Galaxy S 4 Dominates In Early Benchmark Testing

redkemper writes with an excerpt from BGR.com of interest to anyone in the market for a new phone: "Samsung's Galaxy S 4 might not offer much in the way of an exciting new exterior design, but inside, it's a completely different story. The retooled internals on the U.S. version of the Galaxy S 4 were put to the test by benchmark specialists Primate Labs and the results are impressive, to say the least. The Galaxy S 4 scored a 3,163 on the standard Geekbench 2 speed test, just shy of twice the iPhone 5's score of 1,596. That score was also good enough to top the upcoming HTC One, the Nexus 4 and the previous-generation Galaxy S III."

Comments

funny thing is

[etash]

sgs 3 is better than iphone5 in that chart

Re:funny thing is

[niftydude]

sgs 3 is better than iphone5 in that chart

The international sgs 3 is better, the US sgs 3 isn't.

I was never sure why samsung put a slower soc in the phones that went to the US.

Re:funny thing is

[realityimpaired]

You're surprised that a quad core 1.4GHz processor outperforms a dual core 1.3GHz processor?

I'm more surprised that they were so close.... That's actually a vote in favour of the Apple offering, because Apple's slower processor with half the processing cores will use less battery....

(and before some twat accuses me of being an Apple fangirl, I'll point out that I'm quite happy with the 1GHz single core processor in my HTC One V, and have no intention of replacing it until either it up and dies or I have maxed out the credit available on the tab with my cell phone carrier and can get the new one for free... $300 max, currently $163, and increasing at $6/mo)

Re:funny thing is

[etash]

the answer is: the average end user doesn't know and doesn't care about gigahertz or core numbers. The end user understands that a phone which was introduced by apple 1 year later is worse than a phone introduced by samsung 1 year earlier.

Re:funny thing is

[GNious]

I'm more surprised that they were so close.... That's actually a vote in favour of the Apple offering, because Apple's slower processor with half the processing cores will use less battery....

Is not quite that simple - the quad-core 1.4GHz might be able to finish some intensive operations significantly faster than the dual-core 1.3GHz, allowing it to go back to a low-power state earlier and save more battery.

Re:funny thing is

[etash]

yeah, look at the difference, one sgs3 is 4 core, the other 2 core, one would assume the difference wouldn't be just 300 points ( ~1700 vs ~1400 ). multicores are overrated in smartphones ( cpu )

Re:funny thing is

[olsmeister]

The faster Samsung processor used in the international versions didn't work with the 4G LTE that we have in the States.

Re:funny thing is

[Nerdfest]

It's not really that straight forward. For many tasks, multi-cores are under-rated, it just depends on the task and how the software is written. Multi-cores are not particularly helpful with single threaded applications though, true.

Re:funny thing is

[alen]

so why are the "slower" intel CPU's of today so much faster than the 4GHz monsters they sold 10 years ago?

Re:funny thing is

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Qualcomm's "Snapdragon has good in-package support for cellular flavors in common use in the US. As can be seen in the wikipedia list, that puts them in quite a few US-release phones, even from people like Samsung who have their own SoCs.

Re:funny thing is

[etash]

that's what i actually meant, but was lazy enough to explain:

- it's not just good to have a multicore cpu, you also need the software to be multithreaded and...
- the task at hand that the softare solves has to be "parallelizable"

so given the fact that a) most smartphone software are not multithreaded and b) for most smartphones apps there is no point in having them multithreaded ( multithread calendar ? wtf ), it'd say they are overrated. Hell even in desktops, it's only the last couple years or so that some major applications were recoded to take advance of multicore systems

Re:funny thing is

[Anonymous Coward]

The only problem with the One V is usable memory. 333MB is not nearly enough.

Re:funny thing is

[Anonymous Coward]

"You're surprised that a quad core 1.4GHz processor outperforms a dual core 1.3GHz processor?"

I don't think his point was really anything to do with the hardware, but simply the fact that more expensive device that came out, what, 6 months later, performs less well. Most end users would probably be a bit suprised to find that out given that they'd expect the more expensive device to perform better, especially when it was so much newer.

" That's actually a vote in favour of the Apple offering, because Apple's slower processor with half the processing cores will use less battery...."

That's stupid, if the processor processes more slowly, then it's also draining battery for longer. Modern smartphone processors don't just sit continuously processing at maximum capacity draining the shit out of the battery, they ramp up only as and when they need to. Also, even if they did just sit draining the shit out of the battery at maximum processing capacity then why the assumption that the Samsung doesn't just have a higher capacity battery to compensate leaving you with no impact in practice?

If you really believe anything you said then I have an old 90s Nokia 3330 I'd like to sell you for £600. It's way slower than any of these and so the battery does in fact last far longer, which obviously is a vote in favour of the device. You may not be an Apple fangirl, but you're obviously comfortable being a bit dishonest with the truth when it comes to Samsung, so fangirl or not, you're still a twat.

Re:funny thing is

[LordLimecat]

because Apple's slower processor with half the processing cores will use less battery....

Thats not a for sure unless its been shown. I thought everyone would know by now that you cant just compare mhz to mhz across CPU families?

Quick, Ivy Bridge 3.4 GHz vs AMD 3.1GHz-- who will use less power? Pentium 4 2.8 vs Piledriver 2.4GHz-- which is faster?

Re:funny thing is

[SpaceMonkies]

The CPU can only have 4 active cores at a time. There are 4 high-power and 4 low-power cores, with the idea that you can use the slower cores for most tasks and save battery, but have power when you need it.

Re:funny thing is

[realityimpaired]

Is not quite that simple - the quad-core 1.4GHz might be able to finish some intensive operations significantly faster than the dual-core 1.3GHz, allowing it to go back to a low-power state earlier and save more battery.

In theory, yes. In practice, if that were going to be a significant factor, then wouldn't the benchmark show a significantly higher score than the 1.4GHz quad? The two were close enough to make me wonder, is all.

Re:funny thing is

[ahabswhale]

Maybe that's true, in theory. But in my experience with both android and iOS is that iOS ALWAYS has more battery life that android. It's more noticeable the larger the device. My iPad outlasts my Nexus 7 by such a large margin that it's a joke. My Nexus 7 spends more time charging than it does being used (and that's not an exaggeration).

Apple just does battery life better. I've never seen a case where any android device beats it unless you get into outliers like the Motorola Maxx phones which have crazy huge batteries in them.

Re:funny thing is

[Anonymous Coward]

Real funny thing is WHY would someone want to run a benchmark in a phone?

Re:funny thing is

[noh8rz10]

this just in: new smart phone faster than smart phones released 6mo/1yr ago. Film at 11.

Re:funny thing is

[noh8rz10]

but simply the fact that more expensive device that came out, what, 6 months later, performs less well. Most end users would probably be a bit suprised to find that out given that they'd expect the more expensive device to perform better, especially when it was so much newer.

I'm so over this meme. all new top-shelf cell phones cost the same. $199 with contract. All cheap bargain bin cell phones cost the same. there is no such thing as "iphone more expensive than galaxy s"

You may not be an Apple fangirl, but you're obviously comfortable being a bit dishonest with the truth when it comes to Samsung, so fangirl or not, you're still a twat.

thank you, what was missing from this conversation was a bit of misogyny.

Re:funny thing is

[rjr162]

Faster in some senses.. the dual core did better in some areas than the quad-core (due to the faster clock speed even if it isn't a massive clock-speed jump). I have a Quad-Core international (since my wireless carrier doesn't have LTE and is going HSPA+ instead) vs some of the people I know who have the dual-core US one.. (one of which said they thought the screen on my international seemed clearer than their US one although I think that was in their head)

Re:funny thing is

[mhsobhani]

You're surprised that a quad core 1.4GHz processor outperforms a dual core 1.3GHz processor?

I'm more surprised that they were so close....

Quad what core? ARM CORTEX-A9
Dual what core? ARM CORTEX-A15
Does clock speed matter? Not as much as architecture when they are clocked at nearly the same speed.

Re:funny thing is

[blakelarson]

Can that be attributed to screen size alone? Independent of mobile OS?

Re:funny thing is

[aztracker1]

Most well-written software should be threaded and evented... the front end should run in a separate thread from backend processing, with updates coming from state snapshots... Not a huge number of threads, but even a few can breakup workflow and logic so you can scale. The biggest issues is a lot of less-skilled developers make a *LOT* of mistakes in dealing with multiple threads, where you are best off really understanding race conditions, and/or keeping common points immutable with atomic changes, and making a local reference to the existing immutable state before trying to read against it.

Re:funny thing is

[aztracker1]

I would posit that it depends on the applications running... iOS is much more integrated than Android... by the same token, Windows Phone 7 had really good battery life, and reasonable performance on much lesser CPUs, but that's because most applications were hibernated before switching tasks... Of course complaints were pretty significant.

Also, many android apps include spyware services that run in the background (which is why I try to pay a lot of attention to them), why does a flashlight app need full access to my SD storage? iOS has much better curation of their app store. I think that analysis of apps will improve for both platforms, but it will take time. I also think that hybridizing the CPUs into fast/slow modes will continue to improve. Mfg process shrinking is going to continue to slow and get more creative in how to improve performance.

I think that 2000-3000mA micro-usb chargers will become much more common place, so charging mid-day will be less of an issue... just got one for my car (was using a dual port 1000mA charger, swapped for a dual-port 3000mA charger. So I don't think that battery life (as long as you get 6+ hours out of a heavily used device) is as big an issue. I also have a Qi (chi) charger on my desk at work, which works really well if your phone supports it. Though even without charging, I usually get almost two days of use from my phone on a charge (Nexus 4, I don't interact with it much).

Re:funny thing is

[Anonymous Coward]

Better instructions. Each generation Intel looks at what the biggest bottlenecks are in processing (usuall from an enterprise point of view, not home users,) and create a new hardware instruction to speed it up. The last thing that was VERY evident was AES hardware accelleration. the GHZ rating is just how many clock cycles there are per second. AES rounds may have taken 20-30 cycles per word in previous generations, and the AES instructions reduced that to less than 10 (I don't know exact numbers, I'm ballparking it here.)

The clock rate is misleading here because you can do 2-3 time more per billion cycles. Even with 1/4 less cycles, you're still getting a lot more work done. That and having 1 core dedicated to your single threaded application will eliminate context switches because that can all happen on your other core(s) for your lower demand stuff (your OS background tasks and UI.)

Re:funny thing is

[metrix007]

It's not a meme that phones are more expensive. A lot of people opt for prepaid options so as not to be screwed over, in which case the price of the phone when buying outright is relevant. Also, it's a stretch to say using fangirl and twat as insults in misogyny.

Re:funny thing is

[cristiroma]

Huh!? Your first assumption is incorrect!
Listening to music while system is checking the email in background and you browse a site IS taking advantage of multicore systems on desktop OR a phone, as long as the OS scheduler is multi-core aware. Phones are multicore to accomplish such parallel tasks.
Applications don't need to be aware of multicore. OS scheduler will take care of that.

Re:funny thing is

[noh8rz10]

when a slashdot poster identifies herself as female, you call her a twat. that's misogynistic - tearing down the GP because she's female. same way if a slashdot poster identified himself as black, and you said "you're a n*" or if a poster identified himself as gay you say "you're a f*"

so, yes, it's misogynistic, racist, etc.

Re:funny thing is

[Anonymous Coward]

Argh! Where are my mod points? :/

Re:funny thing is

[noh8rz10]

wait a minute, never mind, the GP post throws around twats first, so fuck it, whatever. I still stand behind the price thing. also, so what one phone has more hertz than the other? show me what you can do with it, and how you can do it faster on one phone than the other. websurfing speed? angry birds? dropped calls? what else matters?

Re:funny thing is

[Anonymous Coward]

While I'm at work, I'm at my desk and solved my charging issue by simply having a micro-usb cable plugged in for chargine anything I have - everything uses the micro-usb standard so it's not a problem. Hell a couple of hours charging gives me enough power to handle the trip home w/o running out of power and it's not inconvenient to do so.

Re:funny thing is

[ahabswhale]

Fair question. I don't think so though because even before Android got enormous, they always seemed to lack battery.

Re:funny thing is

[Andy Dodd]

They are very different cores.

The US SGS3 variants have a dual Qualcomm Krait. The international SGS3 variant is quad Cortex-A9.

Krait is capable of significantly higher performance at a given clock speed than Cortex-A9 - it's capable of close to the speeds of a Cortex-A15 core at a given clock speed.

Re:funny thing is

[gl4ss]

sgs 3 is better than iphone5 in that chart

The international sgs 3 is better, the US sgs 3 isn't.
I was never sure why samsung put a slower soc in the phones that went to the US.

because you're(assuming) stupid enough to buy the shit US operators sell you on partial payment plans on their quirky networks they like to choose quirky tech for so that it's harder for you to switch operators and harder to buy phones from open market.

Re:funny thing is

[Jake S Griffin]

Isn't that kind of like saying driving a car slowly uses more gas because it takes longer to arrive at your destination?

Re:funny thing is

[Anonymous Coward]

To use a car analogy, isn't that like saying you are low on gas, so you better speed up so that you can get to the next gas station faster before you run out?

Re:funny thing is

[timeOday]

They're not. In single-thread performance, the very fastest CPU (Xeon E3 1290 v2) at 3.7 GHz (2178 Passmark) is only 2.5x the speed of the Pentium 4 3.8 GHz (866 PassMark) from almost 10 years ago! Going down another factor of 2.5x puts you at the P4 1.5 GHz (344 Passmark), which was released only 4 years before that, in 2000.

Put another way, if you go back 10 years from the P4 3.8GHz in 2004, you are at the Pentium 75 in 1994. I don't even know where to find a single benchmark to compare the two! The performance difference would be more like 20x, not 2.5x. Intel went from the P75 to the P200 in 20 months, and that was a bigger increase in single-core performance than we've seen in the last decade.

