy 4 (?) thinner, you will need. No worries.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Xest]

I used to wonder this but nowadays I know.

It's for the hipsters with their skin-tight jeans, where anything thicker than a piece of paper is a battle to get in/out of their pockets.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[hotfireball]

Then you didn't see much in your life or you see only average-minded trend followers who buys things because everyone does so. For example me and *all* my friends don't have that ridiculously huge rubber case. Relax.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[hotfireball]

I saw something else with my eyes. One of my colleagues got Galaxy S3 and by accident dropped it at home on the wooden floor (no carpet). The thing is that the case was of course totally OK, gorilla glass was like no scratch. Well, the only inner glass of the screen itself was broken per half. :-D

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[pmontra]

My S2 fits in my pockets much better than my old N70 did. It's a bigger phone but twice as thin. That makes a difference and to my surprise it's much easies to carry around (btw, they weight the same). The iPhone 4S looks like a little brick compared to the S2, weights more and doesn't fit as well in pockets. The iPhone 5 is the phone Apple should have made one year ago. They didn't because they realized that they could sell anything they threw to consumers and din't have to try too hard to compete, but they're finally catching up on specs. I'm glad they did and that they skimmed that one extra mm or two. It's not the thinnest smartphone on the market but it almost is and hopefully the other manufacturers will find ways to make their phones thinner.

My S2 battery's lasts one day, even a full weekend if I only check my mail a few times, browse only a little, and keep the WiFi and 3G off when I don't need them. They sell bigger batteries for people that use it as a computer all the time or make phone calls all the day and there are extended battery cases for the iPhone too.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Anonymous Coward]

the darn thing is so smooth and small that I've actually launched it while moving it to my ear, losing grip and sending it flying.

it got some dents on the metal band, but it survived. It really gets slippery if you have sweaty hands.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Anonymous Coward]

I dropped my N8 off a third floor balcony onto concrete when it slipped out of my hand when I was pulling it out of my pocket. Amazingly, no damage apart from a tiny scratch on the side, and was still ringing once I had rushed down the stairs.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[olau]

Where's the "+1 Unlucky" mod when you need it?

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Anonymous Coward]

A case of aesthetics over functionality I think. I found that the iPhone (4) is the least contoured, slipperiest phone I have ever used (glass front and rear, metal on the practically squared off side edges). I need a bumper just to be able to stop it falling out of my hand. I can picture Steve Jobs getting a prototype of the iPhone 4 from the design department, dropping it and possibly breaking it and laughing evilly when he realised that people would get it repaired or replace it (with another Apple product of course).
I'm a daily iPhone user though considering trying out Android when my current subscriptions runs out.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[fatphil]

> I throw it at walls.

Hooray - finally I have a challenger! While people were showing off their new fancy phones, I always used to just pull out my old nokia (5110, probaby), and say "can it do this?", and then throw it against the wall or the floow. "No" was always the response. It bounced down 2 flights of spiral staircase once too, and didn't even think about misrendering a pixel. However, I can't beat your motorbike, I suspect that whilst on my pedal bike I (a) never jetisoned my phone; and (b) never reached anything like 55 mph.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've dropped my iPhones many times (and once broken a screen), but never while holding one, so gloves do not help. I find they fall out of pockets.

What would help is a robust loop to which I could attach a lanyard: phone lives in shirt pocket; lanyard, looped round neck, stops it falling to ground when I stoop (and defeats pickpockets too). Even a case with a lanyard loop would work, but I haven't found one. Maybe I should buy a hard-shell case and drill it.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Anonymous Coward]

Must be fun carrying around a brick of a laptop. Do you also wear khaki pants to work?

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[synapse7]

Here we use iphones for company phones, the glass is fragile.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[AmiMoJo]

This is why I like straps for phones. They don't seem to be popular in the west and some phones don't have a place to attach them (the western GS3, for example, even though the Japanese version does). They have saved me from many drops over the years - I suffer from arthritis so sometimes my fingers just don't do what I want them to. Even if the phone slips away I can always grab the strap before it goes too far.

Fortunately for the GS3 and iPhone you can get cases with places to attach straps.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Paradise Pete]

I don't use a case and my 4S is in perfect condition. And the 5 has a metal case, so "fragile" seems an even more inapt description, no matter what your "girlfirends mom" does.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[triceice]

I work at that fruit company and 80% of the calls we get about broken screens are from people dropping them on the edge. With glass, any glass, if you drop it on the edge or corner not much chance it will not break.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[kdogg73]

Thinner phone is a desirable concept, practical or not. However, it seems that with a thinner phone, you can wrap it with a more protective case. Have you seen what Otter Box has? It can easily double the thickness.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[rwise2112]

My iphone4 fell out of an ultralight onto a construction site where it was run over by a steamroller and it was fine, but a cotton-wool ball touched up against my samsung and the screen shattered.

Well, I'm glad the steamroller was fine!

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Plumpaquatsch]

And the thinner/lighter formula has been just that.

Except 'the new ipad' where it was thicker and heavier.

IOW, Apple is bad for making their devices thinner - unless they make them thicker, then that's evil.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Anonymous Coward]

My wife has been through 3 Iphones in 1 year before. BS on those things being strong.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have dropped my caseless iphone 4 and 4s at least 5 times each (yes I am clumsy) without breakage. It is not fragile even with glass on both sides. The main way gorilla glass is broken is a drop on to concrete, even asphalt seems not to do it at hand height. Almost half the people I work with have the iPhone 4 or 4s, out of maybe 10 phones I have seen one broken from a drop. I have had Samsung phones that break on the first drop and Erikson that took only a few drops. None of my Moto's ever broke from droppage.

My daughter pulled hers out to check the time and dropped it in front of me on asphalt. The whole front completely shattered with a protective case on it.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone I've seen with an iPhone has a ridicilously huge rubber case protecting the fragile thing. You should see the one my girlfriends mom has. You would think she was using a phone from early 2000. Why is thin such a big deal when everyone has a case that makes it NOT thin?

That "bumper" was the result of antenna-gate (iPhone 4), and not necessarily to protect the phone from accidental drops.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Anonymous Coward]

The verb is "weigh". "Weight" is its noun form.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[CMYKjunkie]

I don't use rubbers on my phones.

You're likely to catch a tactilely transmitted disease that way!!

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[alodien]

I think my wife wants the new iphone - because she dropped her 4S the day they announced the 5. It fell from a bedside table (maybe 2.5 feet!) onto a ceramic tile floor - totally shattered.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[alodien]

forgot to mention - she had a case on it, too!

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[cavebison]

Just curious, why don't they put solar cells on phones, so we have longer battery life if out in the sunshine? Or at least a small attachment for it?

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends on the case folks choose....
Of course, I moved to iPhone from Droid-land (tired of obsolete phones in less than a year) with 2 devices broken in 2+_ years because of flimsy plastic and poor quality (Motorola/Samsung)... and didn't have cases on those.

Have dropped my 4s several times and happy to say that the OtterBox defender has lived up to it's potential and the size increase is minimal for the tradeoff in protections to the phone.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Sparton]

(Undoing moderation, sorry.)

Even if this isn't accurate, it made my laugh a little.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Cinder6]

One of the things I'm excited about for the iPhone 5 is the thinness. The old design was thin enough by itself, but with a case on it was just at the edge of "almost too thick" for my preferences. I would give up the thinness for longer battery life, though.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a Motorola Droid 1 I dropped in the street, it was hit by a car . when I picked it up it was ringing. No broken glass, minor cosmetic damage, used it for two more years. Buy Motorola!

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Tastecicles]

I miss my Dell Inspiron.

Two battery bays (one doubles as a drive bay) on the front, *and* an optical drive in the side.

OK, so it weighed eight pounds with two batteries, but I could run it practically continuously for a full weekend with three spares and no power brick.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Tastecicles]

not bad, not bad at all. My Satellite L755D gets six hours on the standard battery - I get to watch 720p Xvid with headphones in, three movies between charges.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Tastecicles]

_/-\o_ RAZR V3i _o/-\_

It's been dropped, drowned, crushed, blasted, frozen, shot*... still works.

*OK I exaggerated somewhat about it having been shot, it did get thrown pretty hard once.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[snadrus]

Well, F = M * A, so smaller does help the same strength materials be less fragile.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[exomondo]

Except 'the new ipad' where it was thicker and heavier.

IOW, Apple is bad for making their devices thinner - unless they make them thicker, then that's evil.

What? That doesn't make any sense.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[hazydave]

Sometimes it's the phone, sometimes you just get lucky.

I was loading some stuff into a pickup truck shortly after I got my O.G. Droid, some years back. I had the Droid in a shirt pocket (yeah, a flannel shirt -- got to complete the image), and I jumped out. The Droid got this sill idea about obeying the wrong law of physics, so when I jumped up a bit to get off the truck, it kept going up for a second -- out of my pocket, followed me down, landed on asphalt, and bounced under the truck.

I was thinking both about my amazing stupidity on dropping a couple-week-old phone this way, and amazing intelligence having it fully insured. But upon fetching the device from beneath the Tacoma... not a scratch. Worked great for the nearly two years, no case every needed. Replace it with a Galaxy Nexus. That's a nice smartphone, but not rugged. It needs a case, the plastic scratches easily. And the glass, at best, is Monkey Glass... no Gorilla in sight.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[hazydave]

The other reason is design. When I had a PDA made of slippery metal like the Palm V and later the Palm T|X, the base was slightly fluted, so it didn't just naturally flee you're grip. The O.G. Droid was even better -- the whole back of it was rubberized. iOS devices, on the other hand, seem designed specifically to jump from one's fingers. And since they weren't breaking often enough, Apple did the glass-on-both-sides thing for awhile with iPhones 4 and 4S.

And yeah, sure, it's really a pocket computer that we still mysterious dub "phone". I use my desktop computer way more than my phone at home or work, I wouldn't expect anything different from my pocket computer.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[hazydave]

It's glass. Sure, Gorilla Glass, which makes it very hard. But like many other very hard things, it's brittle. And like every other kind of glass, if you hit it just so, it'll crack or shatter.

Learned this the hard way when one of my cats knocked an Android tablet of my couch last weekend. The floor is laminate, not concrete or brick or anything, but somehow it managed to fall in an off way, which concentrated enough of the falling force at one point on the screen to crack it in three different directions.

Even Apple has learned that metal is a better material for phones than glass. I suspect it's still designed specifically to be as slippery as possible, but at least there's only a 50% chance of landing on the glass now. More or less... the design could favor one side over the other.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[hazydave]

Steve Jobs loved a thin phone -- so iPhones are thin. That's kind of their thing.

They have also been fairly fragile, and yeah, you can see some crazy cases, like the Otter Box, that pretty much erase any purpose to the thin design. I've seen the same thing with laptops... a guy I used to work with had a super think MacBook Pro. Which was always kept in some kind of Pelican case, making it the most bulky laptop ever seen.

Point being, a slightly thicker phone that doesn't need a case to survive works out much thinner than a phone that requires a case. It's not just Apple... the Galaxy Nexus requires a case. The plastic used wouldn't be rugged enough for a kids' toy, and the glass scratches fairly easily, which is close to crime these days, given that's one of the problems that seems to be pretty completely solved by Gorilla Glass.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[bdenton42]

Nah I'd prefer a SD slot over HDMI.

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not convinced either - the width is suitable for small hands, I'd like an extra smidge there - the height is fine - but the thickness? It's already thin enough to fit my hand with my thumb over the screen and thinner than any pens I keep in my pocket!

I think the aftermarket bolt on battery packs are the most tempting accessory for an iPhone. Personally I keep a Nokia N70 which is much better for using if I go out of town where there's limited option for charging. Shame on you Apple!

Nokia N70 still rocks!

Re:Faster is fine - do we need thinner?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is everybody dropping their phones? How does this happen? After years of smartphone use, and over a decade of cell phone use, I've only ever dropped one phone (an old Nokia, circa 2000; ended up with a loose battery connection that would occasionally cause dropped calls if it shifted mid-call).

Maybe rather than a case people should get the Nokia Lumia 920 and wear grippy gloves, since the 920's screen can be used with gloves on.

Looking at your ID I assume you are an old guy like me. :) The difference is 10 years ago we used our cell phones for phone calls. Aside from an outlier realtor or on-the-go professional that usage didn't add up to a lot of minutes during the day, and often for me there were many days between calls. Fast forward to today where "our" noses are buried in the phone most of the day. It's constantly in and out of our hands for social networking, music, news, texting, reading, pictures, whatever. And folks aren't stopping what they're doing to do all that. I see phones in use driving, walking, jogging, bike riding besides the normal multitasking during a meal or other more mundane activities (including the "dropped it in a toilet" horror stories). I'll also add the the current form factor (thin and wide) is more prone to an accidental ejection from a hand than the thicker candy-bar or slider styles. My lawn? Get off it.

Have not had the dropped it in the toilet yet but it sure does cause you to wince when you drop it into a pond that you are cleaning. After drying it out it worked just fine. NOT an iPhone BTW... An earlier version of the good old PCS... Cheers, JohnG

Check your countries.

[markdavis]

Please note the summary is obviously about the "International" version of the Galaxy SIII.

The USA version of the Galaxy SIII, and the Evo LTE, and the One X all use the faster Qualcomm S4 chip, not the Tegra 3 they are trying to compare against. And "twice the RAM" should generally have nothing to do with performance.

What does this all mean? Generally, that the high-end [USA] Android phones perform easily as well as the new iphone 5.

Re:Check your countries.

[BorgDrone]

True, but they do this with twice the cores and a highernclock frequency. That makes the A6 pretty impressive.

Imagine if they put a higher clocked, quad-core version of this in an iPad.

Re:Check your countries.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, it's almost like number of cores and clock rate mean jack and shit when it comes to CPU benchmarking.

Re:Check your countries.

[KiloByte]

From the blurb: "it seems the iPhone 5 is faster than the S3", from the linked article: S3 has a higher score than iPhone5 by roughly the relative clock ratio. Most tests are single-threaded so the number of cores doesn't matter, but in the few multi-threaded tests, S3 gets far better edge (duh!). The only part where iPhone5 wins is memory bandwidth.

Whoever misquoted the results this badly must be some incorrigible Apple fanboy.

Re:Check your countries.

[iluvcapra]

And "twice the RAM" should generally have nothing to do with performance.

o_O

Re:Check your countries.

[PmanAce]

A small note, the North American version of the SIII is actually faster than the International version, since the NA version has 2gb RAM while the International version only has 1gb RAM.

Re:Check your countries.

[caladine]

Not quite correct. The US/LTE version is dual core (qualcomm S4) - and also faster than the quad core exynos or tegra 3.

Re:Check your countries.

[Nursie]

Actually it's exynos, Samsung's ARM, not tegra.

Not sure I'd call the USA phones high end, necessarily. They have less cores because samsung have to compromise and use third party chips in order to get LTE. I know the Qualcomm stuff is good, but I'm not sure I'd wager on it being *that* good.

Geekbench also seems to have recorded multiple scores for the S III that are above the 1601 reported for the iPhone 5.

All in all I'd say that there's actually no useful information here at all,

Re:Check your countries.

[jones_supa]

And "twice the RAM" should generally have nothing to do with performance.

o_O

He's right. The programs either fit in the RAM or they don't. On a PC you might get performance improvement by installing extra RAM, but that's only because you get more filesystem cache and get less swapping.

Re:Check your countries.

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, the international version (which I have) doesn't use a tegra 3....

Re:Check your countries.

[Smurf]

Sorry, I can't find the text you mention as "from the linked article". Can you please point out where one of the linked articles says that?

The only thing I could find is this page saying that the A6 running at 1.02 GHz scored 1601, while this chart says that the average Galaxy S3 running at 1400 MHz gets a score of 1560, i.e., the S3 scores slightly lower even though the clock runs 37% faster.

What am I missing?

Re:Check your countries.

[atlasdropperofworlds]

Higher clocks, yes, but just 2 cores. The S4 is a dual core chip.

Re:Check your countries.

[rjr162]

I just ran it with 6% battery on my international s III.. Got 1875. Now if this is a benchmark that only uses a single core as some have said, you could expect a much larger jump with all 4 core running

Re:Check your countries.

[Anonymous Coward]

That chart is not an average.
See here a list of all Galaxy S III scores.

Re:Check your countries.

[whoever57]

True, but they do this with twice the cores and a highernclock frequency. That makes the A6 pretty impressive.

Imagine if they put a higher clocked, quad-core version of this in an iPad.

The battery life would be very short?

Re:Check your countries.

[Smurf]

Thanks for the info. I did see that link briefly after I posted as it was linked in another comment, so please allow me to reiterate what I asked over there:

I see a lot of Galaxy S III handsets in that list with processors running at 1,800 MHz, yet everywhere I look for the specifications of the SIII I only find 1.4 and 1.5 GHz. Are those phones overclocked?

If they are overclocked, the relevance of the comparison is greatly diminished. If they are not overclocked, it would be interesting to know in what markets and carriers is Samsung selling S III handsets with those processors.

Re:Check your countries.

[cheesybagel]

It's only "really impressive" until Samsung releases a smartphone with their Exynos 5250 CPU which supports DDR3 RAM at twice the clockspeed and uses ARM Cortex-A15 cores. In the meantime their quad-cores are still after than this dual-core.

You people keep forgetting "Apple" CPUs are manufactured by Samsung.

Re:Check your countries.

[cheesybagel]

What are you missing? Try checking the quad-core Samsung Galaxy S III results.

Re:Check your countries.

[cheesybagel]

Even the non-overlocked quad-core Samsung Galaxy S III phones are faster than the iPhone 5.

Re:Check your countries.

[markdavis]

Exactly, which was the whole point of MY post.

Re:Check your countries.

[cheesybagel]

The Qualcomm S4 Krait has better 3-wide cores than the 2-wide Cortex-A9 cores used in the quad core Exynos. However despite having better per-core performance the quad-core still wins.

Re:Check your countries.

[stephanruby]

Please note the summary is obviously about the "International" version of the Galaxy SIII.

Actually, Canada which is the country this benchmark was made in, also has faster Android phones.

Selecting (out-of-the-country) phones for this benchmark which have slower processors was most likely a deliberate choice on their part. It's a well known fact that if you post negative news news about Apple (it doesn't matter how big you are), or post negative reviews, you and all your colleagues at your company get blacklisted from their VIP events and most importantly, you and all your colleagues (including your bosses), also get blacklisted from receiving any "freebie" review devices.

