Nexus 5 With Android 4.4 and Snapdragon 800 Challenges Apple A7 In Benchmarks

MojoKid writes "One of the hallmark features of Google's Nexus 5 flagship smartphone by LG isn't its bodaciously big 5-inch HD display, its 8MP camera, or its "OK Google" voice commands. That has all been done before. What does stand out about the Nexus 5 is Google's new Android 4.4 Kit Kat OS and LG's SoC (System on Chip) processor of choice, namely Qualcomm's Snapdragon 800 quad-core. Qualcomm is known for licensing ARM core technology and making it their own; and Qualcomm's latest Krait 400 quad-core along with the Adreno 330 GPU that comprise the Snapdragon 800, is a powerful beast. Google also has taken the scalpel to Kit Kat in all the right places, whittling down the overall footprint of the OS, so it's more efficient on lower-end devices and also offers faster multitasking. Specifically memory usage has been optimized in a number of areas. Couple these OS tweaks with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 800 and you end up with a smartphone that hugs the corners and lights 'em up on the straights. Putting the Nexus 5 through its paces, it turns out preliminary figures are promising. In fact, the Nexus 5 actually was able to surpass the iPhone 5s with Apple's 64-bit A7 processor in a few tests and goes toe to toe with it in gaming and graphics." Ars Technica has a similarly positive view of the hardware aspects of the phone, dinging it slightly for its camera but otherwise finding little to fault.

Comments

This is not a fair comparison

[giorgist]

This is not a fair comparison, the iPhone is twice the price.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[tyrione]

This is not a fair comparison, the iPhone is twice the price.

You've got a Quad-Core ARM running at twice their Ghz and you barely post benchmarks ahead of a Dual-Core A7, you know you're stupid for buying one.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Desler]

And the Nexus 5 has a SoC with 2 more cores, 80% higher max clock rate and double the RAM. That it can only keep up is pretty amusing.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[smash]

Because people are willing to pay twice as much money for it. Have a think about why.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[tepples]

So as not to have to rebuy movies and paid apps, perhaps? The original iPhone caught on because it could play DRM iTunes.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[smash]

Possibly in some cases. But there are plenty of new iphone users. The original iphone caught on because it did stuff no other available device did (or at least not as well). Playing DRM content off iTunes was only a small part of that.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

and doesn't its cpu and coprocessor require like twice the power, too.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

especially if you bought it basing opinions on benchmarks

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Desler]

Because we all know that the only people buying iPhones are original iPhone owners, right? Lame excuses are lame.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[auzy]

It kind of is. Of course, this excludes the fact that Android Apps are actually portable (unlike iPhone apps), and ultimately, when Google implements ART instead of Dalvik, Android will be significantly more competitive in performance (these benchmarks don't test the hardware exclusively, but the software environment also).

We can also install other Android builds easily on the Nexus phones, and so are able to do things, which are impossible on Apple (without risking completely messing up the phone on upgrades, such as screen recording).

Long term, Android is a better solution, and is is a more open environment, is less hostile to develop for, and I've found that my Nexus 5 is so snappy anyway, that the speed is irrelevent at this time. And yes, I have 3 other people in the office who are iPhone fans and my Nexus 5 has helped convert 2 of them, who are sick of all the small annoyances by Apple, such as getting cut by the broken glass backing of their iPhone (and the fact that on HSDPA/Wifi iPads for a very long time, we found they kept prioritising the HSDPA, making it painful for automation).

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[whoever57]

You've got a Quad-Core ARM running at twice their Ghz and you barely post benchmarks ahead of a Dual-Core A7, you know you're stupid for buying one.

No. you are stupid for basing your decisions on factors that don't affect your usage of the device. All that matters is how fast it brings up web pages, runs apps, etc., battery life, size and other factors such as features the OS and ecosystem provides. The clock rate of the processor is not relevant to the user.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, this excludes the fact that Android Apps are actually portable

Portable to what exactly?

and ultimately, when Google implements ART instead of Dalvik, Android will be significantly more competitive in performance (these benchmarks don't test the hardware exclusively, but the software environment also).

Ah yes, the classic Fandroid response of "Just around the corner it's gonna get better!!!"

We can also install other Android builds easily on the Nexus phones, and so are able to do things, which are impossible on Apple (without risking completely messing up the phone on upgrades, such as screen recording).

99% of Android users don't install other ROMs on their phone.