Increases in IPC are very small compared to what we enjoyed as clock speed ramped up.

Re:funny thing is

[RocketRabbit]

It's not misogyny to call a woman a twat because of her beliefs. It would be misogyny to call a woman a twat because she is a woman. This is an important distinction and if you don't want to come off as a vaporish twat who cried wolf you should remember it.

Re:funny thing is

[noh8rz10]

hey Michael Scott: "You don't call retarded people retards, it's bad taste. You call your friends retards when they're acting retarded". I can't help you if you don't understand basic social concepts.

Re:funny thing is

[RocketRabbit]

Who is Michael Scott? Anyway I don't think we should let what you refer to as "basic social concepts" redefine language to suit our mood. Misogyny has a perfectly useful definition already, you can't just cry foul misogyny any time you happen to feel offended. There's too much of this going around already. People love to cry sexism, antisemitism, racism, ability-ism, classism, and so forth not because it happens to be true, but because it is an effective way to demonize somebody they don't like.

Stop it. You just come off like a twat when you engage in this kind of misuse of language. I suppose it was too much to ask that you acknowledge your error and correct it though.

Re:funny thing is

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably not...the iPhone has always been significantly better when it comes to battery life, even before Android vendors started selling tablet phones. And an LTE iPad Mini is also significantly better than Android phones and tablets of similar size.

I don't think it's a coincidence. Time and time again, you see Apple making design decisions with battery life, power consumption and recharging in mind. They significantly inconvenienced users by introducing the lightning connector, but damn if it doesn't charge much faster than the old 30-pin did and even faster than the micro-USB connectors that Android devices use. They don't really allow background processes the way that Android does. They don't have removable batteries. All these are design tradeoffs made with battery life and charging in mind. It shouldn't be a surprise that iOS outpaces Android in this metric when the software and hardware are designed to do this well.

Re:funny thing is

[noh8rz10]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sjuBF0-sRE. who is misusing language? do you go around calling women twats? is your mom a twat? is your wife a twat? you see how casual calling women twats may discourage women from posting to slashdot? This is dumb.

Re:funny thing is

[RocketRabbit]

Calling a person a twat is an effective insult. It's not as if I would go around using the words woman and twat interchangeably. One is a purely descriptive, non-offensive word. The other is deliberately used in an insulting manner.

Look at what I said to you before - "You just come off like a twat when you engage in this kind of misuse of language." Now it wouldn't make much sense to me to merely replace twat with woman in that sentence. It would remove the deliberately insulting feel, invalidating the whole point of the sentence!

I think you are deliberately misunderstanding my intentions here. My intention WAS to be insulting, precisely by the use of the word twat. I don't refer to women as twats often, and when I do it is deliberate, and it should be especially insulting. There was nothing casual about it.

I'm sure there are men who go around using the word twat in place of woman on a casual basis, and I agree that is misogynistic. Simply calling you a twat for deliberately misusing the language, and then going further by deliberately misunderstanding my point is not misogyny, though - it is merely an insult.

Re:funny thing is

[shutdown -p now]

This would be because Apple does not permit as many things to run in the background as Android does. But, consequently, it limits the functionality of apps developed for iOS.

Re:funny thing is

[noh8rz10]

perhaps this is a cultural thing? are you british or something? In US you never hear twat, and the closest synonym is c*nt, which is deeply offensive.

Re:funny thing is

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd also say that ATM I TRULY doubt that Android is really completely multi-thread ready, That said the octa-core exynos in the int'l variant is based on the -a15 arch, while the quad core Qualcomm is based off -a9 arch. -a15 does offer perf improvements as given by ARM(which Samsung DOES use), while Qualcomm DOES design inhouse ARM compatible CPU blocks which are used in their SoCs and generally have more advanced design and instruction execution efficiency "features".

i.e. the exynos based variant SHOULD score even higher but perhaps not as much as some might expect with 8 cores/latest ARM arch variant v. Qualcomm design quad core.

(AFAICT EVERY single ARM licensee other than Qualcomm just plops the CPU design licensed from ARM straight into their SoCs, while Qualcomm actually has and uses their staff to design a compatible design with more ... "recent" arch features beyond what the arch target model has. Plus the Adreno is no slouch while I'm a bit skeptical of Mali... That particular GPU design has been a problem for a fair number of more-than-basic-opengles-using apps...)

Re:funny thing is

[ahabswhale]

I don't run anything in the background of my android devices other than email fetching. So, that doesn't fly.

Re:funny thing is

[RocketRabbit]

Yes, cunt, twat, they are both essentially used in the same way - as a deliberate insult. By the way I am in the USA.

My point though, is that it isn't misogynistic to insult a woman using one of these powerful words, unless the motivation for it is an actual hatred or resentment of women in general. For example, if I said, "but you couldn't understand that because you're just a dumb cunt" it would be misogynistic, however, if I said "you're being a cunt because you misused a word" it isn't misogynistic.

I hope this is helpful, it should allow you to both insult people, and take insults, without getting indignant about possible misogyny.

Re:funny thing is

[kaatochacha]

People need to take offense less. That way, when something TRULY offensive comes along, shouting "I'm offended!" doesn't sound so meaningless.

Re:funny thing is

[cheater512]

Erm the GP's point was older phone is faster than the new 'more fashionable' phone.

Re:funny thing is

[metrix007]

It's my experience that the general user interface is significantly more responsive, so it makes for a much nicer user experience. I've noticed this on the Galaxy Nexus compared against the Nexus 4. I own the former, and noticed a much more fluid experience on the latter. Both had the same versions of Android. Not to mention gpu intensive games such as racing games can get a huge boost in looking pretty.

Re:funny thing is

[niftydude]

because you're(assuming) stupid enough to buy the shit US operators sell you on partial payment plans on their quirky networks they like to choose quirky tech for so that it's harder for you to switch operators and harder to buy phones from open market.

Big assumption! it's been over 10 years since I last worked/lived in the US. I don't have the US sgs 3. and I always buy my phones unlocked and outright, not from carriers.

You are right on about the stuff you said about the stuff US telcos peddle though.

Re:funny thing is

[node 3]

Except it's not worse, it's just slower (except in the US) in one benchmark.

But you are right that most people don't care about that. They care about the experience in using it, which explains why the iPhone 5 outsells the Galaxy S3. It explains why the iPhone 4S outsells the Galaxy S3. It also explains why the iPhone 4 outsells the Galaxy S3.

Re:funny thing is

[samoanbiscuit]

Here's what your logic is missing shitface: you're using a word for female genitalia as an insult. When you do this, you're basically saying that being female, or possessing a vagina, is an insulting state of existence. Gendered slurs, they don't say good things about the people that use them.

Re:funny thing is

[trentfoley]

Put simply, multi-processing is not multi-threading

Re:funny thing is

[Anonymous Coward]

the octa-core exynos in the int'l variant is based on the -a15 arch

It's actually quad A15 plus quad A7. When the system is mostly idle, the A7 cores are active. As load passes a predetermined threshold, all threads are migrated to the A15 cores.

A15 is very power-hungry by mobile standards. Supposedly one of ARM's design targets for it was microservers; it's part of ARM's longterm plan to expand out of the low-power niche. So, it has a different power/performance curve than previous Cortex series cores, and it's pretty deficient when it comes to ultra-low-power operating modes modes.

But ARM still needed to sell A15 into mobile devices which require such modes. They came up with the idea of pairing A15 cores with A7 cores. (The marketing name for this is big.LITTLE.) Cortex-A7 is a 100% software-compatible core which is tiny, cool, and slow compared to A15. Because it's so tiny, it isn't prohibitively expensive (in die area, the coin of the realm) to chuck in some A7s. And whichever type of core is currently inactive gets power gated (turned off), so it consumes no additional power.

Exynos Octa is a quadcore big.LITTLE design, and as such, it actually behaves like a quad A15 with a wider dynamic range of performance/power tradeoffs. Peak performance and power are identical to a plain A15 quad, minimum performance and power are much better. Samsung is being a bit disingenuous marketing this as an "octal core".

That said, I should note that technically you can turn on both core types at once. It's just that in practice, you don't want to, and you shouldn't expect to see many big.LITTLE systems doing so. Tablets, maybe, but phones, almost certainly never. The A7 is more efficient at low voltages and clock speeds, but there's a crossover point where the A15 becomes more efficient. There's only one voltage plane shared by both, so when the A15s are operating in their efficient region, the A7s wouldn't be, and vice versa. Also, A7s are slow enough that the performance boost from turning everything on wouldn't be as exciting as you'd hope. So it just doesn't make a lot of sense unless you've got power to burn.

while the quad core Qualcomm is based off -a9 arch.

As far as I know Qualcomm doesn't make any Cortex-A9 products. Their main use of off-the-shelf ARM cores seems to be in low end SoCs which use Cortex-A5 or A7. All their high performance products use their own homegrown core designs.

i.e. the exynos based variant SHOULD score even higher but perhaps not as much as some might expect with 8 cores/latest ARM arch variant v. Qualcomm design quad core.

Besides what I wrote above, in a phone, even when the A15 cores are running, they'll often have to be throttled back. At max performance settings they can easily burn through a cellphone-sized battery in no time at all. (And make the phone very toasty in the process.) Phones with A15s are going to have firmware coded to only permit max A15 performance in short bursts.

(In fact, this was already true of virtually every ARM smartphone. Just not to the same extent.)

(AFAICT EVERY single ARM licensee other than Qualcomm just plops the CPU design licensed from ARM straight into their SoCs, while Qualcomm actually has and uses their staff to design a compatible design with more ... "recent" arch features beyond what the arch target model has.

Apple's A6/A6X SoC (used in iPhone 5 and 4th-gen iPads) has a full-custom ARM CPU design which Apple did in-house. Currently the only known name for it is "Swift", revealed by Apple's open source compiler, LLVM.

Much like Qualcomm, Apple appears to have decided to build their own core to get something highly tuned for what they want to do with it. ARM wants to maximize revenue per core design, so it's natural that their designs aren't as narrowly focused as an Apple (or even a Samsung) might prefer. Once

Re:funny thing is

[Anonymous Coward]

Listening to music while system is checking the email in background and you browse a site IS taking advantage of multicore systems on desktop OR a phone, as long as the OS scheduler is multi-core aware. Phones are multicore to accomplish such parallel tasks.

How many cores do you suppose you actually need to listen to music and check email while running a browser?

I'll give you a hint: two is about the right answer. Music playback should be a very lightweight task, particularly with hardware decoders. Same goes for checking mail; even with servers that require polling, you're not going to poll more than once a minute (and more likely once every 5 or 10). And the foreground task in your example isn't even all that CPU intensive. Well-optimized mobile browsers use CPU time in a burst when loading and rendering a page, but are mostly idle while you read and scroll through it, particularly on mobile-optimized websites that minimize animations.

Low average CPU utilization is the only way a phone can be rated for significant battery life doing any of these tasks in isolation, much less together. Just taking a stab in the dark, but I'd bet that cellphone system architects assume less than 10% average CPU load even while you're actively using the phone, with the lone exception being games (which notoriously chew up batteries and spit them out). Contention for CPU time is not that big a problem in the use case you've laid out. It's kinda nice to have two CPUs so that one's always available for the interactive foreground task, but it's not essential to have more.

And that is the point etash was making. He's not saying that it's impossible to use multicore in a phone, he's saying that high core counts don't make much sense in phones. There are a handful of exceptions to the rule, but for the purposes most people use smartphones for, 2 cores is plenty.

Re:funny thing is

[noh8rz10]

higher-level question: what's the purpose of your words? what meaning are you trying to convey? when you call someone a twat on slashdot, your intended meaning is for it to be a generic put-down, but your meta-meaning is that you want slashdot to be men only, and women better go elsewhere. same when you call people faggy. "I mean faggy to be a generic insult! (btw real fags gtfo we don't want you here.)"

just because you pretend to be ignorant of the power of language doesn't make it less powerful. I would also venture to guess you are not so much ignorant as willfully obtuse.

final thought: let's say you're writing a post, and you have chosen to denigrate someone using a slur rather than make an insightful point. So you reach to your quiver of slurs and pull one out. Would you choose a slur like asshole or wanker that holds no greater meaning, or do you choose a word that is particularly hurtful to a particular community. And why did you choose what you chose?

Ultimately, in our lives, we have the opportunity to hurt people or not hurt people by the slightest of actions (such as which slur we choose). Since the difference between actions is so slight, why not choose the one that causes less pain? No skin off your nose. This sounds like a nice way to live.

Re:funny thing is

[noh8rz10]

it's not about being offended. All I'm saying, let's try to act in a way that makes slashdot a place where the greatest number of people feel welcome to participate, thus creating a vibrant community. If slashdot is a vibrant community, then the discussions will be better and there will be better articles and it all gets better. Isn't that what you want, too?

Re:funny thing is

[Anonymous Coward]

My point though, is that it isn't misogynistic to insult a woman using one of these powerful words, unless the motivation for it is an actual hatred or resentment of women in general.

How could these words be powerful insults if they didn't carry deeply misogynistic meanings?

For example, if I said, "but you couldn't understand that because you're just a dumb cunt" it would be misogynistic, however, if I said "you're being a cunt because you misused a word" it isn't misogynistic.

Bullshit. In what sense is it not misognyistic to imply that misusing words is a characteristic of people with cunts? That it is therefore a negative thing to have a cunt, that some of that badness should be associated with the person you're calling a cunt, even if they don't have one? "Dumb cunt" is merely more explicit, not a fundamentally different thing.

You're trying to split hairs so you don't have to change. You're offended by the possibility that someone might think of you as misogynist, but you want to continue enjoying the privilege of throwing around misogynistic insults without any negative consequences.