Re:Check your countries.

[markdavis]

Oh you are very correct and I was in error. Sorry about that. I knew there was something wrong when I posted but wasn't sure what. Damn.

In any case, the flavor and point of my post was still valid- the Samsung quad is still a previous generation ARM, like the NVidia, and unlike the S4. And it is the S4 that is in all the Samsung Galaxy III's, not the quad core chip.... and the dual core S4 generally outperforms both the Samsung quad and the NVidia quad (it wins in ALL single core tests and comes close in most multithreaded tests).

And you are also right that the article and summary contain almost no useful information at all.

Re:Check your countries.

[markdavis]

Damnit, I wish I could edit postings. I meant to say "And it is the S4 that is in all the USA Samsung Galaxy III's, not the quad core chip.."

Re:Check your countries.

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe the 1.8 GHz ones are overclocked. The 1.4 GHz 4-core ones aren't, and they kick the iPhone 5's ass. The 1.4 GHz one with three cores is slightly less than the iPhone 5 -- for unclear reasons, that's the number that shows up on the graph you originally linked.

Re:Check your countries.

[stephanruby]

Imagine if they put a higher clocked, quad-core version of this in an iPad.

Four cores only. That's sooooooo last year.

On my Nexus 7, I already get a quad-core, plus 12 GPUs!

Re:Check your countries.

[jmottram08]

Yes and no to this... reloading webpages on other tabs because the phone didn't save them is a ram thing. Yes, internet reloads are not really "performance improvements", but in reality they might as well be.

Re:Check your countries.

[Anonymous Coward]

That is true. All this proves is that the iPhone 5 does better at a single, non-multithreaded benchmark (which by looking at the Geekbench site may be biased/optimized more for Apple hardware). If you look at the HTC One S and HTC One X scores in Quadrant, you can see that the One S is "faster", even though the One X is the superior product in real world use.

Re:Check your countries.

[Namarrgon]

Once the program has loaded, sure. But for the user, more RAM in a phone still means more caching, which means more responsiveness. Not just filesystem caching either - programs don't have to be closed and re-opened as often, and browsers can cache more page elements without re-fetching them. RAM in a phone can make a huge difference.

Re:Check your countries.

[Anonymous Coward]

This tweet from end June by
Primate Labs seems to indicate the international SGS3 scores significantly higher than the iPhone5, i.e. geekbench 1,789 vs 1,601

Re:Check your countries.

[Smurf]

Yes, but by a very small margin:

There are in total 106 entries in that table, 87 are "non-overclocked" and 19 that we believe are "overclocked". The 87 that are no overclocked have an average score of 1612.6, i.e., slightly faster than the iPhone 5, but with a huge standard deviation of 243.6.

Unfortunately we only have one data point for the iPhone 5, which kind of sucks. But based on the information we have it seems that the the speeds of the processors in the iPhone 5 and the non-overclocked S III are statistically the same.

(The average score for the 19 presumed overclocked S III is 1768, which is surprisingly low given the average of the other 87.)

Re:Check your countries.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think he is looking at the data from Geekbench directly.

Search for galaxy s iii here and you find a plethora of results ranging from 1271 to 2081 on the first page itself most of which when compared against the IPhone 5,2 page here shows higher scores for memory tests on the iPhone 5.

Just wondering why they chose the 1560 result over the others.

Re:Check your countries.

[Smurf]

I believe the 1.8 GHz ones are overclocked. The 1.4 GHz 4-core ones aren't, and they kick the iPhone 5's ass. The 1.4 GHz one with three cores is slightly less than the iPhone 5 -- for unclear reasons, that's the number that shows up on the graph you originally linked.

Expanding on my reply to the sibling post of yours:

Of the 87 presumably non-overclocked S III in the list, 43 are quad-cores. Those 43 have an average score of 1739.6 which is clearly higher (8.66%) than the only score known for an iPhone 5, but I wouldn't call that "kicking its ass". (They also have a bizarrely high standard deviation of 213.1).

Still, they are statistically faster on average than the iPhone 5. Too bad that according to the table here in the USA we only get a dual core version (n=10, average=1350.8, stdev=230.22, i.e. slower than the iPhone 5). Thus it seems that the superior speed of the quad-cores S III is only a curiosity for those of us in the USA, which is also the biggest market for the iPhone.

Re:Check your countries.

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously. Programs like maps would never ever gain any sort of performance advantage by utilizing a few extra megs of memory. Dumb ass.

Re:Check your countries.

[Anonymous Coward]

The qualcomm s4 is only dual core and it's faster than the nvidia quadcore (about the same as the a6) because it uses a new architecture (like the A6); but if you wait for the nvidia tegra 4 coming out soon, it's quadcore but with the new A15 cortex architecture, it'll be faster than them all (till some one else brings out a new soc).

Re:Check your countries.

[Anonymous Coward]

What am I missing?

Well I see this was already replied to and provided. But I'll just note that when Apple makes an official statement, under oath, to the judge in a US Court that "there is not any substantial difference" between the two devices, you should probably take that as being more accurate than what they put in their marketing material.

Re:Check your countries.

[cheesybagel]

It's a multitasking operating system. For all I know some of the outliers were playing a video while running the test or had some other background task running. That database also mixes up dual-core and quad-core results. I won't bother speculating any more since we will know more about the A6 processor in a week or two after someone conducts a teardown and manages to run more complete tests.

Re:Check your countries.

[Anonymous Coward]

Since there's few ways for a benchmark to complete anomalously fast, I'm assuming the wide spread is due to morons running the benchmark along with some CPU-eating background tasks, and the higher values are correct.

And I guess I assumed the lone iPhone 5 reading was not affected by such stupidity, though saying that, it doesn't seem such a good assumption...

Re:Check your countries.

[Anonymous Coward]

Please note the summary is obviously about the "International" version of the Galaxy SIII.

The USA version of the Galaxy SIII, and the Evo LTE, and the One X all use the faster Qualcomm S4 chip, not the Tegra 3 they are trying to compare against. And "twice the RAM" should generally have nothing to do with performance.

What does this all mean? Generally, that the high-end [USA] Android phones perform easily as well as the new iphone 5.

The USA version is also only a dual core.

Re:Check your countries.

[CubicleView]

Someone needs to overclock the iPhone 5 and upload the results for a fair apples to androids comparison then.

Re:Check your countries.

[AmiMoJo]

And ultimately it's all meaningless, all people care about is how response the phone is and how well the apps run. Bottom line is both are very quick, so you should not worry about artificial benchmarks and instead look at stuff that matters like battery life, size, OS and so forth.

Re:Check your countries.

[Anonymous Coward]

True, but they do this with twice the cores and a highernclock frequency. That makes the A6 pretty impressive.

Imagine if they put a higher clocked, quad-core version of this in an iPad.

No, the US versions dont have quad core. So they do it with the same number of core, and they do it first.

Re:Check your countries.

[boast]

Because they're fabless, like AMD.

Re:Check your countries.

[Darinbob]

I think this is true of HTC One X as well.

Re:Check your countries.

[Anonymous Coward]

Also when I looked at the list rather than just read the article, I found that most S3 performances were higher than the iphone5 .... so who's reading what ?

Re:Check your countries.

[Anonymous Coward]

Since there's few ways for a benchmark to complete anomalously fast, I'm assuming the wide spread is due to morons running the benchmark along with some CPU-eating background tasks, and the higher values are correct.

I agree that there are few ways for a benchmark to complete anomalously fast. One of them is to modify the system to eliminate even the background tasks that would anyway be consuming some CPU power on a normal, unmodified device.

Another of those ways is to trick the PrimateLabs server into accepting a bogus result, and that's not hard at all. Now I'm not saying that GeekBench fraud is widespread, I'm just saying that it's possible and may explain outliers with extremely high (or low) scores.

Re:Check your countries.

[hazydave]

Well, they used to be "Apple" in the A4 days -- the A4 was really just a customized version of one of the Exynos chips. Apple could retroactively claim to have some design work on it, for those who want to be pedantic about, though. Samsung worked with Intrinsity, Inc. on the design of the Hummingbird processor. Like every A8 over 600MHz or so, this was a customized version of the Cortex A8. Apple later bought Intrinsity.

These days, they are doing the SOC design, and so far, Samsung's doing all the fab work, though there have been rumors that Apple's been shopping for a second source, and may be going to TSMC. Qualcomm uses TSMC, and in fact, has been frustrated with the output from TSMC's 28nm process. Enough so they tried to buy exclusive access to that from about a billion. Apple reportedly tried the same thing; TSMC said "no" in both cases. Which is in their long-term interest -- an independent fab can't play favorites and stay independent. Qualcomm's moved a bunch of work to Global Foundries (the AMD spinoff), and reportedly also have talked to UMC and Samsung about making the Snapdragon S4. nVidia, also a long time TSMC customer, seems to be doing similarly, looking at UMC and Global Foundries for increased 28nm support.

In short, business as usual. Many of the big names -- even AMD these days -- design the chips, use the big chip foundaries to actually make them.

Re:Check your countries.

[hazydave]

It's not just the cores, but what they do. The four Cortex A9s in your Nexus 7 may or may not be faster than the dual A15 in the iPhone... looks pretty close. The A15 was expected to be about 40% faster than A9, but this the first time one's actually been benchmarked "in the wild"... assuming, as most think, it is an A15.

They also have either a four core GPU based on the PowerVR SGX543MP4, or something new. This is already faster than the Tegra 3's GPU... much as you find, on desktop processors, you need several AMD GPU cores to match a single nVidia core.

Re:Check your countries.

[Uberbah]

It's only "really impressive" until Samsung releases a smartphone with their vaporware, but then it will only be "really impressive" until the iPhone 5s comes out with an even newer processor!

FTFY, Fandroid.

Shocker

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, what a surprise, a phone that is about to be released has slightly better performance than the 4 month old Galaxy S3.
I ran the same benchmark (GeekBench) on my Evo 3D (13 months old) and got a score of ~1150.
Not impressed.

Re:Shocker

[atlasdropperofworlds]

Actually, it's not.

Sloshdat

[Anonymous Coward]

News for Fucking niggers, stuff that's covered in aids.

Slashdot, for when mommy smacks you in the face for installing Linux on her Facebook machine.

Android logo?

[mr_zorg]

The android logo on an iPhone story? Really?!?!

Re:Android logo?

[blackest_k]

Thats just to pour fuel on the flames Slashdot seems to be degenerating to flamebait, remember when stories were generally interesting and not just to annoy various factions. Hearing the same comments repeated gets boring after a while.

Any way good on apple at bringing a more powerful iPhone to market. So how good are the next generation android phones going to have to be, to compete against this latest generation iPhone.

See this is where the battle for market share should be fought not in the court room.
   

Re:Android logo?

[Anonymous Coward]

U mad, bro?

Re:Android logo?

[Anonymous Coward]

See this is where the battle for market share should be fought not in the court room.

On Slashdot?

Re:Android logo?

[Anonymous Coward]

"So how good are the next generation android phones going to have to be, to compete against this latest generation iPhone."

Well, seeing as the current, and in some cases, even previous gen are still better specced than the new iPhone, then I'd wager the answer is "Not very".

The real question is that if Apple are lagging to the extent that they can't even keep up with current gen. Android phones now, where the fuck are they going to be in another years time?

Re:Android logo?

[thegarbz]

So how good are the next generation android phones going to have to be, to compete against this latest generation iPhone.

They don't. Apple vs Samsung is a sword fight between two blind drunks.

Apple can release a turd and faithful followers and hipsters will buy it because it's oh so shiny, and the opponents will keep buying Samsung phones because they are not Apple.

Case in point the original Samsung Galaxy S. How that slow buggy piece of crap became the most popular Android phone of the time beats me. It's the only system I've ever seen which was so slow that the OS would Force Close programs because they ran so slowly it thought they locked up.

Some how both sides seem to release stuff that really gets on people's nerves and yet have massive market share.

Re:Android logo?

[Anarchduke]

Umm, the same as the last?

With that much power under the hood

[__aaqvdr516]

Since it is faster than all the other phones I can get all my phone calls done faster. That's the way it works.

Plus, all the video encoding gets done that much faster while I text and drive.

Re:With that much power under the hood

[aNonnyMouseCowered]

Right. If you want a mobile device with a better benchmark, get a laptop. Even an anemic netbook should be faster. Smartphones are for making calls and playing Angry Birds.

Re:With that much power under the hood

[gagol]

Exactly, I have a friend who claims he's only computer is an android phone. Now he is in charge of creating and maintaining the website os his new venture and have much trouble just getting wordpress installed on his server... I advised him to remove the dust from one of his computer and use it... we'll see how it goes.

Phones and tablets are consumption devices, period. You need to be productive? get a computer.

Re:With that much power under the hood

[MoronGames]

The iPhone 5 geekbench score is higher than every single Atom-powered computer on the score list. And it is faster than many other computers. So what was it that you were saying about an anemic netbook being faster?

Re:With that much power under the hood

[ArsonSmith]

...and get off my lawn you pesky kids.

Re:With that much power under the hood

[Anonymous Coward]

At best it'll drop all those calls even faster than its predecessor.

Re:With that much power under the hood

[Jeremi]

Phones and tablets are consumption devices, period. You need to be productive? get a computer.

Of course today's smart phones have more RAM, CPU, storage, etc, than even the most high-end productivity computers of years past, and people got plenty of work done with those computers. So there is little reason -- in principle -- why a phone/tablet couldn't be useful as a productivity machine -- you'd just need to connect a keyboard, mouse, and (typically) a monitor to it, and presto -- it's a reasonably powerful desktop PC that you can also take with you when you go places.

The only thing that prevents people from actually doing that is mindset -- both the customers' ("write documents using my iPhone? That's silly!") and the manufacturers' ("SVGA and USB connectors for a cell phone? Why would anyone want that?")

Re:With that much power under the hood

[stoolpigeon]

I think this view is rather limited, thinking of the smart phone as either a phone or a poor replacement for a laptop.

The smart phone is a truly mobile computer. I travel quite a bit and I do appreciate that I can do some things with my phone that used to require my laptop - like checking email, checking my calendar, looking at documents (editing them -though I wouldn't want to do that too much) and so on. But I will have my laptop with me if I need to do more work as you mention.

But where the mobile device really shines is the places where it does things that the laptop can't do (or does poorly) and a regular phone can't do. The most obvious is GPS. I love having my phone to find my way around, but beyond that I also love the apps that will help me to find and/or identify things of interest around me. Google Goggles and Google Sky are great applications that take advantage of how interactive this truly mobile computer can be since it is aware of my physical location.

The phone is also much more convenient when I have limited space and has much better battery life. It lets me stay connected at a level that gives me much more freedom.

I'm not ditching my laptops - (I have one for travel and one for in the office) but it's also been over 6 years since I used my mobile phone just for calls.

I know all this is rather subjective and personal. While I love my phone I don't get larger tablets at all. But from the trends I see, I think what I describe and even more great uses of mobile technology coming mean that a lot of computing will be moving to much more mobile platforms than laptops.

Re:With that much power under the hood

[Noughmad]

Since it is faster than all the other phones I can get all my phone calls done faster. That's the way it works.

So I can reply "Yes" to each of my mother's questions twice as fast as with the old model? Great!

Re:With that much power under the hood

[Anonymous Coward]

Geekbench is a shit benchmark that is optimized for the iPhone. This is no different than when Apple used to claim their piece of shit PowerPC CPUs were better than x86 because it could run a few very specific, cherry picked Photoshop filters faster, but in all other areas got their ass handed to them by Intel.

Re:With that much power under the hood

[gagol]

I agree smartphones are very flexible today. But not to the extent where it can replace a workstation... doing serious graphics work and all. The point was, if you need to create and be productive doing it, dont throw away your desktop/laptop yet as my friend is doing.

Going for the S3

[Anonymous Coward]

I've decided that my next phone (soon, I hope) is going to be the S3. I'd been holding out with my iPhone 4 for a while, waiting (like many others, I suspect) to see what Apple would wow us with for the iPhone 5. Needless to say, I wasn't that impressed, though to be honest, part of me really didn't expect to be, given that there are only so many innovations they could have come up with. What could they have done? An even bigger screen? NFC? A phone you could roll up? The first two would hardly have been groundbreaking and the latter is tech that doesn't really exist yet.

Still, at the end of the day, I'm sure I could be happy with the 5, but I'm ready to play with a new toy. I've never had an Android device before, but got a chance to play with a tablet and some phones over my vacation, and I liked what I saw.

Captcha: revenues

Re:Going for the S3

[Anonymous Coward]

Odds are, you'll go back. Every single person I've met that has switched to an Android phone has gone back to the iPhone. Many within the first month where they can get a full refund.

Re:Going for the S3

[Virtucon]

Uh no, only the Apple Fanboys who can't live without the latest from Apple stick with it. I've had friends who actually prefer Android, as do I. I'm sorry, the business model, their public attitude towards American Workers, the lock in and two of the carriers, AT&T and Verizon, is why I'll stay the hell away from Apple for a long damn time. Not to start a flame war, but it's pretty bad when I see Samsung investing double what Apple does in the US just to make the chips that drive the latest fanboy gadgets.

Apple may be creative but they certainly don't have my vote as a good corporate citizen in the US and all that speed from the new iPhone 5 is built by Samsung in Texas.

Re:Going for the S3

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a Samdung Infuse and I'm going to dump it for an iPhone 5 asap.

Re:Going for the S3

[AK Marc]

I haven't. Android for 3 years now, after Apple abandoned my new 3G within a year of new. No more security updates. Loss of app support (many apps requiring the newest IOS, perhaps as a means to fight the jailbreaking, so no new apps, and no updates to installed and paid for apps). Android is very very slow to get OS updates to phones (much faster if you jailbreak), but usually gets there eventually, depending on the phone maker and carrier.

Re:Going for the S3

[Daniel Phillips]

What could they have done? An even bigger screen? NFC? A phone you could roll up?

How about a standard micro USB, removable battery and micro SD slot?

Re:Going for the S3

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, I should have specified that my friends are virgins with neckbeards. I'm sure that takes care of your demographic.