Long term, Android is a better solution, and is is a more open environment,

It's only "open" when you ignore all the proprietary software, the fact that it's basically developed behind close doors by Google and that to get any visibility you have to go through Google Play which has many the same terms as the Apple App Store.

is less hostile to develop for

You can't afford $99? For any decent programmer that's not even 3 hours of pay.

such as getting cut by the broken glass backing of their iPhone

Then maybe they should have gotten their phone replaced or put it in a case? How is it Apple's fault that someone drops their phone and is dumb enough to cut themselves on the glass?

Re: This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

Says the hypnotic apple jobs follower

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[jmhobrien]

Well what are we comparing here price or performance?

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

E-peens, so keep everything nice and vague.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[jmhobrien]

I hope you are talking about the Android phone?
http://blog.opower.com/2012/09/how-much-does-it-cost-to-charge-an-iphone-5-a-thought-provokingly-modest-0-41year/

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[timeOday]

That's no different than claiming the A7 is pathetic for needing 64 bit registers to do what the SnapDragon does with 32. Which is to say, very silly.

Now, if double cores and double the MHz give the Nexus 5 less battery life than the iPhone, then you have a leg to stand on.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[bill_mcgonigle]

these days confronting reality is "flamebait". Welcome to lala land.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

Because people are willing to pay twice as much money for it. Have a think about why.

It boggles the mind. Some things just can't be explained.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[MacDork]

You've got a Quad-Core ARM running at twice their Ghz and you barely post benchmarks ahead of a Dual-Core A7, you know you're stupid for buying one.

Stupid for buying a faster phone at half the price? You have a strange concept of stupid :-)

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

Because people are willing to pay twice as much money for it. Have a think about why.

Ahh yes. Here we see the iPhone owner in his natural habitat. Smugness surrounding him like the warm cloak of a new iThing case, he trolls non-members of the apple cult with vague language and non sequiturs.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[smash]

No. Some things are explained by reasons some people are simply unwilling to accept.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you are beating the wrong horse here. The hardware looks great and fine. If Nexus 5 really got twice the cores and twice the horsepower as iPhone. So what is going on? Why it can't really beat iPhone? Maybe it is because it runs a faulty software, namely the one under the name "Java".

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[smash]

/thread

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[smash]

Not trolling. Pointing out that vast numbers of people buy the iPhone despite it costing 2x as much. And this is despite the fact that most people are cheap - hence VHS winning against Betamax, Hyundai being way more popular than BMW, etc. It's also why most android handsets are not Nexus 5s or Galaxy 4s.

There are reasons for people buying iPhones despite all this. Chief amongst them is that the average Joe DOES NOT CARE about what the numbers are with synthetic benchmarks, number of pixels on screen, etc. They care about how well a device performance the functions they want it to do. Despite what many in the slashdot crowd may think, things like look and feel, UI consistency, battery life and integration with other devices and services is important.

The raw numbers are pretty irrelevant for everybody outside a very small subset of the population. For so many people to be buying iphones despite being "2x the price", there must be something they value in the device, otherwise they wouldn't be buying it.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[smash]

Also, i forgot another big reason: after-sales customer service. Apple does well at this, with OS upgrades, repairs and other support.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[giorgist]

Hihi ... wooosh :-) I have a Nexus 5

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[AcidPenguin9873]

Quad core doesn't help you on single-threaded, lightly-threaded, or GPU benchmarks, which is most of the benchmarks that I saw in the article. That means you can't say that Krait sucks because it has four cores and barely beats a dual core, since the four cores aren't being utilized. The conclusion you can draw is that a quad core CPU isn't necessary for a good user experience on a phone.

And needing a faster clock to reach the same performance levels isn't a meaningful metric either, at least not in a phone. In a phone that is power-constrained, the metric is performance per watt. If both CPUs burn the same power and give the same performance, they're basically equivalent. How each chooses to provide that performance is immaterial in a phone which is a power-constrained environment. Maybe the Apple CPU has some performance headroom at higher power budgets if it could run at a faster frequency (thus providing higher perf at the same freq as the Krait core), but that doesn't help you if it has to run throttled at all times so as to not blow through the phone's battery life and/or burn your pants.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[NeoMorphy]

This is not a fair comparison, the iPhone is twice the price.

You've got a Quad-Core ARM running at twice their Ghz and you barely post benchmarks ahead of a Dual-Core A7, you know you're stupid for buying one.