Wake up. Whether you want to admit it or not, you're using misogynistic insults. You've grown up in a male-dominated society, you've internalized a lot of misogynistic ideas and phrases. Whenever someone challenges the ones you haven't figured out for yourself, your self-image as a good person is threatened. And, as is common in H.sap, rather using such an event as an opportunity for reflection and re-evaluation, you get defensive. Wounded pride causes you to project your failings back onto the challenger.

It's not that others are over-sensitive for noticing your misogyny. It's that you're insensitive.

Also note that someone calling you out on this type of casual, unthinking misogyny does not mean they think you're a raving woman-hater.

I hope this is helpful, it should allow you to both insult people, and take insults, without getting indignant about possible misogyny.

There is no "possible" about it. It's there. And those of us who have woken up are going to continue to get indignant about it whether you like it or not. That's the only way to get the culture to change.

Re:funny thing is

[RocketRabbit]

Yes, a powerful insult like cunt is a useful word to use as an insult. This doesn't mean that the user hates womankind, just that they are expressing disdain for a certain woman.

Do you get all huffy when somebody calls a guy a dick?

Re:funny thing is

[RocketRabbit]

I think you have an overly broad definition of misogyny. By calling an insult "unthinking" you are ignoring my point, that I choose the word deliberately to convey a powerful insult. Misogyny is a revilement of women, and having a specific beef with one woman, and using a powerful and deeply offensive insult does not make one a misogynist.

Again, this is a big problem in our society. Calling somebody sexist, or antisemitic, or racist, or whatnot has lost meaning because people are defining the terms in an overly-broad fashion. You may feel that the use of a certain insult makes a person into one of these things I listed above, but this doesn't make it so. Insults, when well-chosen, should be deeply offensive and specific insults for different races, genders, etc. are very useful verbal weapons.

I'm not offended personally that people have mistaken these terms for something else, in a personal way. It's more of a general disdain for people who not only dilute the language by altering the meaning of words, and a specific disdain for individuals who would attempt to make the user of a particular insult into some kind of monster by insinuating things that just aren't so. By suggesting that I (or somebody else) has been sexist by using a term specifically designed to be offensive to a particular class of person (race, gender, etc) by ACCIDENT is offensive to me because I have chosen these words deliberately. There are only a few swear or offensive words left in our language that have the power to deeply offend, and the use of these, when deliberate, can be quite effective. Insensitivity or sexism or whatnot has nothing to do with it - in fact it's quite the opposite! Realizing that people are sensitive to the use of these words is what makes them powerful, and using them sensitively is a skill and a privilege.

Re:funny thing is

[AmiMoJo]

Android has a handy feature that tells you which apps are using the most energy. Having background apps is a huge benefit as it allows background syncing and better push notifications.

You can of course disable background sync, it's up to you if you want the battery life or convince. Or just get a good phone/external battery and have both.

Re:funny thing is

[RocketRabbit]

By attempting to read a broad sexist agenda from the use of an offensive term is a bit paranoid. I'm happy to have anybody on slashdot who wants to be here. As the old saying goes, nobody knows you're a dog on the internet! Faggot or fag is an interesting case study, as historically it has meant a bundle of sticks, an old woman, and a gay man. Now it's like "nigga" or "nigger" wherein one group has started using what is an offensive term when used by an outsider from the group, as a vernacular to refer to themselves. This is ironic to me, but I can see the logic in it.

You're deliberately misunderstanding me when you accuse me of pretending to be ignorant of the power of language. I explained quite clearly, that the deliberate choice of these offensive words makes an insult more effective precisely because I am aware of the impact of such a word. I'm not being obtuse, I'm being plain-spoken which I believe is a virtue that has been left largely by the wayside.

I typically reserve insults for people who have decided to use them first. In such a case, I believe that it behooves me to up the ante and really try to be insulting. Taking advantage of a certain person's sensitivity to certain terms allows a more powerful and effective insult, whether the word has racial or sexist or etc. overtones that pertain to their particular individuality. It doesn't designate a hatred for others who happen to fall into the same category or categories, it is simply a sharper verbal weapon. The skill of insulting has taken a rather disappointing turn, both because of the dilution of the power of certain words, and because certain words are thought to be verboten lest one be labeled insensitive or politically incorrect. That saddens me, and this is why I endeavor to use the most offensive terms possible when crafting a deliberate insult. We should all take part in a rejuvenation of our language, instead of letting it become duller over time. Specific, targeted insult is a great tradition, and can be quite fun as well!

As I said before I have tried as plainly as possible to explain why I enjoy using certain deeply offensive words - it is because they have power and make for a better insult. If you start with the premise that insults are designed to cause pain, why not choose the most painful ones? After all, if the intention isn't to cause pain, then why bother with insults in the first place?

I enjoy talking about subjects like this one, because there is so much wishy-washy political correctness in our daily lives. I hope I have been able to explain to you, with clarity, my opinion on insults. You may not agree but at least you should take away from this that the use of them in special circumstances doesn't automatically make one bigoted - it's only when one uses then to express disdain for the entire group that takes offense at a term that bigotry enters the picture. At least, that's how I see it.

Re:funny thing is

[RocketRabbit]

An insult should be offensive, this is my whole point. I'm disappointed when people take offense less easily, because it narrows the choice of insulting words, which after all are designed to be insulting!

Re:funny thing is

[RocketRabbit]

I don't see anything particularly unwelcoming about Slashdot to women, simply because one cockbag calls a woman a cunt. An insult should be offensive. I would argue that, contrary to your view, I feel that trading insults makes Slashdot a more vibrant community. The hilarious insults embedded in the commentary here is one thing that keeps me coming back. After all, an insult should be finely crafted to deliver the biggest impact - anything less is mere laziness.

Re:funny thing is

[noh8rz10]

thank you for your response, because it really clarifies the issue into a single question. given the option to hurt people more or hurt people less or not try to hurt them at all, why do you put so much energy in trying to find words that will cause the most hurt? apart from the drain on your own life, wouldn't you want to live in a world where people tried to avoid inflicting maximal wounds on each other? And wouldn't you want to be part of the change to make the world better?

I used to think like you, "grr nobody can tell me what to do or what to think, I'll keep doing what I want, fuck them!" but when I stopped to think about it I realized there was an easier and better way to be.

Re:funny thing is

[noh8rz10]

I'm glad you strain so many grey cells to come up with real zingers like "twat." anything less would be laziness! Keep up the good work, Jerry Seinfeld!

Re:funny thing is

[RocketRabbit]

You've deliberately missed another one of the points I thought I made clear. We're fast running out of deeply offensive words because of the dilution of the impact of them. Twat or cunt are words that retain a certain amount of power here. It'd be nice if noodlebrain or asshole were still potent terms, but alas they are hardly offensive any more.

It's kind of sad that just because I didn't become putty in your hands, and refused to acknowledge the validity of some of your points, that you have chosen to take this conversation into a less thoughtful place. Or, more succinctly, don't act like a cunt just because I blew sand up your vagina.

Re:funny thing is

[samoanbiscuit]

This doesn't mean that the user hates womankind, just that they are expressing disdain for a certain woman.

Listen up Captain Clueless, when someone uses a word for a woman's genitalia to insult a certain woman, they're definitely not doing it because they think woman as a group are wonderful people. It's like when straight people say "I don't care if you're gay, just don't be a faggot!", or when white people say "I don't care that you're black, just don't be a nigger.". Whatever their justifications, it's obvious that this person is not your friend, they imagine themselves above you, able to judge you as a representative of your group, and will move against you or hurt you if they think they can get away with it. A woman/gay person/black person that agrees with this line of thought ("don't be a "), has internalized a lot of self-hatred.

Do you get all huffy when somebody calls a guy a dick?

Yes I do. Like I said, using gendered insults says a lot more about the person using them than the person being insulted.

Re:funny thing is

[noh8rz10]

and you missed a point about language and communication. A "good insult" is not a slur. that is the laziest way, like maturbating. so for you to throw around twat and cunt, then complain when they don't have the intended effect, is like verbally masturbating and getting upset when the target of your insults doesn't get off too. "was it good for you?" umm, no.

Re:funny thing is

[RocketRabbit]

I'm not saying that all insults have to be creative, just that they should have an impact and cause shock or offense. Anyway a slur is a form of insult, and can be particularly effective.

Re:funny thing is

[cristiroma]

Really? My desktop is currently running two virtual machines, one with Oracle, the other with Windows, has 16GB or RAM (not 256K) and i7 with quad-core hyperthreading. I have my email started, my development environment and also I have servers started inside console. All this, while I run hundreds of unit tests.
How many core do you think it would be enough?
Maybe I'm not average user, but average user HAS THE CHOICE to buy a Pentium 4 with 2GB, instead of a Xeon for his PC, and same thing for the phone. I'm convinced that over 90% of smart phone users are buying to brag with it instead of exploiting its features (at least from what I observed here).
But there are some which use GPS to track their runnign etc.

Re:funny thing is

[Anonymous Coward]

What "States"? I know a lot of States where the thing works. But I'm sorry for your States, cause "long term evolution" seems like it's going to take a loooong time.

Re:funny thing is

[Entropius]

Actually, that's because the Android market is so fragmented. There are no iOS phones other than iPhones. There are very, very many Android devices, and the S3 has a fraction of the Android market.

Re:funny thing is

[Anonymous Coward]

We're talking about phones. Not your desktop. Stop bragging about how much shit you run on your i7. Besides being boring, it's totally irrelevant to phones. And if you somehow managed to make yourself think anybody was saying lots of cores are universally useless, stop that shit and work on your reading comprehension.

What you do not seem to grasp is that even low core count smartphones are deliberately designed with more CPU power than they can use for extended periods of time. Due to size restrictions, these phones have batteries in the range of 5 to 10 watt-hours. 5 Wh means the battery can supply 5 watts for 1 hour, or 0.5 watts for 10 hours. If you are designing a cellphone and you want it to last a day while being used reasonably often, you need to keep average power consumption below 1 watt. The screen, radios, etc. need some of that power, so the CPU might have to be on a 0.5W diet. Or less.

Your i7 uses more than that when it's idling. And it uses about 150x as much under full load.

And: if you designed a CPU which used 0.5W with all cores fully loaded, so it could run at 100% utilization for many hours, it'd be too slow to run things like modern web browsers.

So they design CPUs which are much faster, ones which can consume multiple watts, and plan on using that performance only in short bursts to conserve power. Render the web page, then go mostly-idle while the user reads and scrolls through it. Every minute or two, wake up for a fraction of a millisecond to fire off a packet to the mail server, get woken up again when it responds. Average utilization (and therefore average power) is low enough for good battery life, the phone's fast enough to render web pages quickly, everyone's happy.

Your GPS logging example? The cores which are there are already idle most of the time. A jogger is probably going to be listening to music and running the GPS logger. Music takes 5% of one core, or less. The logger had better not use much either. You could run it without even needing a second core.

Re:funny thing is

[Anonymous Coward]

that's what I said to your mom last night while i fucked her mouth with my cock. and she replied "mhmhmmhmh"

Re:funny thing is

[RocketRabbit]

It's ironic to hear about vibrant communities from a person who is riding multiple troll accounts. This is pretty unwholesome behavior. Are you a paid troll or are you just bored?

Re:funny thing is

[RocketRabbit]

Using gendered or racist insults can be hilarious. The fact that they still retain their potency and cause deep offense makes them even more enjoyable. Insults should be potent and the thin skin of people these days, with regards to certain words, makes gendered, racist, etc. insults very useful.

Re:funny thing is

[noh8rz10]

who pays trolls? that's the dumbest shit i've heard.

Re:funny thing is

[samoanbiscuit]

Yes, keep thinking it's because people have thin skin, and not that they're being insulted based on their group all their lives, while you are not.

Re:funny thing is

[RocketRabbit]

You have no idea if that's true or not. On the Internet we are all black, wheelchair bound lesbians with a lazy eye.

But not the Z10?

[blither]

No mention of BlackBerry's new phone?
Would be interesting to see that comparison.

Re:But not the Z10?

[Junta]

You mean like they did, right in the article? It comes up just shy of iPhone 5.

Re:But not the Z10?

[Anonymous Coward]

Excellent job looking at the chart in TFA.

Re:But not the Z10?

[Mattcelt]

This raises an interesting question: is there a suitable replacement for blackberry for the enterprise yet? None of the phones systems/solution I've seen have anything resembling the BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server) and encryption for email, etc. What will be the successor to BB in the enterprise?

Re:But not the Z10?

[David_Hart]

Ummm... Blackberry....

Seriously, all of the other vendors, with perhaps the exception of Microsoft, have been focused on home users, not the enterprise. So, I guess the answer should be Microsoft, but Blackberry still has the better enterprise solution.

Re:But not the Z10?

[alen]

umm samsung and apple

BB might own the super secret enterprise market, but most of it is gone. apple and samsung are more than good enough for most corporate email

Re:But not the Z10?

[gordo3000]

I'm in finance (about as regulated for email as you get) and we use iphone, ipad, and android for work email now (as well as bb). So when I'm in country, I don't carry my bb anymore, just my personal as I can check the email via the Good app. I'd ditch the bb but I'm on international business often enough and if I do, my company won't pick up the tab for my calls and roaming data while on business.

Re:But not the Z10?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Microsoft is sort of a funny one: their attempt to push Windows Mobile devices into Blackberry's market back in the day was largely a failure, and is totally dead now; but did manage to win 'Activesync' enough support among enterprise admins as the 'Hey guys! we are totally kinda, sorta, adequately endurable compared to BES!' alternative that devices from Apple and the droid crowd that support it were able to absolutely brutalize Blackberry in ways that Windows Mobile was never able to, and Windows Phone seems to be making a rather tepid attempt to.

Re:But not the Z10?