Re:Going for the S3

[foniksonik]

Uh. You do realize that you just completely contradicted yourself. If Samsung is making chips for Apple in Texas, then it's really Apple and iPhone buyers supporting that manufacturing, not Samsung phones. That article you linked to About A6 chips in fact is very complementary to Apple.

Re:Going for the S3

[Anonymous Coward]

Better to be a virgin neckbeard than a pillow biting bug chaser.

Re:Going for the S3

[Anonymous Coward]

How many of those Android phones have had updates a year after you bought it?

Re:Going for the S3

[Keen Anthony]

Their public attitude towards American workers? I'm not following you. What is Apple doing to American workers? Is Apple treating American workers the way say Motorola treats everyone in Libertyville and Chicago? Why would you even compare Apple to Samsung on the semiconductor business? Apple isn't in the semiconductor business; it's a customer. Part of Samsung's business model is to be a manufacturer of components for other companies. As for that story about Apple's chips being made by Samsung in Texas, doesn't that give Apple even a few points for citizenship since the company is continuing to use Samsung? Also as mentioned in the article, there are thousands of Apple employees living in that Austin location in Texas because Apple has a major call center there. What you've written kinda sounds like you're saying Samsung is good for having American workers in Austin, but Apple is bad... for having American workers in Austin.

You're no longer locked into just two carriers as of iPhone 5. The lock-in remains, but it's not really an issue. If you don't like iPhone, it's going to be the totality of the platform that puts you off, so you're going to leave the platform. It's a different kind of disappointment I think than loving Android, but disliking a particular phone. That's where I am. I've come to hate every Android phone that's followed the original Droid. The SIII and (for now) the HTC One X at least has my attention.

Re:Going for the S3

[Swampash]

Apple abandoned my new 3G within a year of new. No more security updates.

The iPhone 3G was supported until the release of iOS5 on 12 October 2011. For your "new 3G" to have been dropped within a year, you must have purchased it on or after 13 October 2010. When the 3G stopped receiving automatic updates the iPhone 3GS had been on the market for nearly two and a half years, the iPhone 4 for 14 months, and the iPhone 4S was 2 days away from its 14 October 2011 launch.

Re:Going for the S3

[SuperKendall]

How about a standard micro USB

The cable that it comes with plugs into any USB port. It also ships with a USB charger (although one that can delivery much higher recharge rates than standard USB ports).

removable battery

Why do you need one when the phone lasts for at least a day even on LTE? I have an external battery for the iPhone (smaller than a standard phone battery BTW) but I stopped bringing it along on even international plane flights because the battery lasted longer than the whole flight for what I was doing.

and micro SD slot?

Only mildly handy when data is so easily transferred on and off the device. Also if you get a slow card it can really drag down application performance.

Re:Going for the S3

[smash]

Micro USB i'll give you, but for many myself included the battery/sd slot are "meh" features I'll never use. And without retention mechanisms to fall off/break and consume internal space - the space can be better used for more battery.

Re:Going for the S3

[Daniel Phillips]

What could they have done? An even bigger screen? NFC? A phone you could roll up?

How about a standard micro USB, removable battery and micro SD slot?

What is up with you Apple people, modding down a legitimate post like that, are you determined to alienate yourselves from everybody not already alienated?

Re:Going for the S3

[walshy007]

The cable that it comes with plugs into any USB port. It also ships with a USB charger (although one that can delivery much higher recharge rates than standard USB ports).

There is convenience in being able to find cables even in places you weren't expecting to need it, more than a couple times I've asked friends if they've had micro-usb cables so I could charge my phone and found one. Doing the same results in far less success with the iphone, likely even less so with the iphone5 considering they are using a new connector.

Why do you need one when the phone lasts for at least a day even on LTE? I have an external battery for the iPhone (smaller than a standard phone battery BTW) but I stopped bringing it along on even international plane flights because the battery lasted longer than the whole flight for what I was doing.

Some people may need more than a few hours (the time of a flight) of battery with continual usage. But more so in a couple years when the battery dies of old age and sheer number of cycles it's went through it will be very easy to just throw a new one in. Older droids make great embedded systems for other uses.

Re:Going for the S3

[Daniel Phillips]

Micro USB i'll give you, but for many myself included the battery/sd slot are "meh" features I'll never use.

It's not just the irritation of having to basically throw the phone away when the battery inevitably fails, it's the fact that you can't ever actually turn your phone off. Doesn't that creep you out? Or perhaps by Apple standards, that amount of creepiness doesn't even move the needle.

As for flash slot and *standard* USB port *on the phone* like all Android devices have... did it ever occur to you that just apologizing for it doesn't get back all those customers who bought Androids just because of that blatantly missing functionality? It's hard to overstate just how convenient it has proved to be, to be able to power my Android phone from any USB cable. Without needing a dongle, which, trust me, you will never have around when you need it.

Re:Going for the S3

[Moridineas]

Wait, what? I did not have a 3g (I got a 3gs in 2009 that I still have is still getting iOS updates including iOS 6), but as far as I know the 3g--released in 2008--could run iOS 2 (stock), iOS 3 (2009), and iOS 4 (2010-11). Even if you bought an iPhone 3G the DAY before the 3gs was released, Apple still issued over a year and some change of software updates.

Do Android phones released in 2008 really do better in terms of running newer Android releases or getting updates? IMHO there are plenty of reasons to go with Android, but I don't think vendor operating system support is one of them!

Re:Going for the S3

[Moridineas]

You got an over-rated moderation and your feelings are hurt? You must be new here :-p

Re:Going for the S3

[Daniel Phillips]

I don't think the word "alienated" means what you think it means.

Re:Going for the S3

[Moridineas]

Look, I get it, you're complaining about getting modded down (those stupid mean Apple people!!). Like I said, it's slashdot, get used to it, move along, next play. The moderation system being (ab)used to suppress or promote content based on your opinions is an integral part of the history and being of slashdot.

There's really no reason to get worked into a lather about it! Make your posts more interesting and somebody might mark them as such next time.

Re:Going for the S3

[AK Marc]

The iPhone 3G was not fully supported in iOS 4. I take back my security update comments. Upon review, I note that it did have the ability to load and run iOS 4, even if some (many?) of the features were turned off. The last release which fully supported the 3G was less than a year from the last sale date by Apple for a new 3G. For some, purchased with a 2 year contract for a phone fully supported for less than a year.

Re:Going for the S3

[AK Marc]

I bought a 3G near the release of the 3GS (the prices stared dropping when the channel was aware of changes, but before the public was), and less than 12 months later was the last release that fully supported the 3G.

Re:Going for the S3

[Anonymous Coward]

I would not buy a phone without any of those features. Standard USB cables are a must because they are ubiquitous and inexpensive, not having a replaceable battery is simply idiotic and having no SD slot is a huge hassle.

Re:Going for the S3

[Anonymous Coward]

All of them.

www.cyanogenmod.com
www.xda-developers.com

That's the benefit of having an open source operating system.

Re:Going for the S3

[Swampash]

IIRC the iOS4 features disabled when running on the 3G (I have one sitting on the desk in front of me) were iOS4's implementation of multitasking, variations of background wallpapers, Bluetooth keyboard support, orientation lock, and some data encryption API that nothing ever used. I'd hardly call that "abandoned".

Re:Going for the S3

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool story, bro!

Re:Going for the S3

[thegarbz]

What could they have done?

iPhone 5: Square corners.
iPhone 6: Circle.
iPhone 7: No longer relevant for Apple which now makes money by suing every phone company that would dare release a phone that has a shape.

Re:Going for the S3

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea lets buy Korean and Taiwanese phones to support American workers, durrr.

Apple has a skilled workerforce in the US? Over 40,000 you say!?

Re:Going for the S3

[Fr33z0r]

I recently moved from an iPhone to an S3, managed to smash my S3 screen after a few weeks and am currently back in iPhone land until it gets replaced.

The iPhone's still a good handset and there are certainly some things the S3 is lacking in (panoramas come out better on the iPhone, nothing even remotely like iMovie or Garageband exists on Android) but it's obviously a much better experience in other ways. For me, the most noticeable places the S3 wins out are the screen size - obviously (iPhone really needs to get with the times or die here, stretching in one direction alone isn't going to cut it) but more importantly the menu/back buttons.

It's weird, the one thing about the S3 that wasn't even the slightest of factors in my switching turned out to be the real killer functionality - I'm back on an iPhone 4 and still use my iPad daily, and although it never bothered me in the least before, I find now that I absolutely *detest* having to hunt around on the screen to find out how to bring up menus or return to previous screens, it completely breaks the experience.

Steve's dead, make with the buttons, Apple.

Re:Going for the S3

[Virtucon]

I was referring to the comments made to Obama by Steve Jobs,

If you refer to this Chart You'll see Apple is in last place, Google a close second in terms of their capital spending in the US.
That's pretty damn poor considering how much they make off of the American consumer. While I'm no socialist, it seems awfully strange that Apple continually looks at ways to avoid also paying taxes in this country as well

SO, they get an F- in terms of what I would consider being a good corporate citizen. I actually give Samsung higher marks because they, like the Japanese and Korean Auto makers realized that they need to do some of their manufacturing here otherwise who are they going to sell their product too? Apple just considers the US another Market, just like the Chinese.

What's also hilarious are the reports that the IPhone 5 will boost GDP by .5%, by what? destroying the old IPhone 4s? Please, what a ridiculous bunch of speculation and after all, it is a phone and if people are so damned wrapped up in waiting for the last drop of sweat off of Steve Jobs' balls, then we're all in serious shit.

Re:Going for the S3

[Virtucon]

So, you must be aware of some trickle down agreement that Samsung must invest in the US because Apple sells product here? Apple does use A6 chips but yes Samsung could have built the plant in China or Taiwan or any other place, but they chose the US. That to me shows at least some responsibility on the part of their executives to spread things around a bit. Apple just sees the US as a market.

Re:Going for the S3

[Anonymous Coward]

Your post, translated into non-fanboi speak:

"Standards are useless as long as you make sure you have your non-standard gear with you at all times."

Never mind all the hardware out there using the old de-facto standard.

"That feature you like isn't important to me, so it shouldn't be important to you either."

Here's why I like removable batteries: I was able to get a $20 aftermarket battery with 3x the capacity. Now I easily go 4 days between charges, *and* I have a spare that I can swap in if I need it.

Micro SD is less important to me than it used to be, now that built-in flash sizes have increased substantially, but I still like that it's an option and I know that my use case isn't going to speak for everybody. Someone out there has a use for it; who the fuck are you to tell them they should just be happy with the artificial limitations of your one-size-fits-all iPhone?

The thing you still fail to grasp is that this isn't about iPhone vs. Android. iOS has already lost; it's just a matter of time before Apple slides into a comfortable 10-15% marketshare of irrelevance again. The whole thing is Apple vs. every other goddamn manufacturer of phones. There are tons of other manufacturers out there that give tons of choices to their customers (which is a GOOD thing for customers, even if it's bad for salespeople from a marketing psychology perspective) and you want to tell everybody that they should just give up every choice and go with option A, B, or C from Apple, when options A, B, and C have exactly the same features at different price points.

I don't give a fuck if you buy Apple products. Nobody else does either. We just want you to shut the fuck up about it and quit telling everybody else that *they* need to be happy with your purchase, too. Look for your purchase validation and rationalization elsewhere and quit telling us what features we need.

Re:Going for the S3

[Anarchduke]

yes I can see how the the article would set off Apple's eyes.

Re:Going for the S3

[petsounds]

The only thing I never understood is that Overrated (-1) can be used on a post that hasn't been rated by an actual human. Using it on a Score 2 post is basically telling the slashdot server its mother smelt of elderberries. I think the powers that be should add the mod's username next to the rating in this instance, because it's obvious fanboyism at work. Or at least change the mod's sig to something appropriately embarassing for a few days.

Re:Going for the S3

[Quila]

Apple discontinued the 3G in June 2010, and the first update that didn't include the 3G was in March 2010. So you bought a phone that you knew was at the end of its sales life (almost two years old already) and at a discounted price due to it being last year's model. Still, you got almost a year of official latest OS support.

I bought an Android phone that was NEVER at the latest OS. It came out 1.6 when 2.0 had been out a while. Then went 2.1 when 2.2 had been out a while, and never went to 2.2.

More recently we bought a phone with 2.3 six months after the phone came out, just after 4.0 came out. Official support will never go to 4.0.

So, while you had a year of latest-OS support, be happy you weren't on Android, where quite often you never get to be on the latest OS for long, if ever.

Re:Going for the S3

[AK Marc]

More recently we bought a phone with 2.3 six months after the phone came out, just after 4.0 came out. Official support will never go to 4.0.

I have the same issue. The phone was sold as "4.0 ready" and "Sony verifies it will be supported under 4.0" But no 4.0, and no word on when 4.0 will be available, if ever.

Apple discontinued the 3G in June 2010, and the first update that didn't include the 3G was in March 2010

Did you miss a year? By those dates, the support (full update support) was ended while they were still selling them as new.

Re:Going for the S3

[Quila]

Yes, typo on the year.

Re:Going for the S3

[hazydave]

I'd been holding out with my iPhone 4 for a while, waiting (like many others, I suspect) to see what Apple would wow us with for the iPhone 5. Needless to say, I wasn't that impressed, though to be honest, part of me really didn't expect to be, given that there are only so many innovations they could have come up with. What could they have done? An even bigger screen? NFC? A phone you could roll up?

That's kind of the point of the disappointment, isn't it -- no innovations. And that's precisely because an innovation is something unexpected, not just a safe, incremental improvement.

Ultimately, an innovation is a judgement. You do something risky. If it sells, that's an innovation. If not, it's probably on someone's worst products list for that year, and then forgotten. The original iPhone was an innovation, taken as a whole. Not really tech innovation, a business innovation -- Apple was doing things everyone in the phone business absolutely knew were impossible. They were going to sell a smartphone (well, originally, a feature phone) to consumers. As the most expensive phone on the planet, none-the-less. And they were dictating their terms to the carriers, rather than kowtow to them. A relatively big risk (tough even if the phone failed, they might have still launched a decent iPhone Touch).

But Apple's riding high now, with over 30% of the US smartphone market, and most of the profits. Every new iPhone has been just an incremental improvement, some hailed as the Jesus Phone, some written off too little of an improvement, all very, very successful. Apple has the formula down, and they're sticking to it. There's no room here for a gamble, and thus, no room for a significant innovation.

What are the big changes here? Faster CPU/GPU ... yeah, that happens pretty much every year, on every phone. Longer screen... pretty much a requirement. Every competitor has a 16:9-ish screen. They didn't try to the match the typical 1280x720 resolution. They did use a new LCD technology, leaving behind IPS for something new from Sharp that integrates the touchscreen in the display, transmits more light -- so, thinner (not as thin as OLED) and lower power. Good place for an improvement, but hardly noticeable to the average user. And then the connector -- maybe that's actually innovative, if it does anything useful that a plain old microUSB/MHL connector can't do. And also the main controversy.

Apple really never going to be the place to look for innovation in smartphones or tablets again -- they're too successful. They'd need a couple of model releases per year to even try out something very different, without risking the whole franchise. With the single model, no chance of risk talking. It's easier to watch all the Android devices life or die in the market, and adopt the innovations from those that rise to the top.

Re:Going for the S3

[hazydave]

If you're a hardcore smartphone user, and run your battery down regularly, you'll use the replaceable battery. The simple fact is that no one's Li-ion battery will last two years of full discharges every day. The ability to replace the cell yourself is a win, even if you don't ever plan on carrying spare cells.

If, on the other hand, you keep your device topped off pretty well, maybe with a charger at work or whatever, the battery will probably last the life of the device.

Re:Going for the S3

[hazydave]

Given that only about 25% of Apple's profits ever enter this country, it seems fairly unlikely the iPhone will have an important effect on the real economy, whatever their effect on the GDP.

Re:Going for the S3

[Virtucon]

Oh I agree completely but you see that's what's strange. It's like Apple is putting MSG or some other cocaine on their products and that every thing they do drives the economy. It's a bunch of bullshit and when you have a Nobel laureate saying the same thing then it really doesn't bode well for the intelligence of the general population or the press in general.

Re:Going for the S3

[smash]

If you want slots, buy a phone with slots. Apple aren't catering to that market, and there are plenty who don't care.

iPhone 5 CPU clock speed error

[wrldwzrd89]

The Geekbench results show a reading of 1.02 GHz. How that could be mistaken for 1.2 GHz instead of 1.0 GHz is beyond me, as the article text stated when I typed this.

Re:iPhone 5 CPU clock speed error

[MrJones]

/. need to errata this article.

I'm going for an S3

[What'sInAName]

(Grrr, thought I was logged in.)

I've decided that my next phone (soon, I hope) is going to be the S3. I'd been holding out with my iPhone 4 for a while, waiting (like many others, I suspect) to see what Apple would wow us with for the iPhone 5. Needless to say, I wasn't that impressed, though to be honest, part of me really didn't expect to be, given that there are only so many innovations they could have come up with. What could they have done? An even bigger screen? NFC? A phone you could roll up? The first two would hardly have been groundbreaking and the latter is tech that doesn't really exist yet.

Still, at the end of the day, I'm sure I could be happy with the 5, but I'm ready to play with a new toy. I've never had an Android device before, but got a chance to play with a tablet and some phones over my vacation, and I liked what I saw.

Captcha: revenues

Re:I'm going for an S3

[starfire83]

Honestly, if you're going to go for an Android-based phone I'd go with one of the Nexus devices. They're a lot easier to modify and get software updates before any other phone. The Galaxy Nexus is available on all carriers and is fairly similar to the S3, spec wise. The iPhone 5 announcement was severely underwhelming and every "new" feature is something that's been floating around Android for a while now. Stock Android 4.0 or 4.1 works so much better and smoother than any of the 3rd party skins like TouchWiz or SenseUI that just hog resources. It's also a lot better, imo, than iOS 5 that I'm forced to use at work or with my parents. The UI just makes a lot more sense to me than iOS.

Re:I'm going for an S3

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going for an S3

An S3 Trio or ViRGE?

Re:I'm going for an S3

[aNonnyMouseCowered]

"A phone you could roll up? The first two would hardly have been groundbreaking and the latter is tech that doesn't really exist yet."