So, what you are saying is that the Nexus 5 is faster, but it needed twice as many higher clock speed processors, which is bad because it costs half as much or is it because it has a higher resolution display. And now that the iPhone doesn't have the highest resolution display, that's unimportant? Buying one of the fastest phones, that has a great display, has stock Android OS, and is cheap is stupid??? I do not think that word means what you think it means.

Re: This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

The typical non sequitur troll response of a fandroid unable to come up with some intelligent argument. As always.

Hi gSheep.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[auzy]

Portable to what exactly?

Computers for starters.. Long term, we can run Android apps on Intel computers at full speed. On Apple, that won't be possible without an emulator, recompile, or switching the computer to ARM.

Ah yes, the classic Fandroid response of "Just around the corner it's gonna get better!!!"

Apple's program execution is nothing special. ART eliminates the disadvantages of using portable code, and allows the execution system to be far more flexible than Apple's. Android is using a slower system at the moment, but, better solutions do take more effort (one giant leap for mankind).

99% of Android users don't install other ROMs on their phone.

Where'd you get that figure? Anyone who purchased the humble bundles did. Part of the Apple Store's intention is to actively block competitors. That is even dodgier when you consider that Apple has stolen products in the past (which, after doing so, they will be competing against you). Also, if the hacker community wasn't there, we would have no good way to make videos of the product we developed for iPhone (we tried a video camera, it was terrible).

That to get any visibility you have to go through Google Play which has many the same terms as the Apple App Store.

Humble bundle gets plenty of visibility, and its a separate system. Also,if you spend 2 months developing software, you WILL be able to run it on the platform ultimately. On the Apple App store, you basically need to discard or Cydia the software if it isn't approved.

Finally, in 2009, it was estimated that Cydia was installed by 10% of the iPhone userbase (could be biased, from the Cydia website). And so, their app's obviously do have PLENTY of visibility on iPhone. The fact though that Cydia constantly breaks though is "hostile" towards unapproved apps. It shouldn't be necessary.

You can't afford $99? For any decent programmer that's not even 3 hours of pay.

That's $99 without any guarantee you will ever be able to sell the software you are developing on another iPhone (unless you go to Cydia). That sounds fantastic! There are so many developers on Cydia, who have developed great Apps, that Apple has screwed. I'm sure many Cydia developers LOVE Apple as much as you do.

Then maybe they should have gotten their phone replaced or put it in a case? How is it Apple's fault that someone drops their phone and is dumb enough to cut themselves on the glass?

Why is it an airplane's company fault if a pilot accidentally hits the wrong button causing the plane to crash? In the Airplane industry, they call this "Human Factors". The glass backing is an inexcusably poor design. The guy who I saw was cut, was just picking up his dropped phone . Basically, if you drop it on its back, it is designed to shatter, and if you are lucky, there are sharp glass fragments on the ground for other people to step on. Apple must have known that making the back out of glass (instead of Plastic or other materials), but instead, they decided to use an extremely fragile material (obviously weighing up whether the Apple Fanbase would care or not), and they ignored human factors in the process of designing the phone (all for the interest of making a good looking phone).

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Clsid]

And here I thought that the big thing about using 64-bit was to be able to access more RAM in the future. Since we are rapidly approaching the point where phones will have more than 4GB of RAM, I don't really see your point there. A quad-core does use more power than a dual-core, which is a good advantage in mobile. I think Apple has the right balance in the hardware (screen included) except the outrageous prices.

Me, I'm perfectly happy with a ZTE V965 and its very fast for what I need Mediatek 6589. I think a lot of people would save a lot more money if they only get what they really need instead of the latest and the greatest. That whole argument of because I don't need to buy another phone for a couple of years is a moot point as well btw, especially when I purchased said ZTE phone for $82 unlocked.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Clsid]

I don't agree with Google's octopus policies regarding privacy but you are very right about the Nexus 5. It has single-handedly managed to make any prospective iPhone buyer look like a complete fool.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[ahabswhale]

Actually, if you look at the benchmarks it loses in everything but the GL benchmarks. Then go and look at the benchmarks at phonearena and the 5S hands the Nexus 5 it's ass on pretty much every test. Personally I'll reserve final judgement until I see an anadtech comparison but looking at everything out there right now, the Nexus 5 doesn't hold a candle to the iPhone 5s. That's not to say it's a bad phone, because it isn't. I'm just saying you're buying a fantasy if you think this thing is on par with the 5S.