[Anonymous Coward]

For many environments it's either ActiveSync or Good Messaging. Lots of control = Good Messaging, less control, cheaper = ActiveSync.

You don't even need to be an Exchange shop to support ActiveSync. There's also IMAPS and SMTPS, some places use those as well, still encrypted device->access point.

Re:But not the Z10?

[segoy]

Blackberry offers BES for iOS and Android (I think): http://us.blackberry.com/business/software/bes.html

Super

[Anonymous Coward]

Now:

When can I get one from Sprint?
How much will it cost?

Re:Super

[compro01]

Sprint is saying Q2 for release and hasn't specified anything about pricing.

Great!

[zhvihti]

Considering this is the US version with Qualcomm chips, the results for the international one with Exynos should be even better.

Re:Great!

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

I want the octocore one even if each core is a little bit slower. I has a sad it apparently won't be available in the US.

Re:Great!

[gutnor]

Well that would be interesting to wait for the benchmark. The Exynos contains 2 set of 4 cores: 4 slower set for battery optimising and 4 faster for CPU intensive application. The speed difference may not be that important, by design, the battery should be the main difference between the 2 (with the 8-core being significantly better). That make sense btw, with modern phones, your main concerned is keeping it powered, not really CPU speed.

It's a friggin' phone

[TWX]

I've had two smartphones now, the T-Mobile G1/HTC Dream, and the Samsung Galaxy SII. It's not about the phone speed, it's about the applications and the connectivity. If my wife's Palm T|X was a phone and had the ability to synch to a server automagically like Android does with Google's applications, she'd probably still be using it. Having the web is nice, but having the e-mail, calendar, contact list, music player, e-book reader, camera, picture viewer, and calculator are what make the device so useful. For me, it's a tool first and foremost, and the toy gadgets aren't what make it why I carry it.

Re:It's a friggin' phone

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had two smartphones now, the T-Mobile G1/HTC Dream, and the Samsung Galaxy SII. It's not about the phone speed, it's about the applications and the connectivity. If my wife's Palm T|X was a phone and had the ability to synch to a server automagically like Android does with Google's applications, she'd probably still be using it. Having the web is nice, but having the e-mail, calendar, contact list, music player, e-book reader, camera, picture viewer, and calculator are what make the device so useful. For me, it's a tool first and foremost, and the toy gadgets aren't what make it why I carry it.

Youre right.

But my galaxy s3 has more tools on it than your s2 and it can use those tools faster than yours because its more powerful.

Buy an electric drill kit from 10 years ago and compare it with a more powerful drill kit today from the same manufacturer and tell me there isn't a improvement in both what you get with it, extra options and performance.

Re:It's a friggin' phone

[Anonymous Coward]

That's right. Android has no apps. It's so fragmented no one is using it.

Jeez. Are there any Apple fans with any sense of reality left? Your comment is so offbase I can't tell if it's satire or not.

Apple is the "emperor has no clothes" phenomenon of our era.

The sad thing is that I was going to post that my friends and family *did* have Palm phones, and they didn't have a reason to get rid of them until they met untimely deaths (e.g., accidentally taking a dip in the pool). The iPhone is nothing but a Palm phone with an updated OS with the design stolen from an LG Prada.

These people are drooling over the G4's specs, Apple fans like to feel like they're superior because they're, well, shiny and clean. The grandparent post is probably right in that in neither case does it probably matter because you're not going to need that sort of hardware anytime soon for what you use a phone for.

At least with the G4 it's something actually functional. With Apple it's just hubris and appearances.

Re:It's a friggin' phone

[TWX]

(I hate the "preview/submit" feature, seem to lose a lot of posts that way, this is a retype)

To use your example against you, I started a new position as an infrastructure specialist a year ago, working with someone with 13 years experience at the same company. I got outfitted with a new Ryobi 18V tool set so that he and I could share batteries with his decade-old 18V Ryobi tool set. The power drill from his set has places for two bits, the plastic housing is sturdy, and the bit holders don't lose their bits easily. My new one has a flimsy plastic housing the deforms under pressure, has only one position to store a bit, and the bit frequently pops out. The only new feature on my drill is a little LED that's supposed to shine on the work area while the drill is in use, but that feature is negated by the need to use bit extensions to reach into wire management and server racks with equipment protruding.

So, newer is definitely not always better, even when the newer product is a direct successor-in-market to the old product. The Dodge Aspen and Plymouth Volaré were arguably worse cars than the Dodge Dart and Plymouth Valiant that they replaced. The Netbook type of computer was a lesser product than the Subnotebook type it replaced. The modern Craftsman any-fastener wrench is a lesser product than the 12pt wrench as while it technically fits everything, it fits nothing especially well.

Re:It's a friggin' phone

[Anonymous Coward]

Buy an electric drill kit from 10 years ago and compare it with a more powerful drill kit today from the same manufacturer and tell me there isn't a improvement in both what you get with it, extra options and performance.

Improvements in cordless drills are largely in battery technology. It isn't uncommon for newer generations to be mechanically inferior to older models.

Re:It's a friggin' phone

[alen]

paper specs

iphone has always needed less CPU/RAM resources than android. i have a droid pro i carry for work and my wife's old iphone 4 with only 128MB or RAM was a much better phone

my father in law has a galaxy s3 and i play with it every one or two weeks when i see him. ok phone, but my iphone 5 with only 1GB of RAM is snappier

Re:It's a friggin' phone

[tlhIngan]

paper specs

iphone has always needed less CPU/RAM resources than android. i have a droid pro i carry for work and my wife's old iphone 4 with only 128MB or RAM was a much better phone

I'm actually surprised the S4 only scores twice as much as the iPhone 5. Given the latter is still just a dual core 1.3GHz processor. The S4 is a 4+4 ("octacore" if you want to believe the marketing) running at 1.5-1.8GHz. Geekbench takes cores into account, so it should be much more than double the iPhone 5.

I suppose they could've tested the Snapdragon version (North American model) which is only quadcore.

But looking at the spec sheets, I would expect the S4 to be much faster than the iPhone. Hell, it's like comparing an i5 dual core with a quadcore i7 processor - of course the latter will outperform the former, especially in synthetic tests like Geekbench.

It's like some threads I saw that said Android phones render webpages 50% faster than an iPhone. Well, duh, if you throw raw processing power at the problem, that should be the case.

Android phones have ALWAYS outclassed the iPhone on the spec sheet. More RAM. More CPU. More this and that - been true since the iPhone 3G and the HTC G1. The iPhone 5 is also the first iPhone to break the 1GHz barrier on CPU speed - something that has been done on Android with the Droid or so ages ago. And the iPhone 5 also has 1GB of RAM, something Android phones have had for years before as well.

Frankly, has it even been useful to compare? The iPhone is always inferior hardware wise. Always has been, and unless something happens to change that, always will.

What's next, the Tegra 4 Android tablets outrun the iPad? Duh - the Tegra 4 tablets would have way more CPU horsepower (again, quad vs. dual core, or I think the Tegra has 4+4 now?).

Re:It's a friggin' phone

[monkeyhybrid]

Just to correct one point, the iPhone 4 has 512MB RAM.

Re:It's a friggin' phone

[Anonymous Coward]

iphone has always needed less CPU/RAM resources than android.

Also, that quote is a bunch of horseshit. iPhone apps? 20MB, per app, easy. Android apps? Not many over 10MB, and most are under 3MB.

Re:It's a friggin' phone

[Solandri]

At this point I think it's fairly obvious that your phone is going to become your PC. Regular PCs (first desktops and now laptops) have gotten fast enough to where even a low-end version can do everything 99% of people want. The greatest optimization that's left on desktops and laptops is reducing size and power consumption. Whereas the optimizations that still matter on phones (nee PDAs) are speed, size, and power consumption.

So not it's not just a friggin phone. It's a computer. And it's well on its way to becoming your PC. The way I see it playing out is that your phone will carry the CPU, RAM, and storage. If you need a tablet, you can carry a bigger screen (probably a flexible one you can roll up into a pen-sized cannister) and the phone will transmit the display to it wirelessly. If you need a laptop, in addition to the screen you can tote along a bluetooth keyboard and mouse which will also connect to your phone.

Re:It's a friggin' phone

[wiredlogic]

I don't know why they can't fix the lag on the submissions around here. It's been like that for 10+ years. I always copy the text before a preview or submit just in case /. forgets about me.

Re:It's a friggin' phone

[exomondo]

At least with the G4 it's something actually functional. With Apple it's just hubris and appearances.

I hope it has decent scrolling in the web browser, I'm not much into apps - at least nothing that isn't available across pretty much all mobile platforms - but I mainly use the web browser (Chrome) and document apps (built-in pdf reader) and on Android 4.2 on my Nexus 7 they are sluggish, there is just too much scroll/pan lag compared to my iphone 5. I really want to go to a large but pocketable sized phone like the GS4 but only if it's not so sluggish in those apps, the general UI seems fine but even bloody windows phone 7 has better scrolling performance in its web browser and adobe pdf viewer than my Nexus 7 has on Chrome and it's been the same in every version of Android i've tried. Surely the Nexus 7 is powerful enough to do this.

That said the experience in most other apps has been pretty much the same between the two devices, though the prevalence of scaled-up phone apps on Google Play over tablet versions is a bit annoying.

Re:It's a friggin' phone

[Anonymous Coward]

size of the app doesn't matter wrt CPU/RAM, you don't load the whole app in RAM.

Re:It's a friggin' phone

[TWX]

In my case, I used to just hit submit, without previewing what I'd written most of the time. Now the stages are a required preview, with the notice that it's not yet saved not covering the whole window.

For all I know there's a setting I could change to adjust the behavior, but I don't really care that much to bother to check.

Re:It's a friggin' phone

[Anonymous Coward]

apple makes up for it with slick software. Unfortunately, that advantage has a limited half life, and google has been chasing them with that for a long time.

BTW, the US GSIII has 2 GB of RAM, and the S4 has the same amount. the Iphone 5 had half the ram of it's competition when it was new, and samsung beat all the others to the punch with ram amount. LG is supposed to be going to 3GB in december, and that will probably be as far as we will go till the ARM64 processors start to get out of the foundry.

iPhone is not cutting edge

[SpaceMonkies]

The iPhone is definitely not cutting edge technology, despite what some people believe. The iPhone is more the tried and true stuff, although I think most people use it for the software, not the hardware. However, for those who like power and fun in their pockets, the S4 is the bomb.

Re:iPhone is not cutting edge

[alen]

the CPU and GPU in the iphone 5 were cutting edge for 2012.
i'm playing Real Racing 3 and the graphics are about as good as the xbox

MHz or GHz speed has never been a good predictor of actual processing power. Intel sold 4GHz CPU's 10 years ago. the 2GHz ones they sell now are A LOT faster

cpu/gpu architecture and the having the software actually take advantage of the hardware features will give you better performance than paper specs

Re:iPhone is not cutting edge

[Anonymous Coward]

This couldn't be more untrue. The newest iPhones always are in the top of the pack when it comes to CPU performance and they always have had cutting edge GPUs.

Re:iPhone is not cutting edge

[Anonymous Coward]

The iPhone is definitely not cutting edge technology, despite what some people believe. The iPhone is more the tried and true stuff, although I think most people use it for the software, not the hardware. However, for those who like power and fun in their pockets, the S4 is the bomb.

No. People use it because its an iphone and has a apple logo on it. They use it because they are a slave to trend and nothing else.

That's why anytime someone has an apple product they refuse to call it a cell phone, a tablet, a computer, a laptop, a mp3 player or whatnot. They have to call it a iphone, ipod, imac, ipad and so on. While everyone else in the world regardless of who makes the product call a cell phone a cell phone.

Its why people will defend their apple products and justify it to others even in the face of total defeat. People still to this day say imacs cant get viruses, they will say the iphone has the most features and most powerful phone even if you pull up a fact sheet proving otherwise.

Its why I see people with apple logo stickers on their cars, and apple tshirts. While I don't see the android guy on anything.

All of that is due to the fact people buy apple products because of the name brand recognition, they don't actually buy it for the product, they want others to know they have apple stuff and that's it.

Re:iPhone is not cutting edge

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple does seem to emphasize GPU speed/efficiency on their chips. Makes some sort of sense, since the UI heavily depends on the GPU.

I don't know what geekbench tests, but I want to know is how fast single thread performance is. Currently (Likely in the phone's useful lifetime) your smartphone software really doesn't benefit much from having more than two cores. Quad core is nice in some situations, but if geekbench is running a bench on four cores and summing the result, it's not a good indicator of performance for the end-user. If this is the case then "just shy of twice" means "just shy of the iphone 5 cpu". (The iphone 5 cpu is dual core)

Re:iPhone is not cutting edge

[Anonymous Coward]

Although your point stands... Intel has never sold a 4GHz CPU. About 10 years ago Intel broke 3Ghz with the P4 however. 3.8Ghz has been about the limit for stock clock speeds for a while now.

Re:iPhone is not cutting edge

[alen]

must be getting old

either way the 2.4GHz iCore and Xeon's i'm using now are a lot faster than the 3.4GHz ones from a decade ago. still have a few old HP proliants with 3.4GHz Xeons.