Haha. Hopefully, we'll be wearing our next smartphone: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Glass

Re:I'm going for an S3

[Onco_Rx]

I would consider the galaxy S3 if it were not for the fact that my organization has standardized onto iOS platform. Sine they develop specific apps for our day-to-day activities I am stuck on the platform. The new S3 is intriguing I must admit.

Re:I'm going for an S3

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking as someone who did swap to Android full-time with a Galaxy Nexus, I've really lived to regret this decision. The short gist of this is that there is not a way to achieve feature parity with some pretty simple iOS features without otherwise giving Google the contents of your communications and otherwise providing them free data.

Things like the closest approximation they have to Visual Voicemail, Google Voice, involve the automatic indexing of your communications. The stock email client is actually quite unpleasant and featureless even compared to iOS's rather spartan client -- in favor, Google just assumes you're going to be part of their family and will just use the GMail client.

For almost a year of putting up with this and taking an active interest in learning the ins and outs of the Android platform both as a developer and as a user, I've found the experience to be far rougher around the edges and I still cannot get over how blatant a data hoover this platform is for Google.

I'm really hoping that Jolla, a company to recently surface with a number of ex-Nokia engineers, might be able to capture the hardcore Nokia fans with a Meego handset worth a damn. We need more alternatives than iOS and Android and stop acting like either of these choices are actually good. They're not good -- they're just what we've been presented with so far.

Re:I'm going for an S3

[Tumbleweed]

Honestly, if you're going to go for an Android-based phone I'd go with one of the Nexus devices. ... The Galaxy Nexus is available on all carriers and is fairly similar to the S3, spec wise.

No, it's not "fairly similar", spec-wise. The Galaxy Nexus is noticeably inferior to the GS3, much more like the iPhone 5, in fact. The only thing it has going for it - which is a BIG point for many - is that it's a stock Android experience.

Re:I'm going for an S3

[MoronGames]

Also, the galaxy nexus has a much better chance of being updated to newer versions of android than the S3

Re:I'm going for an S3

[Karlt1]

"Honestly, if you're going to go for an Android-based phone I'd go with one of the Nexus devices. They're a lot easier to modify and get software updates before any other phone."

Unless you get a Nexus that works on the largest carrier in the US....

http://www.gottabemobile.com/2012/09/11/verizon-galaxy-nexus-jelly-bean-update-excuses-roll-out/

Re:I'm going for an S3

[starfire83]

Takes less than five minutes to root and load CM10 for Jelly Bean goodness but I guess I can see how some people don't do that.

Re:I'm going for an S3

[AK Marc]

Is visual voicemail available outside the US? I've seen complaints about it not being available elsewhere, but I don't know where it is or isn't available. Last I heard, it's still AT&T only.

Re:I'm going for an S3

[m.ducharme]

Visual voicemail is available on Telus in Canada. Maybe on the other carriers too.

Re:I'm going for an S3

[AK Marc]

I just did a search and saw people on Vodafone complaining about the lack of VVM, though not sure if that's world-wide or only a subset of Vodafone.

Re:I'm going for an S3

[m.ducharme]

Funny, I checked out the big three providers in Canada, and not only do they all offer Visual Voicemail, they offer it for all smartphones.

Re:I'm going for an S3

[AK Marc]

I didn't think anyone else had VVM, because it was an Apple thing, did they not patent it?

Re:I'm going for an S3

[Anonymous Coward]

O2 has it in the UK. I think most of the original launch carriers from the respective countries have it. Not all of the later carriers do though.

Re:I'm going for an S3

[psiclops]

Things like the closest approximation they have to Visual Voicemail, Google Voice, involve the automatic indexing of your communications.

it has to be indexed somewhere, either the carrier is going to do it for you in which case you could install the applicable app or you are going to need to rely on a third party, something google is offering as an additional option via google voice.

The stock email client is actually quite unpleasant and featureless even compared to iOS's rather spartan client

what's "stock" on your phone would depend on the manufacturer (and in some cases carrier.) if you don't like the stock option then you are free to install one of the many alternatives

Re:I'm going for an S3

[shutdown -p now]

The other big point going for it is that it can be had unlocked, contract-free, for $350. And that you can switch from AT&T to T-Mo and back as you see fit, because it has pentaband 3G.

Oh, and what exactly are you going to do with all that beefy hardware on S3? On the only point that would actually matter in practice, the screen, they're both the same...

Re:I'm going for an S3

[jo42]

I'm going for an S3

Good luck getting the Gay Pink Candy version of Android 5.0 for it next year...

Oh samsung...

[kiriath]

That ad makes me giggle. Samsung is so deathly afraid of Apple that they are flaunting all of their silly useless(to me... I guess... maybe someone can use them) gadgets in hopes that people will think the I5 is inferior. The numbers will speak for themselves, and Samsung is wasting their advertising dollars... they should save up to pay their patent debts.

Seriously though, I never liked the Mac Vs PC ads, I feel like if you can't sell your product on its own merit, you shouldn't release ads trashing the other guys. When you have an awesome product, people will buy it... when you stoop to trash talk, you're showing your weakness. Apple showed their weakness with the MacVPC ads. Samsung is showing theirs with this.

Also, if Android didn't almost require 2GB of memory to run I'd feel like that is a lot. My 1GB android devices slug up so fast it is silly. If Android had the memory management of iOS, 2GB would scream.

Silly large companies...

Re:Oh samsung...

[FyRE666]

Yeah, 1GB should be enough for anyone right?

I don't think Samsung are "deathly afraid of Apple". Not then they're currently the leaders in market share, and actually supply the hardware to Apple, to make their phones/tablets/laptops. It's kind of a win-win...

Re:Oh samsung...

[kiriath]

I didn't say that 1GB should be enough for anyone, I said that 1GB is enough to beat 2GB running android, large difference.

Samsung is leader in market share? Unless a lot has changed recently that I'm unaware of Samsung does not top the market share in the smartphone area.

Re:Oh samsung...

[kiriath]

Also, my opinion does not make me a Troll.. please don't mod people 'troll' just because you don't like what they're saying.

Re:Oh samsung...

[Anonymous Coward]

By volume, yes. They lead by nearly 100%.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/worldwide-market-share-for-smartphones-a-market-dominated-by-apple-and-samsung/2012/09/11/bbff6198-fc38-11e1-98c6-ec0a0a93f8eb_story.html

Re:Oh samsung...

[FyRE666]

Let me just Google that for you... http://www.bgr.com/2012/08/14/mobile-phone-q2-2012-market-share-sales/

Re:Oh samsung...

[timothyl]

That post makes me giggle. Apple fans are so deathly afraid of Samsung that they are flaunting all of their silly useless (to me...I guess....maybe someone can use them) opinions in hopes that people will think the S3 is inferior.

Seriously though, at least try the phone out before declaring it is superior to the S3. On the surface the specs indicate less memory and a slower cpu clock speed. Ultimately the performance may be close, but the numbers will speak for themselves.

I personally was expecting something innovative and didn't see it, so I'm not sure how the Iphone 5 is an awesome product in itself. Yes, it does complement the Apple universe, but we all don't have to throw ourselves at Apple's feet.

Silly Apple fanboys....

Re:Oh samsung...

[kiriath]

I'm not saying anyone should throw themselves at apple's feet. I'm commenting on the results of the benchmarks in the article up ^ way.

I also commented on advertising gimics related to slamming the other company, and on memory usage.

Thanks for your comment though.

Re:Oh samsung...

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it matter? Most smart phones on the market are so close to each other feature wise, there is barely any difference between them. Rim used to be the top smartphone manufacturer, then apple, and now Samsung. In a couple of years it will be some other company. Don't get so worked up about it.

Re:Oh samsung...

[jbeaupre]

Hmmm, my wife now has an android phone running Jelly Bean on only 384 meg. Runs pretty nice too, despite using an old processor.

The difference doesn't seem to be Android itself, but all the other bloatware that gets stuffed on some phones.

Re:Oh samsung...

[timothyl]

Yep we're looking at the same article up ^ way, but you commented on the ad. I was considering that it was one benchmark result and unconfirmed if it was even legitimate in my response as stated in the article.

"Poole acknowledges that any pre-release results on Geekbench have a chance of being faked, but he seems to believe that these results are legitimate."
and "This one score also places the iPhone 5 ahead of the average scores of all Android phones on Geekbench."

I am waiting for more information before saying one phone's performance is better than another as well as some real world tests.

I do agree with you about the advertising gimics and that if it is a better product people will buy it without slamming the other company.

I think people throw themselves at Apple's feet with it's "Closed" Nature and the premiums charged for their products. It's great for the company and I think they've done a great job with it; that's what a company should do for it's shareholders after all.

Re:Oh samsung...

[stephanruby]

My 1GB android devices slug up so fast it is silly.

May be, you should be upgrading your device, or upgrading to Jellybeans if you can. After all, I know many iPhone owners that are having their share of problems (hanging and freezing) for not running on the latest iPhones.

Re:Oh samsung...

[kiriath]

If the real world tests confirm that it is indeed faster than the average bear, I'll be just as happy as if they confirm that its merely twice as fast as the iPhone 4S. The 4S is fast enough to make anything I run on it as fast as I need it to be. With things getting bigger and more complex all the time, more can't hurt. I will test things out first hand, and decide for myself... I do own both Apple and Android devices though, and I have to say that my Apple devices perform better than their Android counterparts. If the S3 is truly faster than the I5, I may pick one up to play with it too... I really do enjoy tinkering with devices and I'm no stranger to the Android world.

I have never broken an Apple device, and I have been rather rough on my iPhone. My MacBook Pro is solid as a rock. I've had Dell laptops that the power adapter socket broke with the utmost care in all situations applied not to mention hinges that have worn to the point of having to prop the screen up. Apple charges a premium because the quality of the hardware is superior to that of the majority of other companies. I've held several samsung / motorola / etc devices, they are not at all sturdy and do not feel as though they were built to the quality of an Apple device. People say 'the iPhone is soo fragile'... what are they doing to their phones? Dropping them 10 times a day? Throwing them across the room? Sticking them in their back pocket then sliding down a rocky slope? Sure if you smash the screen with a hammer it'll probably break, as would the screen of any other device. My Apple devices withstand normal wear and tear with much more resilience than any other device I have (except my Kindle Fire... that thing is pretty well built too... and apparently faster running JB than my moto xoom) used. This may be one reason why many people will accept the premiums.

As for the "Closed" nature... I appreciate the software quality. With so many open source products (do NOT mistake me as an OSS hater... merely an observation here) you have many hands stirring the pot, and often stirring against the other. This can and has led to a vast number of open source projects being almost as awesome as a closed source competitor... but not quite. I love being able to bring a new PC to a usable state with open source software, being able to do almost anything I can do with closed source software almost as well. As with anything though, there is give and take. The OSS may be almost as good (in some cases far better) than the closed source, but the overall quality of closed source software (at least in the case of Apple) is very good because of the team of people whose 9-5 is dedicating their lives to making it a quality product. There are a vast many very well maintained OSS projects... but as we have recently seen with Google vs Acer, it is hard to keep such a large development base in check, in tune and focused on a common goal.

I generally despise all advertisements, especially the ones that involve a bash on someone else, be it the 'little guy' or the 'big guy'. It seems to me to be in very poor taste. I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who feels that way.

All in all, you are correct, further data is needed to really give us a clear picture of the comparative speed. I shall concede to that.

Thanks for the challenge to my mental process! =D

Re:Oh samsung...

[kiriath]

First troll, then flamebait? Come on guys... if I had Mod privileges I wouldn't go around marking everyone who says something negative about apple as a Toll or Flamebait.

There has been some descent conversation in this set of comments, and I don't really feel like I deserve either of those moderated statuses. I may not be 'insightful' or 'interesting'... but I don't feel like I'm trolling or seeking to be flamed.

Yeesh... =\

Re:Oh samsung...

[scdeimos]

Seriously though, I never liked the Mac Vs PC ads, I feel like if you can't sell your product on its own merit, you shouldn't release ads trashing the other guys.

Agreed. But that doesn't stop Apple's Finder from showing pretty model-specific icons for all of the Macs when browsing a network and showing a generic 80's era CRT displaying a readable BSOD for all of the Windows PCs, now does it?

Re:Oh samsung...

[joelsanda]

I don't think Samsung are "deathly afraid of Apple". Not then they're currently the leaders in market share, and actually supply the hardware to Apple, to make their phones/tablets/laptops. It's kind of a win-win...

I wonder how much profit Apple makes per phone compared to Samsung? I'd say Apple is probably more profitable because they have one new phone model in two colors every what, 12 - 18 months? One model, two colors. Samsung models may not be that different, but having one is cheaper than two or many.

Re:Oh samsung...

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope that you are reinforcing his statement, because the graph in your link shows what he said to be true.

Re:Oh samsung...

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. I got this otherwise nice slick android tablet for under 100$ but it is loaded with crapware I can't uninstall.

Re:Oh samsung...

[FyRE666]

How exactly does this reinforce his case?

"Worldwide Mobile Device Sales to End Users by Vendor in 2Q12 (Thousands of Units)

Samsung 90,432.1
Apple 28,935.0"

Galaxy SIII is 2059... not exactly slower..

[Anonymous Coward]

Iphone G5 1601
Galaxy SIII 2059
Galaxy nexus 1480 ...

Re:Galaxy SIII is 2059... not exactly slower..

[Barefoot Monkey]

Can you provide a citation for those numbers? TFA links here, which lists Galaxy SIII and Galaxy Nexus at 1560 and 1039 respectively.

Re:Galaxy SIII is 2059... not exactly slower..

[Anonymous Coward]

http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/1032880.

Some one should post it on the mac forums....

Pete.

Re:Galaxy SIII is 2059... not exactly slower..

[raster]

http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/search?page=1&q=S+III&utf8=%E2%9C%93

http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/1012560
http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/995810
http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/912975

s3 is not slower. my bet that the variance in benchmarks is totally related to the cpu wantonly clocking down to save power while running the benchmark (eg it wasn't plugged into power at the time and the benchmark doesn't have root access to force the cpu to to clock speed). thus reality is you actually have to take the highest numbers as the real number given interference with clocking down and maybe even other running tasks will drag the benchmark down.

one thing the iphone5 is good as it memory bandwidth. that is where it kicks butt. it'll help memory constrained tests a lot.

Re:Galaxy SIII is 2059... not exactly slower..

[Smurf]

I see a lot of Galaxy S III there with processors running at 1,800 MHz, yet everywhere I look for the specifications of the SIII I only find 1.4 and 1.5 GHz. Are those phones overclocked?

If they are overclocked, the relevance of the comparison is greatly diminished. If they are not overclocked, it would be interesting to know where Samsung is selling S III handsets with those processors.

Re:Galaxy SIII is 2059... not exactly slower..

[raster]

and there is at least 1 1.4gz bench clocking in at over 2000:

http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/1032880

so relevant.

Re:Galaxy SIII is 2059... not exactly slower..

[hazydave]

Some are overclocked... easy to tell, since the benchmark supposedly calculates the actual processor speed. Not a big surprise -- most smartphone processors run below their rated speeds, in order to use a bit less power.

The big boost seems to be the SIII going from ICS to Jellybean. So far, every release of Android has improved the performance of the Dalvik VM. Not specifically an issue for native code (not sure if the benchmarks are done in the VM or the NDK; you'd want the NDK to best judge hardware performance), but it's going to affect parts of the system, even when using the NDK. You might also expect better performance if run with minimal active background services.

So many errors!

[lowlymarine]

There are a ludicrous number of errors here. The summary says that the CPU is clocked at 1.2 GHz, which the screenshot clearly shows is not the case - it's 1 GHz. The quad-core Galaxy S III only has 1GB of RAM, and the LTE variant with 2GB of RAM doesn't have a quad-core CPU. And both the HSPA+ and LTE Galaxy S III's score well above 1600 on Geekbench when actually running on all cores - the test results that are below 1600 and are no-doubt included in this "average" are custom tests run on fewer cores, which is clearly shown if you actually browse the results.

Re:So many errors!

[rjr162]

As I mentioned earlier, I ran it on my quad core sIII at 6% battery and got 1850

Re:So many errors!

[Anonymous Coward]

The quad-core Galaxy S III only has 1GB of RAM

Fwiw, there's a Korean version with quad-core and 2GB ram.

Does the processor matter that much?

[Overzeetop]

At least in the US, the carriers seem determined to ensure that you upgrade every two years anyway, so it's not like you're going to be stuck with a phone which is all that old. It seems more like "fast enough" is simply a responsive GUI and a generally imperceptible execution time for the kinds of activities you do on a phone. I'm not running CFD models, transcoding movies, or running a popular web service on the thing - I'm tweaking photos, or asking it to make simple calculations my HP48 might do, streaming media or rendering a web page (without flash; thanks Steve).

Now that a couple of generations have past for Android and iOS, the options for switching are getting far more expensive and time consuming. Switch all my media to a new program for syncing - major PITA. Re-buy all my apps (not an insignificant endeavor) for the other platform - $$$. Learn where the fuck the Android/iOS developers decide to put some obscure setting I want to change? Heck, even just setting up my icons and replicating a useful look & feel means dropping at least a couple, if not several, hours.

Megapixels, streaming video chat, resolution, memory amount, memory speed - the numbers mean almost nothing. They mean even less when you can't even run the opposing OS on the hardware. But I suppose everybody has to have a ruler handy at some point.

Re:Does the processor matter that much?

[taxman_10m]

Do you mean re-buy or re-install the apps? My android apps are buy once download on anything. The apps I bought on my G2 phone were good when I went to a 4G Slide, and also good on my Nexus 7.

Re:Does the processor matter that much?

[MindlessAutomata]

This isn't true of many apps for iOS. It's to keep things easier to use.

Re:Does the processor matter that much?

[evilviper]

The CPU matters when it comes to dog-slow apps like Firefox... My solution is to only use it when my other browsers can't handle a certain web page.

Also, with a number of video game console emulators, and MAME, I'm sure you can find cases where a nearly 2-year old phone isn't fast enough.

And as for transitioning... going from Android to IOS is probably far more involved and expensive than the other way around. Android has far more free apps in the app store, to the point I've only ever felt the need to purchase a handful. And an Android device has free SSH and SFTP (client AND server) options, so syncing your media can be as simple as rsyncing a folder from your desktop...

Re:Does the processor matter that much?