Before I get called an Apple fanboy, you should know that I own two phones and they are both Samsung Android phones.

Re: This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

Predictably enough, battery life on the nexus 5 is a joke. Confirming the age old maxim - with sufficient thrust pigs fly just fine.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

One thing I've discovered while running the exact same apps, is that my buddy's iPhone 5s will heat up to almost unbearably hot (and eventually go into cooldown mode if maintained for too long) while my Nexus 5 stays extremely cool, even with background apps running.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[smash]

Tis why i browse with flamebait +2 (see sig).

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[smash]

Yes, it is unimportant that the iPhone doesn't have the highest resolution display, as anything that is "high enough" is all that is required. Samsung or Google could release a phone with a native 4k display for all the good it will do; you won't notice any difference.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[symbolset]

Apparently JIT overhead matters a lot. When I enable the ART runtime on my N5, it won't even give a score on these tests. It just says "maxed out".

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[smash]

I'm sure apple will be totally screwed by changing arch. Given that, you know - the new apps for the new iOS would require compilation with the new xcode, which will no doubt have a little button for "x64" or "arm" like it did with the PPC transition. As far as existing software goes, it is all retrieved from the app store, and apple can recompile/require re-submit/etc. for the new platform as they please.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[prowler1]

The most common reason I usually get from non-technical people on why they want or why they purchased an iPhone (or iPad) was because they are 'cool' or 'trendy'. None of them has been able to tell me why or what features it has or does better than any of its competitors. Simply put, they didn't give a damn about how well their device functions when they use it, just the image they can reflect or inherit by owning one.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[davester666]

Exactly. Is the Nexus finally powerful enough to not jitter while scrolling lists or web pages?

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

i....i cant see a sig.

OH GOD

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[auzy]

You do make a fair point.. I recall Photoshop taking a year to port, however, as it turns out, the delay was because they used carbon instead of cocoa (I didn't realise it at the time though, because I only got into Apple coding a year later).However, you are possibly right that it was pretty close most of the time (except in cases of byte ordering probably, in which case additional work would have been needed, however, such changes could probably practically be done with temporary compatibility flags in the compiler during writes/reads to external outputs)

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[drinkypoo]

And here I thought that the big thing about using 64-bit was to be able to access more RAM in the future. Since we are rapidly approaching the point where phones will have more than 4GB of RAM, I don't really see your point there.

That begs the question, are we rapidly approaching that point? I see phones rocking 2GB for some time.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[drinkypoo]

99% of Android users don't install other ROMs on their phone.

Where'd you get that figure? Anyone who purchased the humble bundles did.

Uh what? The humble bundles install through a custom app, not a custom rom.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

because the salesman tells them it's better...

because their friends have one ...

because they want to look rich ...

because they're stupid ...

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Bogtha]

I think I'm qualified to comment on this. I've been an iOS developer since 2008. My company makes iOS and Android applications. I used flagship Android phones from 2008-2012 before switching to the iPhone. So I've had a lot of experience with both platforms from both the user and developer sides.

I think Android phones are terrible in comparison to iPhones. The reason why I started out with Android phones was for the reasons you outline - more open, and more flexible. I quickly discovered that wasn't all it was cracked up to be. The reason why I stayed with Android for so long was that a) I was holding out hope that it would be better in the long run and b) I wanted a hardware keyboard.

Open: Android is "open" in the "open cathedral" sense. It's very difficult to just jump in, make a few alterations, and see the changes running on your device. Practically speaking, it's not developed in an open sense in the same way most open source projects are. You could write a book about the implications this has and how it undermines the benefits open source normally provides.

Less hostile to develop for: not a chance. Yes, Apple have the ultimate say-so on what's allowed on the App Store. Yes, that's a big deal. But with Android, you have to contend with thousands of different models, each with their own shitty customisations that break things. We deployed an application last week for Android. It was finished weeks beforehand for iOS. Despite only having to target three recent Android tablets (it was an in-house project), each tablet was broken in different ways. iOS development is a breeze by comparison.

The problem with producing applications for the iPhone is Apple's policies. That's not a development obstacle, that's a policy issue. As we are a digital agency, all this really means for us is that we can say "Apple won't allow that" to clients when they ask for us to do something that Apple won't allow. And you know what? 99% of the time, it's when the client is asking for us to do something user-hostile.