Re:iPhone is not cutting edge

[Ecuador]

Actually, at around the time of iPhone 4, Apple started putting in some good specs. By the time the iPhone 5 came out it, was among the fastest phones. This is in direct contrast to the early iPhones which had tragically bad specs.
I mean it seemed to me the were targeted at complete retards - people would show me their (gen 1) iPhone and say "look at how well you can browse the web". I could see how the UI of the browser was an improvement over my 3-year old PDAs (Axim X50v) browser, however trying to read on that half-VGA screen would give me instant headaches. Yes, my 3-year old PDA has twice the resolution and a faster CPU. In fact, even before that, my ancient (2003) Toshiba e805 had a 4" screen with full VGA resolution. Consider also the fact that the iPhone originally did not support apps, it should become apparent that the touch-friendly UI alone would not have given momentum to the iPhone release if it was not for marketing and fanboy-ism.
And yet it is surprising that people would call the original iPhone e.g. as a "high resolution display" device. There were devices at least 2 years older with 3x the resolution (but Nokia was too stupid to make a phone back then based on the N770/N800), but they were "invisible" to people.
After Apple opened a new market and everybody jumped in, then they started trying to compete on merit and not just style.
Another reversal that has happened is that now iOS is the least innovative OS. Android - though I am still not a great fan - evolves quickly and I have seen UIs made from scratch (e.g. Swipe UI on Maemo/Meego) look like they are coming to us from the next decade (in look and functionality). Instead of a modern OS on retarded hardware Apple now offers modern (at least relatively) hardware on an aging platform. The only thing that hasn't changed is that you always get less functionality than the competition and you can't change the battery or add memory...

Re:iPhone is not cutting edge

[aliquis]

It was cutting edge when released. And people know what it is / it's a popular phone.

Re:iPhone is not cutting edge

[Anonymous Coward]

"i'm playing Real Racing 3 and the graphics are about as good as the xbox"

But hook it up to a TV, how does it look then?

Re:iPhone is not cutting edge

[Anonymous Coward]

Well if you don't know instead of pitching your feelings/suppositions out as part of the conversation, you should go RTFA.

Re:iPhone is not cutting edge

[Anonymous Coward]

Another way of looking at this, before the iPhone there were a couple of Palm phones (I had the Sprint and the Treo) and there were non-phone devices. The iPhone out-speced the PHONES that existed at the time. Although there were DEVICES that were better (even much better), the were not PHONES. The reason people jumped on the iPhone bandwagon had as much to do with the PHONE features as MARKETING HYPE. Though I did not switch to the iPhone until the 3GS, I could plainly see that my palm device was ok at email, which I needed, but web surfing, which I didn't consider important, sucked.
Saying that the iPhone succeeded only because marketing convinced the lemmings, and pointing at prior non-phone examples of better devices is disingenuous if not outright insulting to people who made choices that were thought out for their needs.

Re:iPhone is not cutting edge

[Anonymous Coward]

Without apps (as it first launched, with success) the iPhone had much less functionality than the smartphones of its era and while it did out-spec the Symbian phones which were the most popular at the time, there were Windows Mobile devices like O2 XDA models that had VGA screens and faster CPUs. So there were better (in specs) phones, although some of the best pre-iPhone devices were, unfortunately, not phones.
The point is that the iPhone came out with less functionality than a smartphone - and even lacking basic functions that feature-phones had at the time (e.g. MMS, video...), touting as a "killer app" its ability at browsing ... on a 320x480 display! And you don't think marketing had anything to do with it?

Re:iPhone is not cutting edge

[Karlt1]

Yes, my 3-year old PDA has twice the resolution

http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-e805-Pocket-Windows-Mobile/dp/B0000DBJUB

No it didn't.

"Intel processor at a phenomenal 400 MHz"

The original iPhone had a 400Mhz processor

[The Axim] has twice the resolution

No it doesn't

"The 4.0 TFT Transreflective Color display offers 240 x 320,"

The original iPhone had a 320x480 resolution.

it should become apparent that the touch-friendly UI alone would not have given momentum to the iPhone release if it was not for marketing and fanboy-ism."

Apple only sold 8 million of the original iPhones.

Re:iPhone is not cutting edge

[Ecuador]

Do you have some reading comprehension deficiency? If not, re-read my post and your reply. You are quoting resolution, replying CPU, mixing up the e805 with the X50v and the X50v with the X50 standard.
Let me make it simpler for you:
In 2004 (3 years before the iPhone) I had Dell Axim X50v (note the v in the end) with a 640x480 screen and a 624MHz XScale CPU.
In 2003 (4 years before the iPhone) I had a Toshiba e805 with a 640x480 screen. It had a more modest (closer to the iPhone) CPU.

Re:iPhone is not cutting edge

[node 3]

Yeah, right. No one ever says "my thinkpad" or "my Nexus 7" or "my Galaxy S3"...

Apple owners aren't the brain-dead "slaves" you think they are. The problem is your assumptions are flawed, namely that people don't have any good reasons, other than "fashion", to buy Apple products. That flaw in understanding is entirely yours. It's an emotion-motivated display of ignorance.

Re:iPhone is not cutting edge

[wiredlogic]

Those "fast" processors from a decade ago were from the dead P4 branch of the x86 family tree created for the MHz wars. They achieved their high clock rates by doubling the length of the pipeline. This had the effect of reducing real instruction throughput compared to the traditional pipeline architecture which was kept alive in the Pentium M and subsequently morphed into the iCore lineup.

Re:iPhone is not cutting edge

[Anonymous Coward]

Totally revisionist history. I had an iPhone 3G, and it took Android a year to put out a phone (OG Droid) that was basically on par with the iPhone 3G, at which time the 3GS was already out.

Apple has always put out the fastest phones with the best battery life when they come out. They generally get beaten before the next model comes out, and then it's rinse/lather/repeat. That may well be changing, but it was true with the iPhone 5, and I suspect it will be true with the next version.

That being said, it doesn't really matter to me because I only run Android.

Re:iPhone is not cutting edge

[IwantToKeepAnon]

those who like power and fun in their pockets

Must ... not ... reply ... Must ... not ... reply

meh.

[Anonymous Coward]

What I'm interested in is the web performance. That's more or less the only thing that matters on these devices.

Battery life

[roman_mir]

I want to know about battery life and how long it will actually remain at that level. I am not getting anything anymore that I cannot be sure will have battery that will actually last for more than 2 days at a time. I've got Samsung Note in the fall, initially the battery life was OK, now it's down to 2 days on standby! It's crazy, you can put everything into this thing but if it will only last for 5 minutes then it's not good. What's the battery life like after just 6 month?

Re:Battery life

[bobthesungeek76036]

I would kill for 2-days of battery life. I have a SG2 and with the stock battery I was lucky to get 8 hours out of it. I now have a 3800mAh battery that gets me through the work day but not by much...

Re:Battery life

[roman_mir]

I would kill for 2-days of battery life.

- stay away from me

Re:Battery life

[CaseCrash]

I would kill for 2-days of battery life. I have a SG2 and with the stock battery I was lucky to get 8 hours out of it. I now have a 3800mAh battery that gets me through the work day but not by much...

Yeah, I bought the Samsung Galaxy Nexus right when it came out because the performance on it was great and it was the first US phone with ICS, but the battery sucks. I have to charge it two or three times a day now and it's only a bit over a year old and this is for just standard phone calls and facebook type stuff.

I'd love to get an S4 but not if I can only use it for an hour before plugging the damn thing back in. Anyone see any battery life metrics for this phone yet? I can't seem to find them.

Re:Battery life

[Teknikal69]

I get just about 2 days on my Galaxy S Advance (also know as s2 lite) but that's with a mugen battery although it's the same size as my original stock battery physically, I have to say though I have some real specs lust after the S4 this may be the one that gets me to update especially if I can get the exynos version in the UK.

Re:Battery life

[Anonymous Coward]

What's up ninny, not putting much stock into that gun you carry?

Re:Battery life

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't you be busying killing millions of babies?

Re:Battery life

[Anonymous Coward]

So do you want the gun to be used in that manner? You sick bastard.

Cyanogenmod not on Galaxy S4

[Archangel Michael]

http://www.androidauthority.com/galaxy-s4-not-cyanogenmod-support-174322/

Reports are coming in that Cyanogenmod will not be spending any resources on Galaxy S4. None. They've complained that the Galaxy models are too hard to keep working. The strange thing about it, Cyanogen works for Samsung on their Android Team.

Question is, will that affect your decision to buy or not buy the Galaxy S4.

Re:Cyanogenmod not on Galaxy S4

[alen]

if i was to leave iphone for android it would be the S4 or the Note

couldn't care less about rooting and tooting. its like the shade tree mechanics of 30 years ago. people have nothing better to do with their devices.

Re:Cyanogenmod not on Galaxy S4

[dc29A]

http://www.androidauthority.com/galaxy-s4-not-cyanogenmod-support-174322/

Reports are coming in that Cyanogenmod will not be spending any resources on Galaxy S4. None. They've complained that the Galaxy models are too hard to keep working. The strange thing about it, Cyanogen works for Samsung on their Android Team.

Question is, will that affect your decision to buy or not buy the Galaxy S4.

The only reason I picked up a Galaxy S3 is because it was CM10 supported. 2 hours after purchase, warranty was voided and CM was running on it. So no CM, no sale.

Re:Cyanogenmod not on Galaxy S4

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh.. no. That's a stupid question. Who is not buying phones because some hacked rom isn't going to be developed for it while a ton of others will be?

Re:Cyanogenmod not on Galaxy S4

[Nerdfest]

Personally, I'm not likely to buy another non-Nexus device. You can't trust Samsung to update the OS, and it's nice to be able to remove any custom Samsung software. Third-party ROM support is never guaranteed, and is often required for non-Nexus devices, even just to fix security vulnerabilities.

Re:Cyanogenmod not on Galaxy S4

[alen]

i was going to "buy" a free Galaxy S2 for my mother in law 2 months ago. main reason was that it was getting ICS and maybe even Jellybean.

as far as the point updates, don't really care if my phone has 4.2.1 and the latest is 4.2.2. i update my iphone 5 to the latest ios when its released, but don't really see any difference. the one difference i saw was a bug where my phone wouldn't work with my car's USB except on locally stored music. it was fixed in the last month and now i can listen to spotify and pandora via my car's USB port

Re:Cyanogenmod not on Galaxy S4

[Alter_3d]

Unfortunately that means you will be stuck with the Android version that comes with your device until Samsung and your carrier decide to upgrade it. That takes a loong time after Google releases updates. I have a Galaxy SII running the latest version of Android (4.2.2), but if I had not rooted it and switched ROMs, it would be running 4.0.4.

Re:Cyanogenmod not on Galaxy S4

[Anonymous Coward]

Any pocket computer is a combination of hardware and software. If you dislike the "value" added to Android by Samsung, Motorola, et al (and want upgrades to a newer OS in the future), but prefer their phone hardware to the Nexus, then you will prefer one that runs custom ROMs well. At least with Cyanogen, the features added are features that some people want.

Re:Cyanogenmod not on Galaxy S4

[alen]

so i miss out on google now? who cares

the way android OS versions are buying something like the S2 which has ICS is perfectly safe from an application compatibility standpoint. ICS is at its peak installs now so it will be at least 2 years before good apps will require jellybean or something later

Re:Cyanogenmod not on Galaxy S4

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously don't use Bluetooth audio or you need to re-examine your meaning of the word "working"

Re:Cyanogenmod not on Galaxy S4

[InEnacWeTrust]

Definitely!

Having CM since my HTC Dream, yes, the fact that Samsung collaboration with the open source community is next to non-existent will drive my next phone choice.
Smasung has been plainly lying to the community for years. promising tons of stuff and delivering nothing. The source they publish is wildly different from the source in their device, tons of proprietary stuff prevent quality versions of CM to be developped for Galaxys except spending countless days reverse engineering stuff.
Contrast that to Sony Mobile who has been delivering lots of things, stays close to AOSP, and actually helps the community getting there...

Re:Cyanogenmod not on Galaxy S4

[interkin3tic]

I can understand. I feel like most people hanging on rumors and press releases about the newest phone or operating system fail to realize that mobile phones are a hobby, not a necessity or something of great importance.

Installing CM on my phone was fun, but honestly, it's still the same phone it was before, just with different standard backgrounds and a few apps that were bundled in with it. Jailbreaking my ipad was a bit more functional, but at the end of the day, I tinker with my devices because I enjoy it and because they're mine to do so. The fact that various companies try to tell me they're not actually only adds an element of "Fuck you, apple" to it.

That said, if mobile phones aren't a hobby of yours, why upgrade at all?

Re:Cyanogenmod not on Galaxy S4

[Anonymous Coward]

Cyanogen is lilfesaver for older phones which stopped getting os upgrades, but have still enough firepower to run newer stuff.

Re:Cyanogenmod not on Galaxy S4

[wildstoo]

Personally, I find the stock Samsung roms to be perfectly good. I've rooted my S3 and disabled a lot of the built-in Samsung apps, but apart from that, it's still running the latest official Samsung firmware. It does everything I want, so I see no reason to change for the sake of it. (In other areas/devices I'm an incorrigible modder, so this isn't just apathy, this is the 3rd party roms not being compelling enough to change).

If I still have my S3 in a year or so when Samsung have stopped releasing updates for it, then I *might* consider flashing a 3rd party rom, but by that time I'll probably have upgraded to the Galaxy S4 or S5 or whatever the new hotness is anyway.

So, no it won't affect my decision, and I doubt I'm a unique case in this regard.

Re:Cyanogenmod not on Galaxy S4

[Kartu]

Uhm, Samsung has automatically updated my Galaxy Tab (the first version that came with 3.x) to 4.x, so I wonder where does that mistrust come from.

Re:Cyanogenmod not on Galaxy S4

[rjr162]

No, because CM for the Galaxy line has been okay at best for a while now. Once they started getting into 9 some funky stuff happened, such as Spirit FM or whatever the radio app is called you had to use since the stock FM app would't work in CM 9. Issue was, EVEN IF YOU WERE USING HEADPHONES ANY AND ALL TIMES THE FM RADIO APP WAS IN USE, your external speaker could (and fairly often like mine DID) die. At first it sounded like it was blown, and then less than two days later it quit working at all.