[Anonymous Coward]

Best comment on /., evah.

I made a mistake in the story write up...

[EGSonikku]

Just wanted to fess up to a typo in the story. I accidentally typed that the iPhone 5 runs at 1.2GHz, meant to type 1.02GHz.

Re:I made a mistake in the story write up...

[mactard]

Isn't that what the Slashdot editors are for?

Re:I made a mistake in the story write up...

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot has editors? When did this happen?

Re:I made a mistake in the story write up...

[Anonymous Coward]

AHAHAHHAHAHAhahahah....haha...oh, that was a good one!

Re:I made a mistake in the story write up...

[Anonymous Coward]

So, that's the only problem in the story that you'd like to fess up to?

Re:I made a mistake in the story write up...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just wanted to fess up to a cheap marketing ploy. I asked our engineers to clock the iPhone 5 to 1.02GHz instead of 1.0GHz, hoping that someone somewhere would mistype it as 1.2GHz. It worked.

Re:I made a mistake in the story write up...

[ThePeices]

Slashdot editors?

Sorry, your autocomplete must have put the wrong word there.

There is no compelling physical evidence that Slashdot Editors exist or have ever existed.

Here at slashdot, we expect to see dupes, typos, troll summaries, poor grammar, incorrect numbers, slashvertisements etc etc in the article summaries.

Re:I made a mistake in the story write up...

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that what the Slashdot editors are for?

Making mistakes? Hmm, I don't often agree with Mactards but yep, you're right.

Re:I made a mistake in the story write up...

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot editors?

Sorry, your autocomplete must have put the wrong word there.

There is no compelling physical evidence that Slashdot Editors exist or have ever existed.

Here at slashdot, we expect to see dupes, typos, troll summaries, poor grammar, incorrect numbers, slashvertisements etc etc in the article summaries.

Actually, there aren't really any dupes any more and they used to be the most common complaint about Slashdot.

The other categories seem to have picked up the slack though.

Re:I made a mistake in the story write up...

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you, new? Facts do not matter here! Only the extreme viewpoint of rabid fanboys/haters.

sorta proves a good

[Anonymous Coward]

sorta proves a good dual core design beats a bad quad core design, i'm pretty sure it also scores higher than the tegra 3 in other benchmarks.
i'm not an apple fan and i'm not gonna buy it, but the tegra3 is really poorly designed...

Re:sorta proves a good

[Tumbleweed]

sorta proves a good dual core design beats a bad quad core design, i'm pretty sure it also scores higher than the tegra 3 in other benchmarks. i'm not an apple fan and i'm not gonna buy it, but the tegra3 is really poorly designed...

Agreed, which is why many people prefer the US variant of the GSIII, which has a dual-core Cortex-A15-based design.

Re:sorta proves a good

[hazydave]

The SIII is not using the A15, but Qualcomm's own Krait design. Krait is supposed to be about 32% faster than the A9, while the A15 is expected to run about 40% faster than the A9. There's some suggestion that the A15 was being designed for higher power use, but then again, both Samsung and TI have released (to developers) A15 core processors intended for smartphones, not even just tablets or high processor count servers.

According to Arnand (http://www.anandtech.com/show/6292/iphone-5-a6-not-a15-custom-core), the iPhone 5 doesn't use the A15 either. He suggests this high power idea as a reason, but it doesn't make the slightest bit of sense that ARM would walk even a little bit away from their primary business (mobile devices) by overpowering the A15, or that the chip makers would use a non-phone-suitable core in a phone-oriented chip. And of course, ARM themselves list the A15 as a processor for advanced smartphones. Ok, sure, Intel has a chip for smartphones too....

It's also the case that Apple's second chip company, Intrinsity, were known for making chips faster -- not low power. They have a bunch of tricks to get to higher speeds in older process technologies, at least some of which (like dynamic latches) aren't the right formula for a mobile device that might be clocked way down for power savings (dynamic latches establish minimum clock speeds -- static logic can clock all the way down to DC). Apple's using Samsung's 32nm process, and may move some things to TSMC's 28nm process (along with AMD,TI, nVidia, Qualcomm, Broadcomm, and the rest of the fabless world -- rumor has it Apple actually tried to buy all of TSMC's 28nm capacity for some unspecified period, and were told to go pound sand).

One interesting observation about this: ARM Holdings (the ARM company that does the basic design of ARM processors, MALI GPUs, etc) made $462M in gross income in 2011, and probably something more in 2012. But still -- could Apple or Samsung or Qualcomm or even TI match ARM's level of investment in CPU development? Sure they could... and ARM still gets paid when they do. Apple's got so much money and, in particular, if they just concentrate on the CPU, they might deliver substantially better CPU cores for their specific purposes than the other ARM licensees. It'll be interesting to see if any of the others, aside from Qualcomm of course, get into their own development.

Qualcomm's done their own designs for awhile. Their previous core, the Scorpion, was about 5% faster than the ARM Cortex A8, not as fast as the A9 (about 25% faster than the A8), thus most Qualcomm powered phones being clocked a bit faster than the A9 phones.

Anyway, if true about Apple's core, that make even more interesting, with ARM, Qualcomm, and Apple all making their own ARM cores. And Samsung still in a very strong position, being the only company in the ARM race with their own IC fab (well, TI does, but not for this class of parts). Oh, well, sure, Intel planning to fight it out as well on mobile... they also make their own chips.

It's a competitive advantage

[Anonymous Coward]

No one else can make the phone that powerful and that thin today. While Apple has everyone else busy trying to catch up on that, they can move on to their next competitive advantage, whatever it may be.

Re:It's a competitive advantage

[CodeheadUK]

Stop drink the Cupertino KoolAid. The 5 is NOT the thinnest phone around.

http://www.androidguys.com/2012/09/12/there-are-at-least-three-android-phones-thinner-than-the-iphone-5/

Re:It's a competitive advantage

[rjstanford]

Well sure, if you're allowed to take your measurements of the "most common" thickness rather than the "thickest" thickness. They all have designs such as http://shopfs.myoppo.com/uploads/images/goods/22/1339773747_33032_b.jpg with protrusions jutting out.

Thinner is thinner

[SuperKendall]

Everyone I've seen with an iPhone has a ridicilously huge rubber case protecting the fragile thing.

Well the cases are not all that large that I have seen, but let's proceed as if they were.

Why is thin such a big deal when everyone has a case that makes it NOT thin?

Because the combination of a thinner device + a case is still thinner than the thicker device + a case. If the case, as you claim, is a constant - then thinner really does mean thinner to the user.

However one thing of note with the iPhone 5 is that it has a metal back again. I'm going to drop using a case with the iPhone5 since it should hold up better to drops (I never used a case with the original iPhone and never had an issue). Other people may also choose to stop using cases.

One other factor you forgot about is weight, the new phone is lighter - that does matter to people, I jog for instance and the iPhone 4 really produces a lot of pull in the pocket.

Re:Thinner is thinner

[msauve]

"Because the combination of a thinner device + a case is still thinner than the thicker device + a case. "

So, what do you think a tautology proves? A thicker device is still thicker - have I proved a counterpoint?

Exactly what advantage (besides bragging rights to a a win in some pissing contest) does a 7.6 mm thick phone over a 9.3 mm phone? It's no different the the old Detroit "longer, lower, wider" marketing BS, which was about (marketed) style, not utility, performace, or any other competitive advantage.

Re:Thinner is thinner

[Your.Master]

He was responding to a guy who basically argued that thinness can't matter because people add a case that makes it less thin. The counterargument is that there's still a net gain in thinness.

The exact advantage you asked for is 1.7mm less thickness. Approximately 20% less thick if you don't use a case; a smaller reduction if you do.

It's not that difficult. Do you really not understand why somebody would want something that they carry around all the time, in their pockets or purses or whatever, to occupy less space? Would you be happy if they quadrupled the phone's size so that the battery lasted 5 times as long (or whatever that would work out to)? What if they made it a cube? There's an really obvious trade-off here, a UTILITY tradeoff, and I simply don't believe you don't see it. Disagreeing with the cutoff point (eg. maybe you'd rather have another 1.7mm thickness for another two hours of talk time, if that's what it worked out to -- I have no idea what's realistic there) is another thing.

Re:Thinner is thinner

[msauve]

"he exact advantage you asked for is 1.7mm less thickness. ...It's not that difficult. Do you really not understand why somebody would want something that they carry around all the time, in their pockets or purses or whatever, to occupy less space?"

So, you claim that a 1 mm^3 phone would be better still, simply because it consumes less space? Ludicrous.

Re:Thinner is thinner

[tsa]

Cars and phones are fashion accessories to many people. For a fashion accessory, things like thickness (iPhone 5) and width ( Samsung Galaxy SIII) matter a lot.

Re:Thinner is thinner

[msauve]

And some people will pay extra to advertise for Abercrombie on their shirts. P.T. Barnum is proven correct.

Re:Thinner is thinner

[Anonymous Coward]

some people just like to have nice shit, it's not their fault you're a penny pinching frump.

Re:Thinner is thinner

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's no different the the old Detroit "longer, lower, wider" marketing BS"

Ahhh - reminds me of an old Ford commercial for the new version of the Pinto, with "more road-hugging weight". I could just envision hundreds of physicists and engineers rushing to their Ford dealers to buy one!

Re:Thinner is thinner

[Anonymous Coward]

Because that's the same thing as dropping the thickness a bit.

Re:Thinner is thinner

[Anonymous Coward]

You selfless SOB...willing to "drop using a case" to settle these anecdotes once and for all. We need more like you here sir. God bless you SuperKendall and your service to this country. :-)

Re:Thinner is thinner

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the combination of a thinner device + a case is still thinner than the thicker device + a case. If the case, as you claim, is a constant - then thinner really does mean thinner to the user.

da derpy derp derp... The OP is postulating (as many do) that perhaps if the thing wasn't a) fragile, b) had the perception of fragility) or c) hard to hold (the jobs-approved way) that the thick case wouldn't be a requirement.

Cue the comments about how many times you have dropped your phone from a skyscraper.

Comparing apples and oranges

[SuperKendall]

What does this all mean? Generally, that the high-end [USA] Android phones perform easily as well as the new iphone 5.

I don't know that I'd draw any conclusions, given the two devices run totally different OS's, the software written for them is in two totally different languages... I know some software for Android is written against the NDK but lots of it is not, is it fair to compare that against all the iPhone apps that are native?

Re:Comparing apples and oranges

[smash]

I know some software for Android is written against the NDK but lots of it is not, is it fair to compare that against all the iPhone apps that are native?

As far as the end user is concerned, whether it is native code or not is irrelevant. The available apps should be compared. If they run fast, that's all the user cares about. Some theoretical e-peen contest about "oh my smartphone has a quad core CPU that is way faster" doesn't matter if the software available consumes far more resources and doesn't run as fast.

Re:Comparing apples and oranges

[AmiMoJo]

You can write native apps for Android. Most devs don't because Java is more than fast enough and is easier.

Re:Comparing apples and oranges

[smash]

Whether you can or not is irrelevant. The apps that matter are the ones out there available to install.

Re:Comparing apples and oranges

[hazydave]

And the Java apps will run on x86 Android... which is coming to the mainstream. At least according to Intel.

Not related, but I want an answer

[aliquis]

I don't care about the size of the iPhone since I don't want any anyway.

But my question is:

Do the galaxy S III really have 2 GB RAM? Here in Sweden to? I thought it was only 1?

Is it quad-core Exynos 4 here with 1 GB and something else in the US? You got a different CPU but more RAM maybe?

http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_i9300_galaxy_s_iii-4238.php

Says 1 GB RAM.

I would had already bought it if it had 2 :/

Which one got which? Which one are the Swedish phones?

Re:Not related, but I want an answer

[marsu_k]

The US/LTE version has 2GB RAM and a dual-core processor, the international version has 1GB RAM and a quad-core processor. This being slashdot I haven't read TFA, but at least the summary seems slightly confused in this regard.

Re:Not related, but I want an answer

[stoolpigeon]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_S_III#Model_variants

Re:Not related, but I want an answer

[jeffmeden]

The North American and Japanese versions do have a dual core (higher clocked) vs the quad core available in the "international" Europe version (non LTE). The NA/JP versions also are the ones with 2GB of ram, vs 1GB in the international. Although, demonstrating how more cores/GHz/RAM actually makes the phone faster has been elusive.

Re:Not related, but I want an answer

[hazydave]

The dual core versions run the Qualcomm Krait processor, which is about 30% faster per clock cycle than the ARM Cortex A9. So head to head tests will vary. And of course, if your benchmark isn't multi-threaded, you're just testing single core performance. That's at least one way the actual effect of additional cores can be made confusing.

Odd conclusion...

[SuperKendall]

Needless to say, I wasn't that impressed

Why? It is in fact very impressive hardware; it's simply the case that most of the details about it were leaked beforehand.

I do not know what aspect of the phone would fail to impress compared to current top-end Android phones unless you were into huge screens. The main thing I wanted was a great camera upgrade from the iPhone4; the iPhone 5 has an excellent camera. It runs iOS apps quite quickly, and has a somewhat larger screen without being physically huge.

I just don't understand the pure spec-based comparison that takes place without consideration of what software you might want to run...

Re:Odd conclusion...

[Anonymous Coward]

The main thing I wanted was a great camera upgrade from the iPhone4; the iPhone 5 has an excellent camera.

The camera is almost exactly the same as in 4S? (well, it starts up 40% faster. I guess because the phone is faster...)?

Re:Odd conclusion...

[ThePeices]

But its *not* impressive. Its totally *meh*. It looks so similar to a 4S that it barely deserves the '5' monkier. Its more like an iPhone4Sv2.

The camera is almost exactly the same as the 4S. Its got a sapphire lens cover now. Thats it. The rest are software improvements the other phones are getting in IOS6.

We all were expecting better than what we got.

Not impressed with the 5. Im more impressed with the S3.

Re:Odd conclusion...

[Anonymous Coward]

The new processor apparently screams and it has twice the ram the 4S had. Does the physical design really matter? I couldn't care less whether or not people were able to tell that I was using the latest model iPhone. What I want is for the phone to be able to do what I want it to do quickly and efficiently. My hacked-to-death iPhone 4 is finally starting to get long in the tooth particularly after enabling Siri, and installing a countless number of tweaks. What I really want in a new phone is more power. I don't care about the physical appearance, I don't care about the screen size (I have my iPad and 30" desktop monitor for anything that takes more than a few minutes). What I care about is processor power, the GPU, the RAM and how quickly I can go from having the phone locked to taking a photo. I'm looking forward to my iPhone 5. I suppose I may be a bit of an outlier though.

Re:Odd conclusion...

[SuperKendall]

But its *not* impressive. Its totally *meh*. It looks so similar to a 4S that it barely deserves the '5' monkier.

Who cares how it looks? A good design is a good design. And I thought people claimed iOS users were just buying for the looks...

And even then, it actually looks pretty different with the metal back. In person it will not look that much like a 4s between the different back and taller form factor. I actually preferred the older size but the other aspects of the device are compelling enough for an upgrade.

The camera is almost exactly the same as the 4S

Incorrect. Google sample photos, you can see clear improvement in detail. Also, it's improved over the 4s in many other ways - up to two stops better low light performance for one thing (that is not at all nearly the same), and 40% faster to operate which is important in a mobile camera. The camera is actually what I am most interested in, along with greater processing power and more memory to handle some interesting photo manipulations or faster panoramic assembly.

We all were expecting better than what we got.

We were? I was expecting exactly what we got since it's now impossible for Apple to release a week after an announcement and have any secrets left to reveal, too many leaks along the assembly chain. Even then some aspects are better than I thought they might be, like the front camera for example.

Im more impressed with the S3.

And again you ignore the real core consideration that shoudl be present in the selection of any smartphone - what can you run on it? The iOS marketplace is still ahead of the Android marketplace, more in quality than quantity at this point - and that will continue as long as most Android phones are stuck at 2.x, while iOS apps are built atop more and more advanced libraries. You'll get some apps that take advantage of Android 4.0 but a tiny fraction of how many will be coding even against iOS6 at launch much less iOS5...

Re:Odd conclusion...

[R3d M3rcury]

Who cares how it looks? A good design is a good design. And I thought people claimed iOS users were just buying for the looks...

But how will people know I upgraded if it looks the same?

Seriously, Samsung. Update those ads to the S3....

Re:Odd conclusion...

[walshy007]

The iOS marketplace is still ahead of the Android marketplace, more in quality than quantity at this point

I'll take the bait, what app do you have on iphone that there is no equivalent functionality within the android market?

Re:Odd conclusion...

[SuperKendall]

I'll take the bait, what app do you have on iphone that there is no equivalent functionality within the android market?

iPhoto for one. I use it for review of DSLR images since I can quickly zoom to 100% on a 15MP JPG file to make sure focus was correct in specific locations.

It's also very lame but twitter clients are better. It annoys me that it matters at all to me but it does.

There are also some specialized weather apps like Dark Sky that I like. (though it looks like you will be getting that particular one eventually).

There are a LOT of interesting photo apps. There are some on Android but I don't think at the same level of functionality.

I have a MINI Coper and the MINI Connected smartphone integration is IOS only at the moment and has been for years (that one I think is silly on their part).

Possibly Android has astronomy apps as good as Hidden Sky and Star Walk, but I'm not sure...

Also a ton of interesting drawing apps, like Paper to pick a recent example. I know Android has some drawing apps but I'm not sure they are at the same level.

There are others I'm sure, those are just what I use most often...

Just in general if any mobile application comes out you know there will be an iOS version at least, and maybe or maybe not an Android version.

Re:Odd conclusion...

[Anonymous Coward]

As you grasp desperately at subjective arguments like relative quality of the marketplace I smile, because it is evidence that you are getting ever more desperate in your defence of Apple.

I smile as your precious Apple empire falls before you, tears rolling down your eyes as you get angry over honest Slashdot posts from people pointing out why they prefer the likes of the S3.

Better sell those shares quick so that you can at least salvage something of value from your religious relationship with Apple otherwise it wont be terribly long until even they fail to net you much, if anything.

Re:Odd conclusion...

[thegarbz]

And again you ignore the real core consideration that shoudl be present in the selection of any smartphone - what can you run on it?