The problem with producing applications for Android is development. The client asks for the feature, there's no intrinsic reason why it can't be done, but in practice you find that what should work and what does work on various devices differs radically.

Then there's the upgrade issue. I've done a lot of web development. Android is the Internet Explorer 6 of the mobile world. Masses of people don't upgrade, and more than a quarter of Android users are still on Gingerbread, released almost three years ago. It takes less than a year for about 95% of iOS users to upgrade to the latest version.

This isn't just a developer problem, it's a user problem as well. When I bought my last Android phone, it was a flagship Sony phone shipped with 2.3 that they had committed to upgrading to 4.0. That's the only reason I gave in and stayed with Android. The promise that I might actually stay up to date for once. Sure enough, they broke that promise. But they dragged it out for a year saying that they would do it. Meanwhile, the version of Android I was stuck on had a bug that rendered my SIP phone line useless.

You lose features too. Remember when OTA upgrades were an advantage over iOS? The year before iOS added that feature, I got an Android upgrade that took that feature away. It was a shitty vendor customisation. I had to use a buggy desktop application that crashed my computer to upgrade Android. When I switched vendors? Same thing, but with a completely different buggy desktop application.

Android's a mess. It was a mess for the fours years I was using it, with every single handset I tried, as I was hoping in vain for it to get better. It never got better, in fact the problems with the platform became more numerous over time. It's "openness" is an illusion and is not going to fix the problems it faces.

I disli

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Ginger Unicorn]

So a phone that's half the price of an iPhone can keep up with it.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[AmiMoJo]

And that fact is mostly irrelevant. Remember back when AMD started quoting their Athlon processors by speed rating rather than MHz because Intel went all out to get high clock speeds? I thought everyone knew that megahertz were not directly comparable between architectures these days.

In this case Apple has gone down the more complex route with a processor that can do more per clock cycle at the expense of added cost and power consumption. The Snapdragon CPU takes the opposite approach with simpler cores that run at higher clock rates. Such cores are cheaper to manufacture and have power consumption advantages when not running flat out at their maximum clock rate.

Also note that the benchmarks they ran don't saturate all four cores, and neither do most mobile games. The extra RAM helps the phone multitask, and no benchmarks or games use it all on either platform so it's meaningless.

It's pretty amusing that Apple spent so much time and money to develop their CPU and it ended up costing far more than the much simpler and equally fast competition. 64 bit turned out to be completely irrelevant at this stage.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[AmiMoJo]

It's a question of marketing. Samsung and Apple spend by far the most and have the most brand recognition, and unsurprisingly sell the best as well. Google doesn't do much mainstream advertising of its hardware, which is a shame because people would buy it in droves if they knew they could get something as good or better than a Galaxy S/iPhone for half the price.

It's only anecdotal evidence but I have seen people make this realization. The first time was when Apple sued Samsung over the infamous rounded corners patent, and suddenly people were asking why they were spending so much on an iPad when they could get a Samsung that was a third cheaper and by Apple's own admission the same thing. More recently a friend's daughter lost her high end HTC and the insurance money was only enough to get a Nexus 4, but once she could see how good it was (better than the HTC in some respects) she was sold on it and the other members of her family got Nexus phones when their's needed replacing.

I think we may be coming to the end of the high price smartphone era, because much cheaper phones are just so good now the only real improvement will be incremental battery life extension and software.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[drinkypoo]

Hyundai being way more popular than BMW

You do know that german cars haven't been the most reliable thing on the road since the late seventies or early eighties, right? Hyundai actually does pretty well in this category. Hyundai isn't just cheaper, it's also vastly better value for money.

Re: This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

Both the A7 and Qualcomm 800 are much faster than what is currently required. That said the nexus 5 has a 5" full HD screen, wireless charging, NFC and is half the price. The iPhone is actually becoming a bad joke.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[rocket rancher]

And the Nexus 5 has a SoC with 2 more cores, 80% higher max clock rate and double the RAM. That it can only keep up is pretty amusing.

What is amusing is that the Nexus 5 costs half what the iPhone does. Apple's target demographic has always been people with more money than brains. Thwok....ball's in your court.