There was a bunch of other gotchas.. and anymore the stock ROM is good with it's features, and if you want root you can still root it and keep the stock recovery for OTA updates and other changes that check to see if the phone has been modified before it does the changes

Re:Cyanogenmod not on Galaxy S4

[rjr162]

Samsung has to be one of the best at actually updating. The issue I think you're seeing and wrongly blaming on Samsung is your CARRIERs lack of updating. Both my Galaxy S and Galaxy S 3 are unlocked units from Immix Wireless. They don't screw with the ROMs or anything else. My wife had a Verizon Fascinate (a Galaxy S phone) and while my Galaxy S was getting updates from Samsung fairly steadily and was at 2.4.3 IIRC before I went 3rd party ROMs, my wifes fascinate was still back on 2.3 (or at least 2.3.x).

Re:Cyanogenmod not on Galaxy S4

[the_humeister]

Reading that link, they talk about not wanting to deal with Exynos. In the USA, however, we're going to get the Qualcomm Krait version. Qualcomm has been much better with releasing usable sources than Samsung. And Cyanogen works for Samsung USA, so it would seem to me that getting an SGS4 is a safe bet in the USA if you want Cyanogenmod.

Re:Cyanogenmod not on Galaxy S4

[Nerdfest]

The Galaxy S line is just 3 years old and can support 4.2.2 through CyanogenMod. It should be supported by Samsung for 3 years as well, I think. 2.3 is ancient (as Android versions go), and was out when the S line was still being sold. Admittedly, keeping an Android phone up to date with the latest version isn't that important for features because of overall flexibility, getting security updates is.

Re:Cyanogenmod not on Galaxy S4

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait until the phone is available, then decide based on what the actual Team announcement is on the device.

Re:Cyanogenmod not on Galaxy S4

[LanMan04]

Rooting is nice (.hosts ad blocking, etc), but other than that, I agree....meh. No need for crazy custom firmwares.

Re:Cyanogenmod not on Galaxy S4

[Anonymous Coward]

That's too bad. I have an Android 4.2.2 Cyanogen mod rom on my Mesmerize right now and it's amazing. The last official update by Samsung was 2.3.

Re:Cyanogenmod not on Galaxy S4

[Riddler Sensei]

CyanogenMod is posting across social networks that this is just the opinion of some of the devs, but is not the stance of project.

Found on G+ just now:

Let’s start with the simplest form of this: CyanogenMod does not pre-announce support or lack of support for devices. Ever. Even for the Nexus 4, we did not announce support until a nightly build was available. Further, any announcement regarding the ‘dropping’ of device support will be communicated via this Google+ page, Twitter, Facebook, our blog, or a combination of those; it will not be something buried in a forum post.

This morning, a comment from a CM collaborator on XDA was taken to be as an ‘absolute’ in regards to support of the S4. He offered the opinion of four TeamHacksung maintainers, their frustrations and lack of interest in supporting the S4. What’s seemingly lost on those reading this is that his comments as an individual do not speak for CyanogenMod as an organization.

As for the team’s stance on the S4, there isn’t one at this time, and most definitely won’t be one before the device is sold at retail.

-The CyanogenMod Team

Re:Cyanogenmod not on Galaxy S4

[Andy Dodd]

Not entirely true.

There are two major variants of the Galaxy S4 - Qualcomm and Exynos based. Similarly there are two major subvariants of the GS3 - again, Qualcomm vs. Exynos.

The Qualcomm-based GS3s were very well supported thanks to Qualcomm having excellent reference source at CodeAurora.

The Qualcomm-based GS4s will probably be OK because many of the Qualcomm GS3 maintainers aren't as pissed off at Samsung as the Exynos guys (including myself) are.

The four primary Exynos4 maintainers (myself, Daniel Hillenbrand, Guillaume Lesniak, and Espen Fjallvar Olson - I may have missppelled thos slightly as we usually just go by IRC nicks) have all decided that we won't be touching any further Samsungs. We're all working with Nexus or Sony devices now. (Sony has done a MAJOR turnaround in terms of opensource support over the past year, or at least the Mobile division has.)

This probably has little impact on the Qualcomm-based GS4s, but right now, the Exynos-based GS4s are without any prospective maintainers.

Will a new maintainer step up? Possibly. Will they succeed without just saying "fuck this shit" and selling the phone for a different one? I personlly don't think so.

It's a volunteer project so nothing is ever a surefire given, and collective decisions are rarely made - so far, they have only been made in regards to outdated hardware and newer versions of Android. (Such as Snapdragon S1-based phones ending at CM7).

That said, if you look at the attitudes of developers, you can "get a feel" for how likely a phone is going to be well supported by CM.
DISCLAIMER: THE BELOW IS MY PERSONAL OPINION AND NOT IN ANY WAY AN OFFICIAL POSITION OF THE PROJECT:
Will the Qualcomm-based GS4s receive maintainer attention and continued support including M and stable builds? I'd be surprised if they didn't.
Will the Exynos-based GS4s receive maintainer attention and M/stable CM builds? I'd be very surprised if they do.

Re:Cyanogenmod not on Galaxy S4

[Algae_94]

At this point in the Android game any device with 4.x is probably fine for most people. Future upgrades will not provide the same level of functionality improvements we've seen with past versions.

If you are not like most people and like to run the latest and greatest OS version, the S4 may not be a good choice.

Re:Cyanogenmod not on Galaxy S4

[Algae_94]

This is a small amount of devices and can only stretch the devices lifespan a little. Once the device gets older, it won't be able to run much of that new stuff anymore.

Re:Cyanogenmod not on Galaxy S4

[dargaud]

Honest question here: what do you get with CM that you didn't get with the original Android of the S3 ? I have a SII and I was curious about CM, but I couldn't find a compelling reason to try it besides curiosity itself.

Re:Cyanogenmod not on Galaxy S4

[shellbeach]

so i miss out on google now? who cares

It's not about google now, or app compatibility. It's about having a secure, up-to-date, bug-free OS and the better performance and features that come with new versions of Android. It's probably also worth pointing out that CyanogenMod comes with the ability to update itself -- fully automatically and painlessly -- from within the system settings ... so after the initial rooting and the installation of custom recovery you'll never have to worry about "rooting and tooting" again.

You can root and install CyanogenMod on many phones in less time than it probably took you to write all your posts on this /. article. That doesn't seem much of an investment of time and effort to me, considering everything you gain.

Re:Cyanogenmod not on Galaxy S4

[AmiMoJo]

A few months is hardly a long time to wait for updates from Samsung. If you buy your phone from a carrier you are an idiot anyway. You can always get a Nexus 4 if you must be on the bleeding edge.

Re:Cyanogenmod not on Galaxy S4

[Rich0]

Reports are coming in that Cyanogenmod will not be spending any resources on Galaxy S4. None.

Cyanogenmod doesn't really have any resources to spend on anything. It is a collection of volunteer contributions. People donate to it, but for the most part all donating does is encourage the devs to buy a new phone and stop supporting the one they currently have (that isn't to say that you shouldn't donate anyway). They aren't some shop that keeps a library of phones and systematically backports fixes to all of them. The way things get backported is that some volunteer who owns the phone tweaks things and gets it running.

I can take a phone that is owned by 3 people, and as long as I do the work to port it, chances are I'll get listed as the maintainer and that phone will show up on the supported devices list. On the other hand, if a phone sells in the millions but none of the owners can be bothered to get CM working on it, then it won't be supported. That's just how most non-commercial FOSS projects work - they don't go where the money is, they go where the volunteers are.

Re:Cyanogenmod not on Galaxy S4

[iampiti]

You can't be sure that Samsung is going to update the OS but AFAIK they've been pretty good with updates so far. At least regarding flagship models.
The galaxy s2 was released on 2011 with Gingerbread (2.3), so far it has received two major updates: Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0) and Jelly Bean 4.1. There's even rumors they will release Jelly Bean 4.2 for the s2.
Meanwhile, most phones from other Android device makers have received one major update (if any).
So Apple is better, but among the Android manufacturers Samsung are among the best.

Yes, but will this be the phone they release?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Galaxy S3 was a quad core when it was first announced, but that phone didn't materialize in the US.

2013 phone is faster than 2012 phone

[alen]

holy crap

is there any software that actually takes advantage of this? there are only a few games that take advantage of the iphone 5's graphical power

not like most people are going to dump their S3 or iphone 5 and run out to buy the S4 just because it gets better numbers
i know someone who is going to buy the Galaxy S3 this week if he gets if for $99 on T-Mobile. he doesn't need the S4's power and price

Re:2013 phone is faster than 2012 phone

[gordo3000]

remember the screen has a much higher number of pixels, demanding a lot more computation (granted, in graphics, but still relevant for SoC)

Re:2013 phone is faster than 2012 phone

[Anonymous Coward]

not like most people are going to dump their S3 or iphone 5 and run out to buy the S4 just because it gets better numbers

Buncha neckbeards who spend all day on gadget websites will.

Re:2013 phone is faster than 2012 phone

[L4t3r4lu5]

I can't find any app which taxes my 2 year old Desire HD (Single core 1GHz Scorpion CPU, part of MSM8255 chipset). I think mobile processing has come to the same point as desktop processing; For 99% of the tasks, 2 years ago is more than enough (5 in desktop, really). The "new shiny" is for posers.

Re:2013 phone is faster than 2012 phone

[Enderandrew]

http://www.polygon.com/2013/1/7/3848380/hawken-project-shield-exclusive-tegra-4

Mind you, the above link is for Hawken on a Tegra 4, which this isn't using, but the point is that developers are working on bringing console-level titles to phones.

Re:2013 phone is faster than 2012 phone

[alen]

by the time a real product with the tegra 4 will ship the next iphone will be announced or leaked to the point where we will know the tegra 4 is not that big a deal

the graphics are nice in your one game. iOS will have lots of games with similar graphics by the time the next iphone and ipad come out.

Re:2013 phone is faster than 2012 phone

[fustakrakich]

Who wants to be caught with a 2012 phone? It's like wearing last season's Pradas..

Re:2013 phone is faster than 2012 phone

[Enderandrew]

So you weren't asking an honest question, you were just trolling.

You discount the performance increase from the S3 to the S4 as a useless jump in numbers, but are quick to point out that you assume iOS will have a better increase in numbers in their next device.

However, I'll give a real response in case anyone is still reading.

iOS devices have often had better GPUs than many Android devices, and they have more games in their app store. An iPhone/iPad at the same price as an Android device can be seen as a better gaming device.

That being said, I happily switched from the iPhone 4 personally to the S3 and am happy with the move. There are enough games on Android that I'm more than happy. The S3 is great hardware. And I actually prefer the software/UI/experience.

Re:2013 phone is faster than 2012 phone

[Anonymous Coward]

A vanishing small percentage of people run out to buy a new device. I've done it once, when my phone got stolen 12 years ago. The rest of us waits for our current 2 years contract runs out and then selects the beat device for our personal needs.

And all the fucknuts complaining about "ohhhh, nobody needs this amount of power", I've heard the same boring argument since the first pentium was launched. Someone will finda funky application of the tech.

Anyhow, more power to us ;)

Re:2013 phone is faster than 2012 phone

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because app developers target the lowest common denominator to increase "sales". Developing apps for phones/tablets are as challenging as the PC market. Variable CPU cores, variable CPU performance, variable GPU performance, unknown available memory, unknown available storage, etc.

Re:2013 phone is faster than 2012 phone

[Anonymous Coward]

The game Vector runs like shit on my Mesmerize clocked at 1.2ghz running 4.2.2 Cyanogen mod.

Does that mean...

[SailorSpork]

...those birds will look TWICE as angry on a Galaxy S 4 as they do on an iPhone 5? IN!

Re:Does that mean...

[Anonymous Coward]

It means you'll be able to dial twice as fast and answer calls in half the time with the SG4 than on a IP5.

Re:Does that mean...

[jxander]

You still have the phone app? I cleared that off to save space.

this is as bad as nvidia's hype

[alen]

at least the S4 is going on sale next month
for the next 6 months i have to read how the Tegra 4 is the most awesomenest mobile chip even though there aren't any products on sale that have it. but all i have to do is keep waiting and not buy anything else

Obvious, why waste your/our time?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, those benchmarks were not necessary at all. With a four core CPU @ 1.9 GHz, or an eight core CPU @ 1.6 GHz, all you only need to do is simple math to know it beats everything else on the market at this moment. Period.

Re:Obvious, why waste your/our time?

[Anonymous Coward]

The 8-core is 4 fast Cortex-A15 cores and 4 "slow" Cortex-A7 cores, for power saving. It won't have the performance on an 8-core CPU as only 4 cores are used at once.

oh that's right

[slashmydots]

Wow, now it's fast enough to run Crysis 3! Oh wait...that's right, it's a phone. Apps are written for the slowest Android devices for the biggest marketability so that speed means nothing and does nothing but waste battery life. Maybe it can process photos faster with a built-in app or something faster but who cares? Most people run 3rd party apps the vast majority of the time. I would much, much, much rather see a doubling of the battery life than a doubling of the processor speed.

Re:oh that's right

[Anonymous Coward]

Then don't buy this phone. Buy an Ace or a blackberry or some other phone-oriented device and not a game-oriented device.

Re:oh that's right

[swb]

I don't think apps are written for the slowest device. My experience with Apple IOS and devices of mixed age is that over time the apps seem to target faster and faster CPUs, either by doing more things or adding new features.

Every so often I grab an old iPhone 4 we use for a home phone and try to use Instacast and it about locks up updating 4-5 podcasts, yet it's like glass on my iPhone 5.

Re:oh that's right

[Anonymous Coward]

I have an LG Spectrum.

I have a Galaxy Nexus

I have a Nexus 10.

I also have a Galaxy S Fascinate.

You're going to try and tell me speed means nothing?

You're obviously an idiot.