For a real core consideration I find an amazing lack of innovation in the apps arena. Honestly every program I expect that I can or would want to run on a phone already exists. Yes many of my apps were coded with Android 2 in mind, actually one of my most used apps was written for version 1.6, and you know what ... I'm not looking to replace them. They are feature complete and even the older OSes never seemed to be a hindrance.

Re:Odd conclusion...

[walshy007]

iPhoto for one. I use it for review of DSLR images since I can quickly zoom to 100% on a 15MP JPG file to make sure focus was correct in specific locations.

How are you getting it to your iDevice? the only thing I could think of is by means of those eye-fi cards unless you are going really high-end like the wft-e6 with the canon 1dx, the eye-fi option would really limit your photo taking ability because of the lack of storage on the idevice and on the card.

If you are using wireless ftp or the like nothing is stopping an android device from having the same functionality, zooming to 100% is not exactly hard.

Darksky is pretty useless to most android and ios users anyway, it only covers the US, although it does look neat

In regards to serious photo editing and manipulation, this is what a laptop or desktop is for, if you are going to process raw images and white balance/gamma/etc why not do it on a medium that can do it better? Android has many of the same silly little photo apps but I've never seen the point in any of them. I've never been at an event that was active enough that I couldn't bring the laptop and thought I would do raw processing right there while the event is still happening as opposed to taking more photos. When has this cropped up?

I'm fairly sure the astronomy ones you listed are clones of google sky map, which is only available on android and is pretty kick-ass.

Re:Odd conclusion...

[Anonymous Coward]

On the other hand Android has OSMAnd, AIDE, Chrome, Terminal IDE, SSHDroid, ... some of which Apple won't allow just on principle.

Re:Odd conclusion...

[Anonymous Coward]

I did not follow the leaks, and yet it wasn't as impressive as the past releases have been. The retina display, dual core, HD camera - that was amazing! The iPhone 5 improves on all of that a bit, but there's nothing fascinatingly new.

Personally, I think Apple could have just addressed some of the usual critique points - make the battery replaceable (seems like they could have just kepts the size of the 4S, which was fine), add external storage (microSD), use a standard port (micro USB - if you must, use both that and your own one).

That would have made the iPhone attractive for a lot more people. I kept my phone for so long now, the second battery is getting weak, I might need a third. I don't have the cash to buy a new smartphone every two or three years just because the battery is getting weak.

Now if somebody claims the iPhone battery is more durable... well, I'd like to see an explanation for that, does it use different technology than those in other phones?

Re:Odd conclusion...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but in the end you are locked into one manufacturer. If Apple decides to stay on this small incrementing of new features, you will have no choice but to deal with whatever they decide is best for you.

I choose android because I am not locked this way. If Samsung, HTC, Moto, LG or anyone else come out with better hardware. I know I can switch over to that phone and all my apps will come with me. No need to repurchase anything.

Same goes for tablets, as my apps will run there and I can again choose the best hardware I like and suits me.

To each their own, but for me I like freedom to make my own choices.

Re:Odd conclusion...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never been at an event that was active enough that I couldn't bring the laptop and thought I would do raw processing right there while the event is still happening as opposed to taking more photos. When has this cropped up?

I'm fairly sure the astronomy ones you listed are clones of google sky map, which is only available on android and is pretty kick-ass.

He's the guy in the back of the crowd going "gee whiz check out how good that picture I just took looks" to all the other people, so he can show off two gadgets at once. Any decent photographer (maybe even one smart enough to pick a Canon) knows how spot zoom works in preview mode.

Re:Odd conclusion...

[SuperKendall]

How are you getting it to your iDevice?

Camera connection kit, USB adaptor to camera via USB cable.

It can pull in the JPG files directly (I shoot RAW + JPG) which I would do even if it supported my RAW format, for speed... I just need to review.

I also have some EyeFi cards and they do have an app, but Ive not tried that approach yet.

In regards to serious photo editing and manipulation, this is what a laptop or desktop is for

Yes of course. Again I am using this for critical review of overall quality and sharpness at 100%, and to make an initial cut as to which images I'll be using later.

I've never been at an event that was active enough that I couldn't bring the laptop

Doing landscape work bringing a laptop is not really an option. An iPad fits inside a Slingshot A3 bag with a bunch of lenses.

Also I personally would not want to bring a laptop to an event for fear of theft.

I'm fairly sure the astronomy ones you listed are clones of google sky map

I really doubt that is true of Star Walk.

Re:Odd conclusion...

[SuperKendall]

If Apple decides to stay on this small incrementing of new features, you will have no choice but to deal with whatever they decide is best for you.

That would only matter if they were falling behind quality wise; they are not.

The huge problem with Android is that many developers have no reason to target newer releases because so few phones can update to it by non-technical users. So developers target older and older versions of the OS. Meanwhile on IOS I can be pretty sure with every OS update, that a fair number of impressive apps will launch to take advantage of new features on day one. It doesn't matter if I have a wider range of hardware if none of it will run the software I want to use.

Re:Odd conclusion...

[SuperKendall]

He's the guy in the back of the crowd going "gee whiz check out how good that picture I just took looks" to all the other people, so he can show off two gadgets at once.

No, I 'm the guy discreetly taking event photos or out in the wilderness doing landscape work mostly alone - showing no-one anything because who shows photos before they have been carefully culled and adjusted?

The review is for ME, not for other people. I don't care what other people think.

Re:Odd conclusion...

[walshy007]

Just seems overly convoluted simply to get a higher resolution preview, android, idevice or laptop for that matter.

Re:Odd conclusion...

[SuperKendall]

How is it convoluted to attach a cable and read off JPG files, or if you have an SD card simply place it in a reader? Have you ever tried to pair an EyeFi card with something? Now THERE is convolution.

The thing about iPhoto on iOS is that it allows lag-free 100% zoom anywhere on an 15MP JPG image. I don't need a high-res preview, I can get that on camera. I need a large 100% pixel view. I can check a few spots and move on or re-shoot.

A laptop is too bulky to drag out in the field, and also far more prone to getting hurt - and the battery doesn't last that long compared to an iOS device.

OS change doesn't bother you?

[Overzeetop]

I know I have a lot of money tied up in software for my phone. Whether it be remote control software, or specialty apps which are only available for a premium, or just games I paid for - there's a $100-150+ in software I would have to re-buy. I don't want to have to think about switching my media management over. Not that iTunes isn't a steaming pile of shit on Windows, but I've finally gotten it to work acceptably (most of the time) with my 80+GB of music, 400+GB of movies, audio and ebooks, podcasts, etc. I'm sure there are better managers, but the number of hours required to switch that stuff into another management app just makes my insides curl. I'm doubly tied as I have an iOS tablet.

At this point, the "competitor" from Android would have to be pretty fucking amazingly better to make it worth while to switch, and while the S3 is very nice and there are things about it I like better, it's hard to find a reason for the extra expense and time to switch.

Re:OS change doesn't bother you?

[downhole]

That's one of the interesting parts about the mobile OS wars. I'm pretty tied into Android in the same way. Not that I have any real complaint about it, but I do have all of my contacts set up in Google, some amount of money in apps purchased from Google Play store, time setting everything up in a way that works for me, etc. If I wanted to switch over to iOS, I'd have to rebuy all of the apps, in some cases, find new apps when they don't share the same ones, then figure out how to copy over the contacts with email, phone numbers, etc, and all of the text messages, etc. It'd be enough of a PITA that I'd have to seriously want to switch over to bother with it.

Re:OS change doesn't bother you?

[thegarbz]

Switch media management tools? I regularly control iTunes from my Android phone and also regularly play music from some networked device over my phone as well. Honestly I think you'll find the switch would be a lot less complicated than you imagine.

Also I'm not sure what the difference in incentives is but Google Play has a lot more free and ad supported apps than the App Store. I've got some 200 apps and have probably spent about $10 between them, many games included, but admittedly none of those fancy 3D things that I see some people playing on their phones so it probably depends on what you purchase.

Re:OS change doesn't bother you?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your example shows exactly why the whole "walled garden" paradigm (along with DRM-infected media) has a large potential to bite the consumer in the ass: once you "invested" enough in apps and media that are tied to a single corporation/vendor, there's no way you can bail out of the platform now without major losses.

Apple has your ass. They can keep churning out overpriced devices with no innovations whatsoever (not saying it's necessarily the case right now, but they can just do that) and you have no other choice but to keep buying their products and keep yourself tied to their services.

(The same would apply to other "walled gardens", not just Apple's.)

Re:OS change doesn't bother you?

[jittles]

You do know that you can sync your calendar and contacts to the iPhone via gmail? Just like you can on android? I don't let Google or any one host that info for me though. I have my own CalDav, CardDav, and WebDav server and host all of that stuff for my family. Google has enough of my info from searches and their trackers, they don't need to know all of my family, friends and acquaintances too.

samsung s3's with LTE use a dual core snapdragon

[user317]

samsung s3 with LTE use a dual core snapdragon, clocked at 1.5ghz with 2gb of ram. how come they didn't compare apples to apples?

The numbers are liars

[Anonymous Coward]

One should note that the score given for the SGS3 is an average score from thousands of benchmarks which they range everywhere form 1271 to 2211.
The Iphone 5 however only has a single result, and that's on a phone that is probably not burdened by a bunch of crap which seemingly tends to give really varying results..
I won't trust this before they have at least 250 benchmarks done after the release.

Not everyone.

[mosb1000]

I don't have a case for my 4S, I didn't have one for my 3GS, and I didn't have one for my original iPhone, which I got from my brother when he upgraded to a 3G. My brother also is on his third phone and doesn't use a case. In all that time only one's ever fallen on the ground. My friend asked to hold it, and immediately dropped it onto a concrete floor when I handed it to him. It was the original iPhone. It put a small dent in the corner of the case, but it didn't really damage it. I'd hardly call the device fragile.

The population of iPhone owners seems pretty evenly split between people with cases and people without. I certainly appreciate a device that looks good and feels good in my hand. I'm not really concerned with breaking it since I look after my things. A lot of other iPhone users are the same.

Re:Not everyone.

[smash]

I've been through 3 iphones - a 3g, 3g-s and 4-s.

None have had cases. In my experience it all depends very much on the luck of the draw - how they land. The 3g-s was dropped at least 10-15 times, often onto bitumen, tiles, concrete, etc. It had a crack in the screen after about drop number 3 (bad luck drop!), but it was still fine. Eventually it died when it fell out of my pocket onto CARPET whilst ferretting around under a desk. I suspect the ribbon cable came loose to the screen.

The 3g was dropped almost as much, and i just passed it off to someone else (company phone) when I upgraded after 12 months.

The 4s has been dropped multiple times onto tiles, and has a small dent in one corner. Screen is fine. It has a quirk where it will randomly do "volume up" whenever it feels like it, but other than that, it is fine.

To get one to die after drop #1, you need to be exceedingly unlucky. Between my 3 phones they've had over 30-50 drops onto various hard surfaces from 2-4 feet high - plenty more onto carpet, and I've only actually killed one of them.

Anecdotal of course... but that's my personal experience.

Re:Not everyone.

[Mike Buddha]

I've been through 3 iphones - a 3g, 3g-s and 4-s.

I've had the same three iPhones. Never used a case on either of them but both the 3G and the 3GS started developing cracks in the white plastic around the edges. Both of those phones were exchanged several times for this same cracking issue. It made me give up on iPhone. I sold them both and got a Droid.

The 4S I never used with a case. I dropped it once and luckily it only scuffed the aluminum band. I had to get a bumper case for it though, because I started to got a blister on my pinky finger where it would rub against the aluminum band where the 30-pin connecter pit is.

With this new LIghtning connecter business I'm through with my Apple experiment. I grudgingly went along with the 30-pin connecter because it was fairly standard, but I'm not paying $20 for new cables or $30 for the privilege of using some of my old stuff (not all of it is compatible, of course). All this added cost coupled with decreased functionality? No thanks.

Re:Not everyone.

[smash]

Yeah, eventually my 3g-s developed some slight cracks. But it was 2 versions old by that point and I went to the 4-s.

You cannot compare specs directly

[SuperKendall]

It's really wrong to compare specs between Android and iOS devices directly without considering how the underlying systems are actually used.

For instance, an Android phone needs more memory than an iOS device as it tends to have more background processes. iOS has a tighter control over memory so it simply does not need as much to accomplish most things (unless you start getting into talking about image processing applications).

Also, what about the performance difference between Android apps and iOS apps? Android apps have to rely on a garbage collector to reclaim memory, iOS uses ARC which means memory is reclaimed without that overhead. Not to mention the VM in Android.

Also how many Android apps are written in such a way as to take advantage of all those cores? With so many Android devices still being on 2.x, lots of developers target that spec. iOS developers at worst are targeting about two versions back, currently switching from iOS4 to iOS5 as the lowest level supported - that means use of a LOT of libraries that actually make use of multiple cores for many tasks.

I can see comparing specs from on Android device to another or one iOS device to another, but comparing specs between an iOS device and an Android device seems kind of pointless unless you are giving very specific parameters for a task either might accomplish. Running GeekBench is not really a task a user would do every day...

Re:You cannot compare specs directly

[Anonymous Coward]

> ARC which means memory is reclaimed without that overhead

I'm not sure if you are familiar with what garbage collection actually does....

> Also how many Android apps are written in such a way as to take advantage of all those cores?

They don't have to be. The fact you can run multiple apps at a time means multiple cores can be utilized.

The parent should be modded "disinformative".

Re:You cannot compare specs directly

[evilviper]

Android applications don't need to be written to be multi-threaded, unless you've got a real CPU hog, like a high-end game, or maybe Firefox/Chrome.

Multitasking seems to be far more common in the Android world... I'm listening to music, have VX Connectbot idling in the background, and browsing the web (obviously), in addition to whatever background processes are running. Not exactly maxing out a quad core CPU, but it's being utilized, and providing some benefits.

Re:You cannot compare specs directly

[SuperKendall]

I'm not sure if you are familiar with what garbage collection actually does....

I can tell you are not if you think the GC is free. I'm not sure you understand what ARC does either if you think the cost the same. Since I spent a decade in corporate IT development working with Java I think I understand both Arc and garbage collectors better than you.

They don't have to be. The fact you can run multiple apps at a time means multiple cores can be utilized.

Yes, I can also do that in iOS. But most of the time the CPU will be idle even with background tasks running (for instance a music player will simply have fed data into an audio chip and be waiting until more data is requested), and it still means the primary app you are trying to run will be slower than it could have been had it used as many available cores as possible.

It also means worse battery life if your computations take longer than they could have if they used idle core time.

Re:You cannot compare specs directly

[SuperKendall]

Android applications don't need to be written to be multi-threaded

Nor do IOS apps. But it improves UI responsiveness, battery life and performance if you take advantage of multiple cores (note this is not necessarily multi-threading).

Multitasking seems to be far more common in the Android world...

Not sure that is true. Just listening to music alone almost all iOS users do frequently, for example.

I'm listening to music, have VX Connectbot idling in the background, and browsing the web (obviously), in addition to whatever background processes are running.

On an iOS device you can do all that too. Note that since your SSH client is idling that CPU could have gone to your foreground task but instead the CPU is sitting idle.

Re:You cannot compare specs directly

[Anonymous Coward]

That sounds exactly like something a Mac fanboy would have said way back when Intel boxes were starting to pull away... How is something like this "Informative" now, but "Flamebait" then?

Re:You cannot compare specs directly

[Anonymous Coward]

So let me summarize....waste not want not. As an old school embedded developer, how anybody is falling short on CPU and memory on a modern cell phone is just mind boggling to me.

Re:You cannot compare specs directly

[smash]

Because it is actually true, and demonstrably so.

Re:You cannot compare specs directly

[shutdown -p now]

Frankly we are at the point where it's pointless to compare those specs, except perhaps for the GPU. iPhones have had smooth, fast UI for ages. Android is finally there with ICS as well (judging by my Galaxy Nexus, at least). Why would I care if that is achieved by a super-powerful CPU, or many cores, or a bunch of neckbeards doing assembly-level micro-optimizations, or unicorn poop? All I care about is that it works fast enough (i.e. no lag, no stuttering, no command delays), doesn't cost me a fortune, and has a reasonable battery life.

My phone is what, a year old now? But I don't have any use case for it that would actually load that hardware to its full extent, except for 3D games. I can't think of anything for iPhone, either. Consequently, I don't see the point of upgrading to something like S3 - what, exactly, would that buy me? not on paper, but in practice?

Re:You cannot compare specs directly

[SuperKendall]

I agree with you on this, once a phone is fast enough for everything you use it for, what need do you have for a further increase?

The iPhone 5 for me is a good upgrade because it will be faster for many things that I do (including using the camera). If I had a 4s I'm honestly not sure I could say the same thing; but I am not sad to be getting something somewhat faster for unknown use cases.

It comes back to the point I made in that if you are going to be talking about specs like that across OS's you really need to be doing so in the context of some task you are trying to do. As you say simply getting more MHZ because, well, more means little if both devices scroll smoothly and that is the main thing you care about.

Re:You cannot compare specs directly

[thesupraman]

No, obviously you have no idea what you are talking about in this case.

Reference counting (ARC) is EXACTLY a form of garbage collection, not particularly better or worse than any other.

You DO realise that ARC imposes a runtime cost which some other garbage collectors do not? no? thought not.

You DO realise that ARC is sensitive to some forms of data structure that it cannot collect? (circular references) and
then needs to fall back to other forms of GC? no? thought not.

And no, iOS cannot just run multiple apps at the same time to use multiple cores, as iOS only supports specifically
written background tasks - it cannot just continue normal execution of a non-foreground task.

You also, I bet, dont know what a process scheduler is, since that addresses your idiocy about primary apps being
slower.

I kind of feel sorry for the corporate IR development teams you worked with, but then since you worked in Java, I am
not really that surprised.

Really, your UID is low enough that you should know better..

Re:You cannot compare specs directly

[Swampash]

iPhones have had smooth, fast UI for ages. Android is finally there with ICS as well

I put a Samsung Galaxy S3 w/ICS next to my 2-year-old iPhone 4 and in normal swiping and scrolling operations the S3 felt like dogshit by comparison, where "dogshit" is a euphemism for "frustrating and laggy".

When using the S3 I said out loud "oh wow, lag" and the owner asked what I meant. So I handed him my iPhone 4 and he swiped and dragged around for two seconds and said quietly "Oh. I see."