Re: This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

Typical iPhone fanboy wasn't too run the arguement both ways. The CPU performance which on both phones is significantly more that what is necessary is debated endlessly, but their screen which runs at less than HD is perfectly adequate. By the way I have a nexus 4 and a nexus 5 and the new screen looks fantastic furthermore the battery life is not an issue.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

Where'd you get that figure? Anyone who purchased the humble bundles did. Part of the Apple Store's intention is to actively block competitors. That is even dodgier when you consider that Apple has stolen products in the past (which, after doing so, they will be competing against you). Also, if the hacker community wasn't there, we would have no good way to make videos of the product we developed for iPhone (we tried a video camera, it was terrible).

This is a solved problem. Normally, you record the iOS Simulator. If you for some reason need to do it on the device, mirror the screen over AirPlay and record that.

Humble bundle gets plenty of visibility, and its a separate system. Also,if you spend 2 months developing software, you WILL be able to run it on the platform ultimately. On the Apple App store, you basically need to discard or Cydia the software if it isn't approved.

No, if the app gets rejected, you fix the thing that made them reject it. It's very rare that the core functionality of the app gets rejected. This just isn't a problem in practice.

Finally, in 2009, it was estimated that Cydia was installed by 10% of the iPhone userbase (could be biased, from the Cydia website).

Yes, but the majority of jailbreaks are for unlocking phones tied to a carrier.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[AmiMoJo]

Open: Android is "open" in the "open cathedral" sense. It's very difficult to just jump in, make a few alterations, and see the changes running on your device.

Wait, are you an app developer or an OS developer? Most app developers don't try to patch the OS. At least on Android you can submit patches, on iOS there is no way to do that. AOSP isn't hard to interact with, compared to say the Linux kernel or BSD.

Yes, Apple have the ultimate say-so on what's allowed on the App Store. Yes, that's a big deal.

Apple can make you waste vast amount of money developing something only for it to be blocked, and then copied by Apple themselves. That's more than a big deal. It's hard to get projects approved when managers see this happening.

But with Android, you have to contend with thousands of different models, each with their own shitty customisations that break things.

Only if you are a terrible programmer. Like most operating systems Android runs on multiple platforms and offers stable APIs to interact with that hardware. Just like you wouldn't design your Windows or Linux app to run at 800x600 and then get upset when people find it looks crap on their 1920x1200 monitor you should not be developing Android apps that are tailored to specific hardware.

Can you provide any concrete examples of standard Android API functions that are broken on popular Android devices? The worst I have seen is some flaky Bluetooth drivers, but those are down to the phone manufacturer in the same way you wouldn't call Windows broken because Dell ship broken drivers with some of their computers.

99% of the time, it's when the client is asking for us to do something user-hostile.

You mean like develop an alternative HTML rendering engine, or set up their own app/book/music/video store, or write a better SMS messaging system, or port their keyboard from Android, or some nefarious scheme like that?

Masses of people don't upgrade, and more than a quarter of Android users are still on Gingerbread, released almost three years ago.

31% of desktops are still running Windows XP, which was released in 2002. Of course that doesn't tell the whole story. .NET 4 is available for Windows XP, just like how many of the newer features in Android are available via non-OS updates that everyone gets via Play.

This really isn't the big issue crap programmers make it out to be. The API is stable, it's easy to deal with the differences and if a feature isn't available in Gingerbread there probably isn't any point trying to hack around it because devices of that age won't support it anyway. Can you point to any specific functions that have caused you problems, or is this just a general rant?

It takes less than a year for about 95% of iOS users to upgrade to the latest version.

Yes, and now you get complaints that your app is dog slow because the OS runs like a dog on older hardware, but users were not clever enough to block the update and can't downgrade.

It was a shitty vendor customisation.

Simple solution, don't buy from shitty vendors. Really, your argument is that once you bought a gas hob cooker and it was awful, leaked gas and eventually exploded burning your house down, therefore all gas hob cookers are shit and electric induction is the only way to go.

I dislike the controlling attitude of Apple and I dislike how much power they have in the mobile market.

No, you love it. You want your hand held. You want everyone to have a practically forced OS update with no downgrades, even if it makes their phone terribly slow. You want strictly controlled hardware and no choice about it so that you don't have to use your brain when writing apps.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

And that's perhaps why ART core is being tested... from what I gather it's not much of an improvement either.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[jareth-0205]

Of course, this excludes the fact that Android Apps are actually portable

Portable to what exactly?

You'know... *portable*. Maybe not portable *out* as much, but there's a bunch of standard Java libraries that have been tweaked for Android app use (or in many cases, can be used directly within apps). This is a pretty big win for developers.

and ultimately, when Google implements ART instead of Dalvik, Android will be significantly more competitive in performance (these benchmarks don't test the hardware exclusively, but the software environment also).