Re:oh that's right

[blind biker]

Wow, now it's fast enough to run Crysis 3! Oh wait...that's right, it's a phone. Apps are written for the slowest Android devices for the biggest marketability so that speed means nothing and does nothing but waste battery life. Maybe it can process photos faster with a built-in app or something faster but who cares? Most people run 3rd party apps the vast majority of the time. I would much, much, much rather see a doubling of the battery life than a doubling of the processor speed.

Samsung claims the SIV has best-of-breed voice control. What they demoed looked very impressive, even though it might have been staged (indeed, it happened on a stage :D ).
Regardless of whether the SIV demo was staged or not, the fact remains that good voice recognition requires a lot of processing power. Bear in mind that the voice recognition process must run in parallel to whatever app is being controlled, so more cores can come in handy.

Re:oh that's right

[jxander]

One of the benefits of Apple's walled garden approach (yes, we all know the perils of walled gardens, I love rooting and installing CM, too)

Apple currently has less than a dozen total devices still supported. That's combined between all phones, pads and pod-touches (not counting pod-shuffles - they don't get apps.) On those, only 2 or 3 potential OSes are supported, with the current OS installed on over 60% of applicable hardware.

This makes it very easy for app developers to optimize apps for the majority of devices, with all of the potential bells and whistles of the new stuff. Compare with Android, almost 50% of devices still using Gingerbread (released in 2008, around the same time as iOS 2) and only 10% are on the current release. Also compare the maybe 20-30 total iOS devices ever (going all the way back to iphone 1) with the 4000+ android devices running around the wild today

Re:oh that's right

[fa2k]

Speed does mean something. My 2 year old Nexus S has frequent delays of 5-10 seconds. It seems slower than when I bought it, but I can't see any reason why Google would make their OS slower, so I have no idea why it's like that. If there is a delay of order 100 ms, it may be caused by frequency scaling and other power saving features, but multiple second delays would definitely be fixed by a faster CPU. There is also RAM, though. Hard to tell if it's swapping or running at full speed when it's all solid state.

Re:oh that's right

[Whatah1]

The thing is, a year from now when it goes on sale for $99 (with 2 year contact) it will still be a nice phone. Then at the end of the 2 year contact (3 years from now) it will still be able to run those apps that you talk about which target whatever happens to be the baseline 3 years from now. That is part of what makes it a good phone.
But I agree, battery life is good as well...

Re:oh that's right

[Lost Race]

My iphone 3gs is like that too. I figure it's mainly the flash controller working harder as the flash memory ages. I routinely fill it to 99% before purging the camera roll. After 3 years of heavy use I'll bet the average page erase count is way up there, and there are probably more than a few bad blocks by now.

Or it could just be three generations of extra firmware bloat bogging down the primitive CPU.

I see what you did there...

[ArhcAngel]

The > Galaxy S 4 scored a 3,163 on the standard Geekbench 2 speed test, just shy of twice the iPhone 5s

I know what is being conveyed in this fragment but given Apple's naming convention on the iPhone this looks suspiciously like an article from the future!

Let's shoot for desktop replacement, Samsung

[sl4shd0rk]

As long as we're going down the road of matching cores and RAM to that of nearly current desktop specs, why not nail down some standards for connecting peripherals? And no, I don't mean shitty proprietary bluetooth/wi-fi protocols. I mean a standard mini-usb dock with VGA, HDMI, DVI output and a few USB ports for a keyboard and rat. Something that can be implemented by the entire range of Android devices whether it's HTC, or Samsung, or Motorola. Otherwise, I see no point in phone with 4 damn cores and 3-4G of ram. It's just an expensive and wasteful pocket heater. Gaming on a screen that small is ridiculous.

Re:Let's shoot for desktop replacement, Samsung

[Anonymous Coward]

> I mean a standard mini-usb dock with VGA, HDMI, DVI output and a few USB ports for a keyboard and rat.

Why a standard? All the outputs are standard, the dock gets resold with your phone when you buy a new one (or you buy a compatible phone).

http://www.samsung.com/us/mobile/cell-phones-accessories/EDD-S20JWEGSTA

> Gaming on a screen that small is ridiculous

Oh, maybe not talking about the Note then ;)

Re:Let's shoot for desktop replacement, Samsung

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out Ubuntu phone.

Yeah, it's in its infancy, but right now it's at the forefront of what you seek.

Deal breaker for me.

[Anonymous Coward]

Having the web is nice, but having the e-mail, calendar, contact list, music player, e-book reader, camera, picture viewer, and calculator are what make the device so useful. For me, it's a tool first and foremost, and the toy gadgets aren't what make it why I carry it.

The deal breaker was that there isn't a bottle opener or corkscrew.

It's fine and dandy to have all of those electronic communications, but when it comes to face to face communication, it's seriously lacking.

Re:Deal breaker for me.

[Githaron]

If you think that has a market, design, manufacture, and market a phone case with a bottle opener and corkscrew and start reaping in the dough.

Re:Deal breaker for me.

[93 Escort Wagon]

If you think that has a market, design, manufacture, and market a phone case with a bottle opener and corkscrew and start reaping in the dough.

Don't be absurd.

Now a cupholder, on the other hand...

Re:Deal breaker for me.

[TWX]

I carry a Gerber model 400 multiplier for real-world "applications" like a bottle opener. Works decently as a knife/screwdriver/file/canopener/bottleopener/centerpunch/pliers/wirecutter...

Now if I can only get a new carrying pouch cheap, this current one is falling apart...

Having been through 4 Samsung android devices...

[Anonymous Coward]

I can confidently say that the only way I'll purchase another is if it carries the Nexus brand.
Fool me 4 times....

what's the killer ap for bigger CPU on cell phone

[goombah99]

what's the killer app for increased CPU?

why do I need such a powerful computation engine in my pocket? the main use I see is if it gets to be good enough to be a desktop replacement and I can just dock it to a big screen. But until then having more cpu or GPU isn't going to let be surf the internet faster or type e-mail faster or even give me longer battery life. THe existing ones already play HD movies so the frame rate threshold has been reached for highly satisfactory video.

SO what's the killer app for increased CPU? playing halo? Nice but not a killer app for a cell phone I think. I just can't think of anything in terms of compuational horsepower that I would like my cell phone to do that it doesn't do now and for which the cell platform is the right place to do it. I need help with my imagination I guess.

For me the thing I need on my cell phone is vastly more battery. Why? Well aside from the obvious of longer charge time, you could probably vastly increase the communication rate and reliability by broadcasting more power. You could certainly increase the amount of time you would be tempted to use video (battery consumers).

who gets paid for this crap

[Anonymous Coward]

I got to be honest...who the heck benchmarks phones......and why would anyone really care. This is up there in the top ten of get a life and do something with a purpose.

Re:who gets paid for this crap

[Silas is back]

Wow, I am really disappointed that I had to scroll down 2/3 to find the first comment asking this very question. Thank you, AC. Phone benchmarks?? Really??? I mean, this kind of benchmarks doesn't even matter on desktops, except for workstations, why are we doing this same crap on PHONES?

Twice the cores

[dFaust]

Given that the S4 has twice the cores of the iPhone5, this seems reasonable, if not a bit disappointing. I'd be curious to see some real-world benchmarks to see how actual apps fare, as they typically won't be making use of all 4 cores. For instance, while the S3 international flavor scores higher than the iPhone5 on this chart, there were many real world tests that the iPhone5 easily won.

I'll be anxious to see real world tests and see how well the S4 is making use of all of the available cores.

Re:Twice the cores

[Anonymous Coward]

The CPU can only have 4 active cores at a time. There are 4 high-power and 4 low-power cores, with the idea that you can use the slower cores for most tasks and save battery, but have power when you need it.

Re:Twice the cores

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what he's saying. The S4 has 4 cores, double the iPhone 5's two cores.

Re:what's the killer ap for bigger CPU on cell pho

[alen]

games?

only reason to buy an iphone over android at this point is games. i play real racing 3 on my iphone 5 and the graphics are about as good as my xbox 360. ipad 4 has better GPU and will be slightly better.

and if you have an apple TV you can output the game to your TV to make it like a real game console and that takes CPU power as well as a nice wifi router

Re:what's the killer ap for bigger CPU on cell pho

[geoffrobinson]

You get to charge your cell phone more often?

Seriously, Apple takes great care to make sure battery life lasts as long as possible.

I'm not saying the S3 or S4 are bad phones, but I think we can be sophisticated enough to worry about overall experience for what you are trying to accomplish.

Maybe I want a faster processor and lower battery life. But I agree with you. I don't see the killer app that requires a super-charged CPU.

And this means...?

[pev]

So this is a GeekBench 2 score :
    http://www.primatelabs.com/geekbench/

Does this tell you :
    - How responsive UI is and how well graphics accelleration in 2d and 3d improves your experience?
    - Whether the phones and apps operation scales onto the multiple cores to make use of them?
    - How well the O/S has been optimised to make use of the processor features?
    - Whether the O/S and apps are optimised to make use of cache well?
    - If you're going to be waiting on I/O all the time?

So - if you're using your S4 to run matlab I think this is great news. If you're wanting to use it as a smart-phone, perhaps more subjective tests will tell you more if you get on with it.

Personally having spent my teens and twenties fascinated and overly keen on benchmarks in computing, these days I pick up a device and use it for a while. If I like how it feels to use and how fast it feels then I'll keep it. (Caveat: I use benchmarks all the time developing embedded platforms to verify optimisation but that's a whole different kettle of fish)

What about battery?

[houbou]

Got a nexus.. so, whatever apps work on my Nexus will work on the 4.. but will it offer significantly better battery life?

Re:What about battery?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think at this time nothing beats the Nexus 4 benefit/cost.

iPhone 5 could still tear this phone a new one

[Anonymous Coward]

iPhone 5 could still tear this phone a new one. iPhone software is optimised for...iPhone hardware. Android software is not optimised for...(random) hardware.

Re:iPhone 5 could still tear this phone a new one

[Anonymous Coward]

Hahaha, yeah, like how OSX is "faster" than Linux on xserve mac hardware.

It will pass everything but a gas station...

[unixcorn]

From my personal experience, if the phone does what it needs to do based on current software, the most important thing for me is battery life.

We're doing benches for mobile phones now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Like, CPU and memory?

How about the only things that matter in a phone and that are rarely checked in detail:
- battery life (various aspects of it)
- speech quality
- reception quality
- interactiveness (i.e. reaction to input)
- interoperability (i.e. usb mass storage, sync protocols)

Thankyouverymuch.

Please explain to me

[nanotech]

How does this translate to real-world user-visible improvements?

Does it scroll more fluidly?
Do apps run noticeably faster? (Were they slow to start with?)
Is there any software out there that takes advantage of it to do more?

Can't see anyone caring about this at all in the mainstream market (you know, the one where people buy 50M+ units).

Also, comparing against iPhone5 is misleading as Android code runs via a JVM and iPhone runs native.

(Not a fan of either, aiming for objectivity)

Re:what's the killer ap for bigger CPU on cell pho

[obarthelemy]

I've got an old Nook Color (800MHz single-core A8) lying around, it's still perfectly OK for most everything I do on a tablet, except HD video (I don't game).

I think OEMs are mis-aiming. Better battery, louder sound, more rugged design... would be more interesting to me than octo-core with bells on.

Blackberry's been dead a while.

[Medievalist]

This raises an interesting question: is there a suitable replacement for blackberry for the enterprise yet? None of the phones systems/solution I've seen have anything resembling the BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server) and encryption for email, etc. What will be the successor to BB in the enterprise?

BES was always a half-assed and expensive solution to the regulatory problems US corporations have with email.

End-users send HIPAA/HITECH/SOX/GLB/FDA-regulated material with their phones (for legitimate reasons or just because they are end users) so having the mail transit a server at RIM headquarters was a regulatory non-starter (stupid enterprises did it anyway, and most did not get caught so how stupid were they really?). So the big boys bought BES servers and we hacked their existing email systems up to support the extra mail hub.

But BES, while it kept your sensitive email on a system you controlled, also usually exposed a Microsoft host to the Internet on at least one port. That's something one generally wants to avoid, and while Microsoft's SUS automagic updating makes it a lot less risky than it used to be, and you can put some transparent firewally stuff in between, why would you want all that complexity? (answer: because the CEO has a bloated ego and wanted a blackberry just like his rivals. But now he has an iPhone).

Today you just use iPhones and Androids. It's no harder to secure them than it was to keep a BES server up to regulatory requirements in a US zaibatsu. And the whole process has always been driven by the egos of corporate officers anyway, and now those same officers are measuring their relative penis length with iWhatsits and Androids, not Blackberries.

Re:Blackberry's been dead a while.

[Anonymous Coward]

And with this response you prove you have never used a BES.

YOU host the damned server, and YOU control the encryption keys. ALL traffic to the device is encrypted on YOUR side. RIM cannot see into these and does NOT have access to these keys.

This is why it is the ONLY choice for HIPAA compliance, because it is end to end encryption. Not just device encryption.

Stupid iLoverz and sexDroid humpers.;

Re: Blackberry's been dead a while.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you need to re-read his post because that's exactly what he said.

Re:Blackberry's been dead a while.

[aztracker1]

You can't use IMAP/SSL and SMTP/SSL?

Re:Blackberry's been dead a while.

[monkeyhybrid]

YOU host the damned server, and YOU control the encryption keys. ALL traffic to the device is encrypted on YOUR side. RIM cannot see into these and does NOT have access to these keys.

Uhhh, unless I'm mistaken, he didn't say otherwise. He does actually mention that the big boys bought their own BES servers, keeping sensitive emails under their own control.

I think you need to take the time to read a user's comment more carefully before jumping down their throat.

Re:Blackberry's been dead a while.

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently not, if your blackberry takes the place of a sexual partner in your affections.