Re:You cannot compare specs directly

[shutdown -p now]

S3 has that crappy Sammy's own and very special bastardized version of Android, right?

You want to see smooth, get stock ICS. For silky smooth, get stock Jelly Bean.

Re:You cannot compare specs directly

[Jeremi]

You DO realise that ARC imposes a runtime cost which some other garbage collectors do not? no? thought not.

Can you give some details about ARC's runtime cost? I'm curious about that.

Re:You cannot compare specs directly

[Anonymous Coward]

Google Earth

Re:You cannot compare specs directly

[jkflying]

Note that since your SSH client is idling that CPU could have gone to your foreground task but instead the CPU is sitting idle.

I'm sorry, WHAT!?!?!?!

Have you ever heard of using system wait/interrupts instead of asm("nop"); ? Because the people who actually write decent, useful programs have, and it doesn't suffer from this problem.

I'm sure further up in the thread you said you weren't a complete idiot... you might want to re-evaluate that.

Re:You cannot compare specs directly

[Swampash]

I'm not sure how the owner had it set up so it may indeed have been running "Sammy's own and very special bastardized version of Android".

Re:You cannot compare specs directly

[Anonymous Coward]

sure you can listen to music while viewing a webpage but that's about the limit of ios multi tasking (yes it also remembers your recently used apps), android however can be taken much much further (if you really don't know this your too ignorant to bother educating).

Re:You cannot compare specs directly

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure you know how copy and paste works. Or, maybe instead of Ctrl+V you just hit Ctrl+W and pasted it twice?

I'm not sure why double-U looks like a double-V...

Re:You cannot compare specs directly

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly it's not even that. The S3 is so powerful that even Samsung's bastardised UI runs fine because it's powerful enough to brute force it into running impressively smoothly.

I'd wager the problems he saw are actually much more to do with him being an Apple fanboy and that what he saw, only he saw, inside his head.

The iPhone 4 and 4S doesn't even come close to even the SIII in terms of smoothness and pleasantness to use, let alone pure ICS/JB Android handsets like the Galaxy Nexus.

Re:You cannot compare specs directly

[Misagon]

My Commodore 64 had smooth scrolling, and it ran at 1 MHz. Your problem is probably either in the software or in the touch sensor.

Re:You cannot compare specs directly

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me guess, comp sci undergrad who's read and thoroughly misunderstood a bunch of crap they read on the internet?

Try harder kiddo, try harder, durrr.

Re:You cannot compare specs directly

[Anonymous Coward]

ICS is smooth, JB is silky smooth, and 2013 is the year of the Linux desktop.

Re:You cannot compare specs directly

[BasilBrush]

I'm not sure if you are familiar with what garbage collection actually does....

Given that what he said was correct, I suspect he does. And I suspect you aren't aware of the difference between GC and ARC.

Re:You cannot compare specs directly

[AmiMoJo]

Ah SuperKendall, back to blind us with science again eh? Unfortunately your ideas are rather out of date.

Android does use GC. Somehow it doesn't cripple Android apps though. Compare games, very timing critical apps where any large waste of CPU cycles is going to be fairly obvious, and they tend to run about equally on equally matched iOS and Android hardware.

The reason is that GC isn't as dumb as you think it is. There are lots of times when a process needs to wait for something to happen, during which some GC can take place. Even in a game where the CPU is 100% utilized you don't examine every object every cycle of the GC, you spread the load so as not to cause noticeable performance issues.

GC just isn't a big deal. It doesn't noticeably affect apps. On the other hand not having real multitasking is something that users do notice.

BTW, the Java VM does JIT compilation, and you can write native code if you want to.

Re:You cannot compare specs directly

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, what about the performance difference between Android apps and iOS apps? Android apps have to rely on a garbage collector to reclaim memory, iOS uses ARC which means memory is reclaimed without that overhead. Not to mention the VM in Android.

Inaccurate and misleading statement. Android native apps do rely on garbage collection, but generally speaking, most any application where this is likely to be an issue, it won't be a native application. Most any game, whereby memory constraint is likely to be an issue, is a natively application which almost never uses garbage collection.

And, let's not forget, that Android has a specific collector which is used for these types of applications. The overhead is so low its not worth discussion. It exists specifically for native Android games.

Also how many Android apps are written in such a way as to take advantage of all those cores? With so many Android devices still being on 2.x, lots of developers target that spec.

Not really accurate. Developers will commonly use concurrent strategies. Since many things require a specific CPU count, plus combined with the nature of the workloads typically associated on such a device, multiple cores frequently scale very well, when done so properly. You do have a point that I expect most applications actually do so properly. And beyond that, simply because of the nature of the types of applications people use on these devices, its not likely most applications will leverage more than two, or three cpus at most. Really my point is, the constraint isn't that people targetted specific generational device specifications. Furthermore, the category of applications which are likely to benefit the most from multiple CPUs are typically games. These typically determine the number of cores and/or the engine has finite limits simply because not everything can be algorithmically paralleled. Just the same, I believe you're making it sound as if the contraint is lower than it actually is; which is not to say its unconstrained.

Popular benchmarks are frequently garbage. I agree with that. Doubly so when you sum it up in a weighted scare as has been presented here. Having said that, raw numbers such as memory throughput and I/O performance do have their place and are very meaningful basis for comparison.

Re:You cannot compare specs directly

[hazydave]

I have the Galaxy Nexus as well... I do believe there's a chip containing unicorn poop in there.. that's where the on-screen rainbows come from.

As well, the TI OMAP 4460 improved the overall system. It wasn't just dual ARM Cortex A9s, but dual memory bus controllers -- much the same deal you find on the average desktop PC. That's one key to keeping the processors (and GPU of course, don't forget all of these SOCs are "shared memory" devices, in the sense of PC graphics being shared) well fed. Some of the quad cores, like the nVidia Tegra 3, still use a single (though somewhat faster) memory bus. So when you have good cache hits, the Tegra 3 pulls ahead, when running memory bound, the 4460 will be faster.

In short, performance is all about the total system, not any given spec. The Tegra 3 ought to be significantly faster on 3D games. That's also what the iPhone has typically been optimized for -- Apple sells a crazy boatload of games, and they've pretty much made that a thing in the iTunes store now.

I think if you chose well, as we did with the GN, you're not going to see a huge upgrade opportunity in just a year. Sure, if someone gave me a free SIII I'd use it, but if I have to spend real money (and maybe a bit of it, if I want to keep my unlimited plan on Verizon), I'll wait for a substantial upgrade. Hopefully one that tunes battery life in as well.

Where are you seeing that?

[mosb1000]

I'm looking at the linked article, and that doesn't seem to be the case. It shows the Galaxy SIII at 1560 while it shows the iPhone 5 at 1601. Care to elaborate?

Re:Where are you seeing that?

[cheesybagel]

Search the database.

Faster?

[Andrio]

The S3 gets a 1560, and the iPhone 5 gets a 1601.

Basically, the speed difference in imperceptible to anyone. Having twice the amount of RAM is leagues more useful than a hair faster CPU. Especially when you have real multi-tasking :)

Re:Faster?

[Anonymous Coward]

What, Android has multitasking?

Hey no fair, why cant us Apple owners get real multitasking too? :(

Sent from my iPhone.

Re:Faster?

[MindlessAutomata]

It keeps things easy to use!

Cache skews results

[Anonymous Coward]

Looking at iPhone 5/S III scores, the iPhone's memory performance is almost 2x the S3's. The SIIIs listed on Geekbench's site do no report cache memory, but the iPhone 5 benchmark shows L1/2 cache. The benchmark does not seem to account for caching and overstimates the actual memory performance.

Interesting bandwidth results

[Namarrgon]

As you say, while the S3 has a consistent edge elsewhere, the iPhone destroys the S3 in the memory bandwidth tests. But those tests are strangely inconsistent, for both devices.

The S3 is a lot slower for sequential read bandwidth (578MB/s vs 1.73GB/s), but actually faster for sequential writes (1.53GB/s vs 1.35/GB/s). It's interesting that write speed is so much faster than reading; usually read speeds are faster than writes (as with the iPhone). This appears common to many Android devices though.

OTOH, the iPhone 5 is ridiculously fast in the stdlib write test - over 6GB/s. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the tests, but I don't see how this result can be three times higher than sequential writes; I'd expect a little slower. Perhaps the iPhone has a large enough cache that the test fits within it?

Re:Interesting bandwidth results

[AmiMoJo]

Maybe the benchmarking software is broken. Wouldn't surprise me as much as the weird and inconsistent results do. I'm not sure which CPU we are looking at any more (the quad core Samsung or the dual core Qualcomm) but the specs for both suggest write bandwidth should be about the same as read bandwidth.

Better camera, not the same

[SuperKendall]

The camera is almost exactly the same as in 4S?

No it is not.

Up to two stops better performance is a good upgrade. And also there happen to be sample pics on DPReview from an iPhone 4s that match one of the shots the iPhone 5 was demoed with - the iPhone 5 captures detail better. Also I cannot find details on how the 4s camera was constructed but I believe the iPhone 5 is a step up in terms of the lens used.

I have a DSLR and profesional compact cameras too. What I want out of a cell phone camera is an image that does not make me wish I also had a compact camera, and the iPhone 5 meets that goal (really the 4s did as well, but the 5 has a nice boost beyond even that).

Re:Better camera, not the same

[walshy007]

Out of curiosity, why not simply take one of the smaller less expensive dslr's with you everywhere?

While you can control the EV, ISO etc doing so on a smart phone uses about the same time pulling a dslr out of a bag would.

Re:Better camera, not the same

[walshy007]

my bad on formatting, should have looked at it, lol.

Re:Better camera, not the same

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple fanboi much, it's nice to see the fanbois come out and upmod every one of your comments.

Re:Better camera, not the same

[Anonymous Coward]

Im currently hiking through patagonia. Very wet. Snow. Before that I was hiking through parts of the atacama desert (extremely dry but dusty and rapid changes in altitude from 2300 metres to over 4500 metres. Im afraid none of the iphones in the group (obviously no v5s ) are still working. The samsungs (mostly s2's but I have a galaxy note) are ok. Also I have a number if batteries so I can just throw in a new battery each day (i can go 5 days...... with care) plus with a 64gb micro sd card I can store LOTS of pics. The nice thing is when we get to a place with power and wifi I can post the pics from the samsung very fast while I recharge the batteries in parallel. The DSLR pics (canon 5D) are better but take too long usually to upload. (where I am today the wifi is very slow and thats usual... although I do plan to upload one pic of a condor taken with the 5d and a long fast lens in flight tonight)
Everybody I have hiked with so far agrees not only are the g note pics acceptable but the extra storage and ability to saw in new batteries by far beat the iphone and thats while the iphones were still all working

And we have a winner ^_^ !!

[sky770]

Finally my home made Götterdämmerung can fly.

S3 Iphone 5

[Muramas95]

Galaxy S III > Iphone 5 http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/search?q=Samsung+Galaxy+S+III

Practical reasons why thinner is better

[SuperKendall]

A thicker device is still thicker - have I proved a counterpoint?

How is simply extrapolating the other direction based on my main argument anything but a verification of what I said?

Exactly what advantage (besides bragging rights to a a win in some pissing contest) does a 7.6 mm thick phone over a 9.3 mm phone?

I never have given a rats ass what people think about what I wear or carry.

In fact there is a practical reason for the difference to be preferred, I sometimes carry a camera in one packet and when I do I carry the phone in the same pocket with my wallet. A thinner iPhone shares a pocket more nicely with a wallet.

And you have again overlooked the benefits of a lighter device, which I also laid out as a practical reason to also prefer.

Thinner devices are better for practical reasons

[SuperKendall]

For a fashion accessory, things like thickness (iPhone 5) and width ( Samsung Galaxy SIII) matter a lot.

I would say for both there are primarily practical interests at work.

Although I cannot see carrying around such a huge phone myself, I can see why some people would prefer the large screen on the Galaxy depending on how they use the device.

In the case of the iPhone a thinner, lighter device fits in a pocket better with other items, and also means a purse is less heavy. Both of those are very practical reasons why you might be happier with a thinner and lighter device beyond mere looks.

Consider how much hikers pay to get rid of weight (sometimes just an ounce or two) they will be carrying around for just a few days at a time. Your phone is with you ALL the time, so why would you not want to minimize the weight and bulk of something you carry even more often? Especially when in the bargain you get a device that runs twice as fast, has a larger screen and a better camera? None of those are "fashionable" reasons for wanting an upgrade.

Watch where that stone is going sir

[SuperKendall]

Look, I think the Abercrombie shirts are silly as well, but only because who loves Abercrombie enough to tell you you should go there?

But think twice before you laugh at them. You are saying you have NO t-shirts from bands? No t-shirts with beloved science fiction characters, say perhaps Star Wars?

Again I can't see advertising Abercrombie myself but I cannot really say anything against the practice because I do have band t-shirts and other shirts advertising commercial entities I like. It's not just that you are paying to advertise for them, it's that you are indicating to others you are part of a community... (although again, Abercrombie? Is there such a thing as an Abercrombie community?)

Re:Watch where that stone is going sir

[msauve]

The difference is that Ambercrombie (or Gap, DKNY, etc.) shirts are self-referential.

He claimed the opposite

[SuperKendall]

So, you claim that a 1 mm^3 phone would be better still, simply because it consumes less space?

It would obviously be better (you could keep it inside the thinnest pocket or even a wallet), but only if it did not break and the battery was sufficient.

Remember in the end his followup point was about the utility tradeoff, not pure thinness. I would agree something being simply thinner may not be desirable if there were other things you lost as a result. But between the old and the new iPhone, there is no loss of utility by the new one being thinner and lighter. You get the same battery life, a better screen, faster network connection, faster processor and more memory.

If someone took something you liked and had to carry all the time and told you they could make it 20% thinner with zero loss in functionality, why would you not want to take advantage of that? Why would it not be desirable from a purely practical standpoint?

Re:He claimed the opposite

[walshy007]

If someone took something you liked and had to carry all the time and told you they could make it 20% thinner with zero loss in functionality, why would you not want to take advantage of that? Why would it not be desirable from a purely practical standpoint?

Serviceability, tightly packed components and ones packed in odd ways are harder to service. While anyone who tries to service an iphone themselves is usually a masochist anyway, room allows for a cleaner internal design that is easier to disassemble/fix.

Re:He claimed the opposite

[SuperKendall]

Sorry, but serviceability is not a general modern practical concern, for all kinds of products now...

Perhaps it is a concern of yours but there are not very many that care about that aspect any more. And how often are you REALLY opening up your phone?

What's not true?

[SuperKendall]

This isn't true of many apps for iOS.

You can re-download apps for iOS too. It knows from your store account what you've already bought.

And if you are using iCloud downloading an app also downloads the backed-up data that went with that app too... it makes moving to a new device pretty easy.

And who cares?

[Torp]

Meanwhile, no matter the hardware specs, iOS will keep being more responsive and iOS phones will keep getting software updates for years after launch. Clock speed and number of cores has stopped being relevant even in phones (it's not really relevant on the desktop any more as well) already.
Note: i've owned two Android phones before switching to iOS.

Re:And who cares?

[Ash-Fox]

Meanwhile, no matter the hardware specs, iOS
will keep being more responsive and iOS phones
will keep getting software updates for years
after launch.

As opposed to my Google Nexus S?

Bulk

[SuperKendall]

It simply is not practical to have even the smallest DSLR with you everywhere. The phone is always with me because I need to look things up on demand at any time. I still carry a compact with a large sensor when I can in addition to the phone in case I wish to capture something with much greater quality, but even that is too bulky to always have at every moment.

The speed thing is more about a fully automatic experience when there's something happening right now I would like documented...

You continue to claim you understand?

[SuperKendall]

Reference counting (ARC) is EXACTLY a form of garbage collection, not particularly better or worse than any other.

It's not the same as garbage collection, it's exactly what the name says - AUTOMATED reference counting. The moment your code no longer needs an object code is inserted to release it for you. It has no cost over the code you would have written manually.

It is superior to traditional GC because there is no processor time taken in deciding what to collect, no examination of the object tree to find what is still in scope. That means no overhead, and no "pauses" in application flow as a GC fires up to collect things.

You DO realise that ARC imposes a runtime cost which some other garbage collectors do not?

Compile time feature, moron. Even the weak reference zeroing is just code inserted around properties.

You DO realise that ARC is sensitive to some forms of data structure that it cannot collect? (circular references)

It's not "sensitive" to anything, that is simply an artifact of reference counting. By the way, in almost a year of developing multiple applications using ARC you know how many circular references I have seen in real life? Zero. Over-retention is still possible, but cycles are quite rare.

And no, iOS cannot just run multiple apps at the same time to use multiple cores, as iOS only supports specifically
written background tasks

Which then run in the background doing whatever they were designed to do in the background. For instance what do you think Pandora does, genius? What happens when I have Pandora running AND have backgrounded a navigation application? Why in fact they ARE both running.

Of course the system tasks all do run in the background so you really come off as quite ignorant claiming iOS cannot do this arbitrarily when it's a limitation specifically imposed on a subset of applications on the system. A jailbroken iPhone can run any user application in the background simply by a tweak to Launchpad, not the OS or app.

it cannot just continue normal execution of a non-foreground task.

Actually it can for about ten seconds for any app even without jailbreaking. You just have to let the OS know.

You also, I bet, dont know what a process scheduler is,

I've written several thanks. That was a while ago as I moved on from such trivial things.

I do also know what an apostrophe is. Zing!

that addresses your idiocy about primary apps being slower.

Might want to watch the word idiocy when you are so prone to misunderstanding what is being said - I am talking about an foreground application that is not taking full advantage of the system resources. Pretty obviously an application that runs on one core when it could make use of two would be slower than it could be. Duh.

I kind of feel sorry for the corporate IR development teams you worked with

Imagine the concern I feel for whatever company must put up with your constant misunderstandings of technology! I sure hope you are not in charge of any iOS work for sometime to come.

Really, your UID is low enough that you should know better..

My UID is low enough you should have known to do more research rather than spout off on technologies you have not used.

I will allow you the last response, you may either choose the path of wisdom and grovel for forgiveness at your iOS 101 level of understanding, or you may continue down the path of proving beyond all doubt you enjoy staying ignorant. Your choice, but I'll respond no more as I have already spent too much time on your education.