Ah yes, the classic Fandroid response of "Just around the corner it's gonna get better!!!"

Well, indeed, but what these 'fans' are also saying is that *right now* the situation works pretty well, and in the future there's a highly likely big bump in performance as devices start recompiling to machine code on app installation. Android is only in a bad state performancewise in your mind, everyone else who uses & develops for find it quite acceptable.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[TheRaven64]

The smooth scrolling on the iPhone is implemented by the scroll view instructing every view inside one to draw a larger region than is actually composited into the final image. It looks smoother because it's just compositing already-drawn data into the exposed region, rather than having to do all of the rendering on demand. It's a pretty neat trick, but this trick comes at the expense of making the CPU do more work to render bits of a page that may never be seen, and used-CPU means used battery life. I don't know what the total cost is, but Apple has obviously decided that it's worth it and you apparently agree, but it's not a question of CPU speed it's a question of what the widget set does with it.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if you are a terrible programmer

Don't be a jerk, there are things outside your control. I still haven't found a video file format which works on all Android phones. On iOS it's an mp4, but on Android we always get the "hey, my phone doesn't play this" shit. Yeah, terrible programmer, those making Android suck so much.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

nice work. you manage not to address the issue at hand,
and insinuate that anyone that doesn't see this as obvious
is a dimwit. in fact, i don't believe there is any objective data
that explains why someone would pay twice as much for a
phone (or car) of similar functionality.

Re: This is not a fair comparison

[iamhassi]

And those original iPhone buyers brought developers, and those developers created apps that drew more buyers to the iPhone. Now you have millions of apps and hundreds of millions of eager app buyers on iPhone. Which is why people keep buying iPhones, for the apps, and why developers keep making quality apps, for the money.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[jo_ham]

And the Nexus 5 has a SoC with 2 more cores, 80% higher max clock rate and double the RAM. That it can only keep up is pretty amusing.

What is amusing is that the Nexus 5 costs half what the iPhone does. Apple's target demographic has always been people with more money than brains. Thwok....ball's in your court.

That's not really an argument.

Remove the word "Apple" from your argument and you're essentially saying that anyone who buys any product that costs more than the absolute cheapest product available in that class is an idiot.

This sort of bell curve of product purchasing is totally accepted in everyday life (cars, food, houses, sports equipment, televisions, jewellery, books, entertainment, holidays...) but somehow when the same metric is applied to computers, unless you buy from the bottom of the discount bargain bin, you're suddenly an idiot.

It's certainly a strange argument coming from the corner than claims to promote user choice. Or is it only the right choice if they make the same choice that you do? Anything else is the consumer clearly demonstrating they have "more money than brains"? Is it part of the Android experience to not just enjoy the phone and ecosystem you selected based on your own criteria, but also to insult anyone who had a different set of selection criteria to you? Put another way; I don't think all Android users are idiots for not choosing iOS, or OS X.

As is predictable in this thread, when Apple is on top on benchmarks, suddenly they don't matter. When Apple is behind on benchmarks they get bashed for having "expensive, old hardware that can't keep up". In other words, the argument positions between the extremes of the camps swaps over. Still, the underlying "if you didn't buy an Android you have more money than brains" always persists.

Thwok; ball is back in your court.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[bill_mcgonigle]

Good call. Imma go adjust my score modifiers now.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Bogtha]

Open: Android is "open" in the "open cathedral" sense. It's very difficult to just jump in, make a few alterations, and see the changes running on your device.

Wait, are you an app developer or an OS developer?

I'm not talking about the technical difficulty in writing a patch. I'm talking about the difficulty in applying a patch in practical terms. If I want to, say, modify my Xperia Pro so that a particular application that is useless to me isn't forcibly bundled, it's far more difficult than it should be.

Apple can make you waste vast amount of money developing something only for it to be blocked, and then copied by Apple themselves. That's more than a big deal. It's hard to get projects approved when managers see this happening.

I deal with people who commission apps on a regular basis. Unless the entire concept of an application is forbidden by Apple (e.g. porn), it's never been a deal breaker.

But with Android, you have to contend with thousands of different models, each with their own shitty customisations that break things.

Only if you are a terrible programmer. Like most operating systems Android runs on multiple platforms and offers stable APIs to interact with that hardware.