Don't care about speed, I care about battery life.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't care how fast it is. I have a Samsung Galaxy S 2, and it's already faster than I need it to be.
What does suck, though is that I only get at most 16 hours of battery life with normal usage before it's dead. (as in, playing music, using minimal GPS/data to track where my bus is, maybe 25 text messages sent, and taking a call or two). The only way I can push it to 24 hours is if I keep it on airplane mode for half the day.

My only question is, can I reduce its CPU speed to at least the level of the S2 to have a greater battery life than the S2? Because no matter how you put it, a fast phone with no battery left is just a $600 weight in your pocket. I wish smartphone makers would focus on R&D for better batteries and less power consumption rather than useless new "features".

Desktop comparison?

[Anonymous Coward]

How does that compare to a desktop CPU? Are there any benchmarks that compare cell phone CPU's to desktops?

Re:what's the killer ap for bigger CPU on cell pho

[Aranykai]

You get to charge your cell phone more often?

Seriously, Apple takes great care to make sure battery life lasts as long as possible.

I'm not saying the S3 or S4 are bad phones, but I think we can be sophisticated enough to worry about overall experience for what you are trying to accomplish.

Maybe I want a faster processor and lower battery life. But I agree with you. I don't see the killer app that requires a super-charged CPU.

That's an interesting take considering the talk time, standby time and battery capacity stats are firmly in the favor of the samsung devices. The s3 out talks the iphone5 by over two hours. No telling what the s4 will do, but based upon their trend, it will improve on the s3.

Comparing Internals

[topic7]

The real question i'd like answered is for someone to benchmark the GS4 Snapdragon version VS the GS4 Exynos 5 version. If the Exynos version benchmarks higher, I may have to fly out to Europe and pick one up.

Re:Comparing Internals

[hawguy]

The real question i'd like answered is for someone to benchmark the GS4 Snapdragon version VS the GS4 Exynos 5 version. If the Exynos version benchmarks higher, I may have to fly out to Europe and pick one up.

Why would you spend considerable money and fly thousands of miles (I'm assuming you're in the USA) to pick up a phone that's faster in synthetic CPU benchmarks but may not be fully compatible with next generation 4G networks here in the USA? What do you do with your phone that requires the fastest possible CPU? And what do you do every 6 months when a faster phone comes out?

Re:Comparing Internals

[Anonymous Coward]

And what do you do with an LTE phone when the actual bandwidth in North American cities is around 3 Mbps?

Re:Comparing Internals

[topic7]

Although benchmarks are not the end all be in, they are rather indicative and the closest thing we can get to real world use without actually using them in the real world. When I buy a phone speed is a huge issue for me. I have many of the newest and best tablets and computers here in my office and I am always waiting on pages to load, files to load, programs to load. Speed or lack thereof is my single biggest time waster, so this is a sticking point for me.

Re:Comparing Internals

[topic7]

Not true. See links below: http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/att-clocks-average-real-world-lte-speeds-13-mbps-opensignal-survey-finds/2013-02-14 http://www.gottabemobile.com/2012/09/21/iphone-5-speed-test-verizon-4g-lte/

core count doesn't work that way

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple may be more efficient per core, sure. However, how much power is used per core? Are phones running at max power consumption all of the time? Speed says nothing about energy efficiency, just that under "ideal circumstances", one phone is faster than the other.

If these are ideal circumstances is a matter of debate. I personally wouldn't want my phone to be doing something that uses so much CPU power that it requires 4 cores at 1.4 GHz to do the task, or 2 cores at 1.3GHz for that matter. I'd want the apps on my phone to be elegant and power friendly, not some blunt thing thrown together "because todays phones don't need programs to be optimized anymore".

Latency

[Twinbee]

I'd be more interested in the latency, responsiveness and touchscreen delay than raw CPU speed.

HTC One X (Quad) appears to be 1808 for comparison

[gravious]

fyi :)

Geekbench is multithreaded

[default luser]

And the scores scale linearly, so you can just divide the scores of the new Samsung quad core by 2 to get a rough comparison with the iPhone 5. This gives an estimate of SIMILAR single-threaded performance between the two.

There are variations not handled by the simple comparison method (e.g. bandwidth-limited scaling of more cores, or clock turbo/throttling depending on number of cores used), but it's a pretty quick and fairly accurate comparison.

Re:what's the killer ap for bigger CPU on cell pho

[Wallslide]

But until then having more cpu or GPU isn't going to let be surf the internet faster or type e-mail faster or even give me longer battery life.

I can't believe this was labeled insightful. I have a device less than a year old, and with a faster CPU I would be able to surf the Internet faster, and type an email faster. With a newer, more efficient processor, I'd get longer battery life. Rendering webpages on a phone is still slow compared to a desktop machine. There are many cases in which I am waiting for Chrome to render a webpage on my phone, and when there is lag between pressing a link to open it, and the web browser responding to my input. As for typing emails... many Android keyboards have fairly advanced predictive text functions, and on my phone there is often perceptible lag... more often when the keyboard is first loading, but also sometimes while typing.

Re:what's the killer ap for bigger CPU on cell pho

[93 Escort Wagon]

what's the killer app for increased CPU?

You won't ask those sorts of questions next time you're trapped in your car, upside down in a snowbank, and that Space Heater App is the only thing standing between you and grim death!

News just out today ...

[bob_jordan]

In shock news, it was revealed the new Samsung Galaxy S 4 phone is actually faster then the previous generation Galaxy S III.

Glad they cleared that one up. :-)

Bob.

Performance is nice, but so it battery life

[Anonymous Coward]

Performance is receiving too much emphasis in phone marketing and development, in my opinion. If the phone can't last all day -- and many can't even with very light usage -- then what good is it? It's not all that mobile if it has to drink too frequently from a wall socket.

The killer app is zombification!

[Medievalist]

what's the killer app for increased CPU?

Botnets controlled by criminals, of course. It's a growth industry!

Re:what's the killer ap for bigger CPU on cell pho

[blind biker]

SO what's the killer app for increased CPU?

On the fly translation of spoken language, for one.

Samsung

[Anonymous Coward]

Samsung has 40% market share in the smartphone market, so I'm not real surprised.. they are doing impressive stuff over there. Apple only has 20% atm. And... Blackberry has some 4% and change or something like that. Basically Samsung is the "big dawg" of the smartphone market at the moment.

Re:what's the killer ap for bigger CPU on cell pho

[Anonymous Coward]

SO what's the killer app for increased CPU?

On the fly translation of spoken language, for one.

this not going to happen any time soon for smart phones even at 10x the processing speed.

Re:what's the killer ap for bigger CPU on cell pho

[Jeremy Erwin]

The AppleTV adds MPEG-4 artifacts. Even the HDMI cable adds MPEG-4 artifacts.

And still...

[Anonymous Coward]

Only runs "apps", not real software.

Re:what's the killer ap for bigger CPU on cell pho

[Anonymous Coward]

a) where's the app that does this well???

b) learn a new language

Clunky, Slow Interface, unlike iPhone

[Anonymous Coward]

The S4 has a clunky, slow, laggy interface that is inconsistent with other Android implementation and difficult to use. It is also inconsistent with the platform's apps, where the developers have no guidance or framework for creating usable apps. The result is a poor ecosystem with a terrible user experience.

iPhone has an elegant, beautiful interface that shares harmony with the platform's high-quality applications for a more pleasing user experience across the operating system, apps, and other aspects of the human-machine interface.

Once again, the Google/Android/Knockoff Phone megaplex has completely missed the mark and made an inefficient product that no one will want to use.

Re:Clunky, Slow Interface, unlike iPhone

[Spy Handler]

how exactly would you know S4 has a clunky, slow laggy interface? It's not out yet, and the only people who were allowed to test it so far have been credentialed journalists at the event.

And I highly doubt you were one of those, seeing as how you're AC posting on slashdot.

Already available!

[crow]

You can get a dock for the Note that is compatible with the S3. It has a HDMI port and several USB ports. There are only two downsides: It costs around $80 to $100, and it doesn't necessarily work with USB ethernet.

Oh, and with the S3, you can get a simple USB OTG cable to hook up a keyboard and mouse (using a hub). It also works with USB hard drives. When I connected my USB ethernet adapter, it fried the phone. Instant death. They replaced it under warranty, but something is very wrong with the design if a standard USB device can destroy the phone.

I just want it for the IR transmitter

[crow]

The only feature that I really want in the S4 is the IR transmitter. There's nothing like having a remote control for all the TVs in the restaurant, primarily for using the off button.

It's no BlackBerry Z10

[DG]

If you haven't tried this phone yet, you really need to see the BB Z10. It provides the absolute best user experience with a phone I've ever had.

Re:It's no BlackBerry Z10

[Anonymous Coward]

trollololol

Re:what's the killer ap for bigger CPU on cell pho

[Anonymous Coward]

You laugh but there are actually people out there who think that is a good idea....

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15231758/programmatically-making-a-iphone-hot

As great as stackoverflow is, some of the people there really give me the willies.

Re:what's the killer ap for bigger CPU on cell pho

[schlachter]

I'd take power/weight savings over processing speed any day in my phone. Wish Apple/Samsung would optimize for that.

faster...

[schlachter]

not better.

Re:what's the killer ap for bigger CPU on cell pho

[Bigby]

Parent post has one such task. There is also anything you want the phone to do instead of the cloud; maybe bringing together weather, traffic, calendar, your location, and other services to determine any alerts that may be important to you. But for the most part, cores good (4 is probably the best); Hz not so much

Re:what's the killer ap for bigger CPU on cell pho

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a well-known axiom that states that software expands to fill hardware capabilities. In other words, while you may not need this much power in your pocket TODAY, you very well may TOMORROW, and more to the point, the fact that this power does exist will lead the software to exploit it.

Games are of course the prime example for most people. There's some truly stunning games out there for any device you name, but in many cases the systems they run on were far more powerful initially than was needed for the games of the time. The games expanded as the developers learned to push the boundaries.

There's some truly stunning apps for iOS and Android these days, and the future apps will be even more stunning as developers learn to use the power these new devices provide. So, that's the answer: there may not be any killer app today that justifies all this power, but this much power will allow the NEXT killer app that isn't possible with lesser hardware.

In other news...

[Torp]

My 15 months old iPhone 4S continues to be good enough. I'm not interested in the new Samsung, the new iPhone or the new anything.
Maybe after two more hardware refreshes...

Relevant?

[MaWeiTao]

Is this metric actually relevant? There's not a whole lot out there that will tax even current smartphone CPU's. The most demanding thing you can throw at a smartphone is gaming and that's where the GPU comes into play.

The iPhone's CPU has generally always been sub par in most benchmarks. But their GPU's has generally been at the front of the pack. The iPad 2/iPhone 4S GPU still scores quite favorably. The funny thing here is that the Galaxy S4 uses a newer variant of the GPU from the iPhone 5.

At the end of the day, however, this all feels like the clock speed wars of the 90's. Largely irrelevant as the performance improvements are largely incremental and won't even be fully exploited before the phone is replaced by a successor.

Re:Relevant?

[Anonymous Coward]

The funny thing here is that the Galaxy S4 uses a newer variant of the GPU from the iPhone 5.

FYI, it's not so much "newer variant" as "different variant". The version in Samsung's newest Exynos SoC supports some additional features, mostly for Windows DX11 compatibility. Imagination designed both variants as one project. Think of it as a compile-time ifdef to enable the additional features (because it pretty much is the moral equivalent of an ifdef). If you don't need to support DX11, the variant without support probably synthesizes to marginally fewer gates and consumes slightly less power. And you might even pay slightly less in patent licensing fees. (That's speculation on my part, but it's close to a certainty that any GPU feature you can think of has been patented by someone.)

Obviously, Apple only has to care about Apple's own OpenGL stack and OpenGL application base, neither of which use these features. Samsung, on the other hand, wants to sell the Exynos SoC to anybody. Including companies designing Windows RT tablets or WP8 phones...

Weird, I'd like Qualcomm better

[coder111]

Strange, I'm outside US, and I'll probably stay away from S4 as I'd like my next phone to have a Qualcomm chip. They are both powerful enough for a phone.

Octocore has PowerVR GPU which is absolutely hostile to open-source driver support. While Qualcomm at least has Freedreno.

On top of that this won't be supported by Cyanogenmod out of the box. I'll probably get a nexus 4 (or maybe nexus 5?) for my next upgrade.

--Coder

Battery Life

[snadrus]

The best battery savings is in a race to Idle. A faster phone means faster results so you'll turn-off your screen earlier, which is often the biggest power draw. Continuous uses like video can involve "buffer..sleep" cycles which involve more sleep on a faster processor.

You get this savings even if the power cost scaled equally to the CPU difference (likely better than that).

If I can't unlock it I won't own it.

[mrmeval]

I currently have a Samsung Vibrant. Does anyone know T-Mobile's unlocking stance? Also will Samsung abandon the phone just as soon as they damn well can and leave owners vulnerable to malware? This happened with the Vibrant but fortunately I could use community generated firmware with as much security fixes as they were able to do without trashing compatibility with binary blob drivers.

Re:what's the killer ap for bigger CPU on cell pho

[Anonymous Coward]

I have an app that does OCR on menus, signs etc and translates it on the fly. Works extremely well. Might even be available on iOS too.

How did that get rated "informative"?

[Anonymous Coward]

The parent post contains a completely false statement about HIPAA, so a rating of "misinformative" might be more appropriate.

HIPAA compliance is now readily achievable with commodity smartphones, so BES is just an expensive boondoggle at this point. It was great back in the day, sure, but now it's just another legacy app server to maintain.

Re:what's the killer ap for bigger CPU on cell pho

[Anonymous Coward]

bloatware. You need more cpu power/cores to handle all the background tasks they force you to run and can't delete.