If I were you though I would go watch all of the Stanford introductory iOS course and read some of the iOS documentation to understand how the system works. Oh and find a good white paper on what ARC does, because Damn.

Re:You continue to claim you understand?

[Anonymous Coward]

That is one epic smack-down. :-D

Re:You continue to claim you understand?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a shame you demonstrate such a great understanding of iOS whilst showing a complete ignorance of the way Android works, otherwise your posts in general would actually be worthwhile reading.

As it stands though, you give us useful information about the way iOS works whilst spouting trivially disprovable drivel about the way Android works meaning that despite your intricate knowledge of iOS, your posts still end up being full of bollocks when you start comparing to Android.

Re:You continue to claim you understand?

[Anonymous Coward]

You DO realise that ARC imposes a runtime cost which some other garbage collectors do not?

Compile time feature, moron. Even the weak reference zeroing is just code inserted around properties.

So the compiler adds extra reference counting code yet this imposes no cost at runtime! That is some shit hot technology.

Re:You continue to claim you understand?

[Anonymous Coward]

Burn! Ouch :)

Re:You continue to claim you understand?

[Anonymous Coward]

Reference counting is certainly a runtime cost. Code and data has to be added in order to *count references*. It is certainly not compile time, because the compiler does not know about the state of dynamic objects and their references to one another. And it is not necessarily the same cost as you would incur manually (and either way, refcounts are an overhead that garbage collection does not require).

There are important trivial cases where it can be determined that refcounting is not required. These are exactly the same cases where a garbage collected language can also detect and immediately free the object.

Don't be too quick to call someone a moron without knowing about the topic yourself.

Also, if latency and performance is a critical concern, then the best answer is to not use a JITed, managed language. e.g., "native" development model for Android.

Re:You continue to claim you understand?

[moonbender]

Posts like these are why I mostly stopped reading Slashdot after a decade or so. I can take the trolls. I don't care about dupes or bad summaries or even off-topic stuff, I come here for the discussion. But when even the people who seem to have something worthwhile to say continue to make an ass out of themselves on formal grounds, there is just not much signal left in the noise.

Re:You continue to claim you understand?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except ARC is purely a compile-time feature. It doesn't add any additional costs than you normally would have yourself with your own retain/release/autorelease code. ARC doesn't rely on the state of dynamic objects at runtime nor does it care. When an object is freed, all of its internal strong relationships are sent a release message, which can potentially free them as well, thus providing a cascading effect.

When developing for ARC, there are some new precautions to be aware of, though. If you create a new UIWindow and tell it to become key, it'll simply disappear because you didn't maintain a reference to it, despite the fact that's it would be easily accessible from elsewhere in your code without a direct reference ([UIApplication sharedApplication].keyWindow). But back to my original point, it's certainly worth reading up on ARC to see that ARC isn't a runtime feature.

I was at the last WWDC when they discussed ARC and how it came about. With the development of Clang/LLVM, the created a pretty good static analyzer. The realized that with Objective-C objects, they new exactly when an object is over or under-released and they applied the reverse logic: If the analyzer knows where the retain/releases/autoreleases are supposed to be, why bother asking the user to put them in? That's essentially the reason ARC was started.

Re:You continue to claim you understand?

[BasilBrush]

Reference counting is certainly a runtime cost.

Reference counting is. It's a single increment when a memory location is referenced and a decrement and possible delete when it's unreferenced. AUTOMATIC reference counting does not add any additional code to that, and in fact often needs less code.

There are important trivial cases where it can be determined that refcounting is not required.

Correct, and the LLVM compiler spots those and doesn't add ref-counting code in those cases. That's why it often needs less code than manual reference counting.

Now, compare these small amounts of trivial ref-counting code to the 100s of milliseconds of time that the Android garbage collector takes doing mark and sweep. Anyone who understands these two technologies cannot conclude that the Android Garbage Collector is more efficient. It's not. And most Android developers will have come across occasions when the GC is killing the performance of their app. Times when they have to rethink their approach and re-code.

Re:You continue to claim you understand?

[Anonymous Coward]

>> Reference counting is certainly a runtime cost.

> Reference counting is. It's a single increment when a memory location is referenced and a decrement and possible delete when it's unreferenced.

An ATOMIC increment/decrement. These are 1-2 orders of magnitude more expensive than an arithmetic increment or decrement, and in fact can be even more costly when they result in cache line contention.

> AUTOMATIC reference counting does not add any additional code to that, and in fact often needs less code.

Yes, it is a cost which is not associated with garbage collectors, if you would keep up.

Also, automatic reference counting also in fact often needs more code than hand-coded refcounting.

>> There are important trivial cases where it can be determined that refcounting is not required.

> Correct, and the LLVM compiler spots those and doesn't add ref-counting code in those cases. That's why it often needs less code than manual reference counting.

Of course, a competent programmer would generally be able to spot even more cases where it is not required, often resulting in less code than automatic reference counting. Granted that a lot of apps are not written by competent programmers.

> Now, compare these small amounts of trivial ref-counting code to the 100s of milliseconds of time that the Android garbage collector takes doing mark and sweep. Anyone who understands these two technologies cannot conclude that the Android Garbage Collector is more efficient. It's not. And most Android developers will have come across occasions when the GC is killing the performance of their app. Times when they have to rethink their approach and re-code.

OK, so let's see your numbers or citation of studies.

Unlike you, I did not make a claim as to which is more efficient. I only pointed out the error which parent made when trying to claim that automatic reference counting has no runtime overhead.

Re:You continue to claim you understand?

[jittles]

It's not the same as garbage collection, it's exactly what the name says - AUTOMATED reference counting. The moment your code no longer needs an object code is inserted to release it for you. It has no cost over the code you would have written manually.

Wow. Apple really does have a bunch of geniuses, then. I would have sworn that the act of reference counting would have overhead in and of itself. Not to mention having to lock/unlock the code in the critical path for reference counting. Now I know that Google made a presentation on how to implement critical paths without locking, but there has to be overhead to ARC. It is impossible for there not to be overhead over manually new and delete, or malloc and free. I'm not trying to say that it is as bad as Java's GC, but it can't possibly be free.

And wow, you are going to allow him to grovel? You are so magnanimous. I wish Slashdot had more users like you...

Re:You continue to claim you understand?

[Anonymous Coward]

Although it might be possible if async signals and threads are not used, that the ref count could be non atomic.

But it would still add refcount storage overhead to every refcounted object. Also, the cost is probably not primarily in the ALU operation to manipulate the counter, but in the increased cache line footprint it causes.

Ignorance on parade

[SuperKendall]

Well it seems you are the ignorant one, since you don't realize you can have navigation apps and several other categories of things backgrounded.

Also if you jailbreak you can choose to run any application in the background since the ability to do so is not an OS limitation.

Re:S3 Iphone 5

[aristotle-dude]

Galaxy S III > Iphone 5

http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/search?q=Samsung+Galaxy+S+III

Is that that best you can do? Possible faked or overclocked CPU benchmarks? How about comparing default spec versus default spec? Those are pretty irrelevant if they were either falsified or on a device with an overclock because a "phone" is supposed to be usable in your pocket and have battery life measured in hours around at least a work day long rather than minutes.

You misunderstood

[SuperKendall]

Note that since your SSH client is idling that CPU could have gone to your foreground task but instead the CPU is sitting idle.

I'm sorry, WHAT!?!?!?!

I understand your concern but you read that wrong.

I didn't mean to say that the SSH client was using the CPU at all. That's what I meant by "idling", that it was as you say in an interrupt state, consuming no CPU at all and just waiting to go active.

And that is the key. The SSH client is sitting there using no CPU. The foreground task is using only a single core, meanwhile it COULD be using the core that would have gone to SSH if active, but instead it just stays on the single core and the other one is doing nothing (since the backgrounded SSH task is doing nothing either). That's the waste of resources, that the foreground task could have used the resources the system has available but because most apps code to an older API they are not taking advantage of more advanced libraries that do so.

I'm sure further up in the thread you said you weren't a complete idiot...

Well I didn't see anywhere that you claimed to not need basic reading comprehension lessons, but honestly how do you misinterpret "idling" as a busy loop?

I mean I even said the CPU was sitting idle so obviously it could not have been executing anything, much less asm("nop")... that was pretty damn clear.

I'll let it pass though.

Re:You misunderstood

[jkflying]

When a process is waiting on an interrupt it doesn't consume a core. That's basic multiprocessing. The foreground task is free to use that second core, there is nothing stopping it, even if you have 10 background SSH's running, all waiting on interrupts. That's the beauty of interrupts - they don't consume CPU.

What stupid operating system would allocate an entire core to handle a single interrupt? Even if it was sitting in idle, it's still stupid, and guess what? It doesn't work that way.

Re:You misunderstood

[evilviper]

You seem to have reading comprehension issues. The discussion was about applications which are NOT multi-threaded... and therefore, some cores are sitting around idle in some cases.

And BTW, there is no "beauty" in interrupts. They cause context switches, which wastes a LOT of CPU cycles. They can be a real performance nightmare... hence: "polling" exists.

Re:You misunderstood

[Anonymous Coward]

You are simply incorrect. Rather than dig a deeper hole, either just admit it and move on, or if you're not a big enough man then just stop posting.

This is what you said:

"Note that since your SSH client is idling that CPU could have gone to your foreground task but instead the CPU is sitting idle."

and

"The SSH client is sitting there using no CPU. The foreground task is using only a single core, meanwhile it COULD be using the core that would have gone to SSH if active, but instead it just stays on the single core and the other one is doing nothing (since the backgrounded SSH task is doing nothing either)."

1. A blocked task is not "on a CPU" or "idling a CPU". Blocked tasks are a purely software construct and have no bearing on the hardware.

2. Blocked tasks (typically, and this is the case for Android) are not resident on scheduler runqueues or known by the scheduler at all, in fact. While blocked, they have exactly zero bearing on what runnable tasks can be run on the CPUs.

3. An idle SSH task absolutely does not prevent any CPUs from running any runnable tasks.

Re:You misunderstood

[Anonymous Coward]

He does not have reading comprehension issues. You do.

"Note that since your SSH client is idling that CPU could have gone to your foreground task but instead the CPU is sitting idle."

Implying that if the SSH client was not there, the CPU would go to the foreground task. Which is false.

Re:You misunderstood

[jkflying]

Note that since your SSH client is idling that CPU could have gone to your foreground task but instead the CPU is sitting idle.

This is what I had a problem with, it is blatantly incorrect. There is no way that the second core is idle because of an interrupt, which is preventing the foreground task from using the core. Moreover, nowhere does this imply "single-threaded app". If he meant that the foreground app was single-threaded, then how does

that CPU could have gone to your foreground task but instead the CPU is sitting idle

fit in? If he meant single-threaded, this sentence contradicts that, and as such it has nothing to do with my reading comprehension.

And interrupts... it depends how often you need them. If you have keyboard input, interrupts are great. If you have network packets arriving 10x a second, interrupts are great. If you want to check something at exactly 1000Hz, not so much, unless your interrupt is hardware driven and you're using a realtime OS or no OS at all; however, polling would give you pretty crap results then as well, besides the fact that it would munch your CPU and any concurrent use of the CPU would result in all sorts of inaccuracies. I use interrupts on embedded stuff all the time, and I can get much higher performance and accuracy via interrupts than I ever could with polling, especially once I start trying to use more than one input source at a time (ie. always). In a higher level system, interrupts can be replaced with event-driven design, they're essentially the same thing. Polling is horribly inefficient compared to interrupts/events, I'm not sure if you're being serious when you advocate it's use, but... yuck.

Re:You misunderstood

[evilviper]

There is no way that the second core is idle because of an interrupt

He never said anything about interrupts. You invented that, and put it into his mouth.

Both the quotes are very clear: IF we had multi-threaded applications, then the 4th core would be doing more than just very light number-crunching for the idle SSH session.

I happen to disagree with him, because SSH does a non-trivial amount of computation (keep-alives, rekey interval, etc). But at no time was there any confusion about what he was saying.

Polling is horribly inefficient compared to interrupts/events, I'm not sure if you're being serious when you advocate it's use, but... yuck.

Any good networking stack, such as Linux's, switches to polling when there's heavy traffic. If you don't realize it has some serious advantages, you're an idiot, who clearly doesn't work on "embedded stuff all the time" as you claim to.

Re:You misunderstood

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't have a reading comprehension problem, then you have a deeper problem understanding how computer systems work.

"Note that since your SSH client is idling that CPU could have gone to your foreground task but instead the CPU is sitting idle."

That statement is simply false, no matter how you try to read it. If your ssh client is"idling" (to use his terminology, by which he means "blocked"), then it has exactly zero bearing on what other tasks may be run on any of the CPUs in the system. End of story.

Re:You misunderstood

[evilviper]

Haha! You start by saying "it doesn't matter how you read it" and then go on to change what he said from an "idle" process, to a "blocked" one! And yet you don't see the blatant irony here?

In short, no! "Blocked" is obviously NOT what he meant at all. It's the words YOU are putting in his mouth which change the statement into something that is technically incorrect, and then you go yell at him for it! He was CLEARLY talking about the 4th core being underutilized because there are only 4, single-threaded processes running, so one core is only handling a largely idle SSH (ConnectBot) process.

And what's worse, YOU are the only people who didn't understand his statement. The context was very clear.

Re:You misunderstood

[jkflying]

He never said anything about interrupts. You invented that, and put it into his mouth.

What other mechanism do you propose with which to cause a thread to go idle? Sleeps in the thread? Well, are you aware of the mechanism used to make the sleep work? It uses... wait for it... timer based interrupts!

Interrupts are always better. I have experience on embedded ARM Cortex M3 based chips, Intel 8051,Freescale MC9S08GT16, plus misc Linux work. Polling is nice, easy and dirty, until you need to do anything else as well, or you want to limit your power usage. You don't always have one core available for each listener interface, and the context switching from threads and sleeps is just as bad as from interrupts. The difference is that threads and sleeps trigger a lot no matter how much you are using them, whereas interrupts only happen when you actually have data to process. One of the main issues with power usage on Linux is that it is polling all the time instead of using interrupts, waking the CPU up from the lower power states.

Inaccurate Info- S3 has same score as iPhone 5

[Anonymous Coward]

The scores:
Samsung Galaxy S3 - 1588 (I assume this is the average score)
Apple iPhone5 - 1601

% Difference - 0.008 or 0.8%

This is way to small and can be attributed to a number of things, in fact the page shows a huge variety of scores for the s3 (1550 to 2283 for 4 cores)
http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=samsung+galaxy+s+III

The rubber case is a bigger proportion.

[Anonymous Coward]

When your phone was 9.3mm thick, a 3.1mm thick rubber casing was one third the thickness again. Now you have a 7.6mm phone, you need a 3.7mm thick rubber casing (more torque strain if you drop the phone diagonally) and that's more than half the thickness. And then the headline "20% thinner" becomes "2%thinner"... So if the thinness was such a huge buying point, why do you make it thicker?

Get a phone that is 11mm thick but doesn't need a case because of its construction and you have a phone that is even thinner.

Trend Alert.

[thegarbz]

One other factor you forgot about is weight, the new phone is lighter - that does matter to people, I jog for instance and the iPhone 4 really produces a lot of pull in the pocket.

Pocket? Jog? Dude if you're trendy enough to have an iPhone, you're trendy enough to have an arm strap for it.

I joke but in all seriousness try it, get a $5 one off ebay. Having the phone rigid on your arm rather than bouncing in your pocket makes a world of difference when jogging.

Maybe OP was high while posting this?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't what the hell was OP was smoking, but these are the numbers:

Blowfish - iphone5(45.6 MB/sec), s3(93.4 MB/sec)
Text compress - iphone5(5.19 MB/sec), s3( 6.33 MB/sec). ...
Overall score - iphone5(1601), s3(1940)

So, OP, what have you been smoking? Sure, per core, iphon5 is faster. But I'm also sure there are many people in the world that can jump on one leg faster the Bolt. Still, Bolt is the fastest one.

Well that's NOTHING, my IBM Mainframe

[Anonymous Coward]

Gets 26 MIPS and only costs $75k!
http://www.tech-news.com/publib/pl2818.html

Obviously depends how you define "faster"

[fluffynuts]

The linked benchmark puts the iPhone 5 at a score of 1601. According to the original poster, this is " faster than the S3", yet searching for S3 results yields numbers around 1800 (some lower, a lot higher). So please could someone explain how the iPhone 5 is supposedly faster?

I call selection-bias BS

[daboochmeister]

"Every single person [you've] met has switch [back to] the iPhone"??

It's likely that has more to do with YOU than the people who are willing to discuss with you their choice in phone. Anyone who can make a statement like that just about HAS to be an iPhone devotee, and likely your access to the (far vaster) pool of people using Android -- many of them quite happy -- is limited by that selection bias.

fact check, honestly it doesn't take long

[Anonymous Coward]

Wish we could stop the insanity of not fact checking articles like this and arguing over false representations: http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/compare/1048144/1030202

Re:S3 Iphone 5

[hazydave]

Is that that best you can do? Possible faked or overclocked CPU benchmarks?

So.... dozens of Galaxy SIII benchmarks are presumed to have been faked and/or overclocked, even with those having performed some of those here, telling you "no, it's stock hardware". But a random unsourced one-of benchmark claiming to be an iPhone 5 is somehow gospel handed down from on high?

How about comparing default spec versus default spec? Those are pretty irrelevant if they were either falsified or on a device with an overclock because a "phone" is supposed to be usable in your pocket and have battery life measured in hours around at least a work day long rather than minutes.

It's similarly irrelevant to judge one unsupported posting.

On the other hand, if I were working at Apple and knew the iPhone 5 had crazy killer performance, I'd post a number higher than the current competition, and totally faked. To get them all going crazy, posting higher numbers, etc. Then, next week, when real iPhones 5 hit the market, we'd see all those much higher actual numbers from the iPhone, and victory would be mine. Mine, I tell you, mine!

Good thing the iPhone 5 isn't really that fast and I'm not working for Apple.

Why can't we accept truth?

[Anonymous Coward]

Has no one caught on yet that this story isn't factual?

ridiculous

[Anonymous Coward]

same reason why muslim think islam is the best one cause it came last. Think you android fan.