Which means nothing when vendors customise the implementations of those APIs and break them. It's all very well saying that, say, the API to draw a control on screen is the same across all devices, but if one device draws the control and another doesn't bother, that's kind of a problem.

Can you provide any concrete examples of standard Android API functions that are broken on popular Android devices?

I don't remember the full details, but the most egregious problem we had was that radio buttons simply weren't showing up on one device. At all. On another device, the rendering was completely fucked in some way, something like being a tenth of the size they should be or something. The code was right, and the application worked just fine on most of our test devices. But on some, they simply didn't work right due to vendor customisations.

99% of the time, it's when the client is asking for us to do something user-hostile.

You mean like develop an alternative HTML rendering engine, or set up their own app/book/music/video store, or write a better SMS messaging system, or port their keyboard from Android, or some nefarious scheme like that?

Let's be straight here: I'm describing what Apple's policies mean for us in practice, and I'm reporting what clients actually ask us to do. You are scraping everything you can think of that Apple has ever rejected together. I'm sure there are lots of business plans that have fallen by the wayside in the five years Apple have been running the App Store. But that doesn't mean that they are a significant percentage of the apps people actually want to create.

No client has ever asked us to develop an alternative HTML rendering engine. Why would they? Besides, Apple don't have a problem with an alternative HTML rendering engine.

No client has ever asked us to set up their own app store. There are book stores on the App Store already, there's no rule against having a book/music/video store.

Alternative SMS messaging systems aren't against Apple's rules. I've got one on my phone right now.

No client has ever asked us to replace part of the system like a keyboard. If you have an application that needs a custom keyboard, you can implement one for your application, but you can't replace the keyboard in other people's applications.

When I say that the things clients ask us to do are things that are user-hostile, I'm talking about things like hookin

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

German cars are reliable enough for me! Mine runs since 24 years now, did never ever stop apart from a flat tire and has very little rust. I watched several japanese cars at work rust away in this time range!

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[bobwalt]

Yes but how does it compare to the Tegra 4 with the GeForce cores?

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[drinkypoo]

Mine is 30 years old and runs like a crackhead with your stereo, but if you've looked at German reliability it's been in the toilet until recently and the only german cars which hold their value are mid-range VWs and to a lesser extent, BMW 5-series.

Re: This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

The iPhone is twice the price and half the phone.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

Explain it, then. Otherwise your logic seems to be "the iPhone is better because it costs more, and it costs more because it's better."

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

because nexus 5 is high end device , if ART enabled android installed on low end device , performance improvement will be very high . and another thing , ART doesn't anything with benchmark's . benchmark use NDK and native code for most of cases . but ART is for improvement for managed part

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't be so sure about the simpler here, e.g. the Qualcomm version of the cortex-a8 had some OO capabilities that don't appear in the general ARM spec until -a9, etc. but that's the benefit of not just taking ARM's reference design and plunking it onto your SoC, ASUS will be doing this with Tegra 6 IIRC(designing a compatible ARM rather than plunking in ARM's ref design as they've so far...)

I've got the black 32G n5. It's definitely noticeably zippier than the n4, although the areas that I'm usually in T-mobile's LTE is a disappointment(the areas that I'm are supposedly labelled VERY GOOD to EXCELLENT, although I'd personally rate them crap to non-existent), being no better than HSPA+ in the same locations, only upside being LTE is more reliable than HSPA+ which would stall out(completely) and/or corrupt data transfers. Upload still sucks on both though. (All said it's still way better than Sprint or AT&T, but too bad Verizon doesn't have sane pricing models... but enough digression...)

It's a pretty decent phone for the price. Haven't looked at any photos that I've taken on a computer yet though, so I can't say much about that.

KitKat is good AND bad(mostly to me the limited # of screens(3), sure I could replace the launcher but at the cost of integrated improved searching, so I'll keep the searching and deal...)

Beyond that? It's a smartphone. Really I only moved from my n4 to the n5 for the improved radios(cell/wifi)

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

In your little fanboy ragepost you neglected to tell us your background in mobile dev and why your opinion counts for anything. I am not the OP but I also started iOS dev when the first iPhone SDK was released, have coded Android for 4 years now, and have been a pure mobile programmer for well over a decade (ie plenty of J2ME java experience in addition to the android java-like experience) - and I can tell you quite impartially that everything the OP said is 100% TRUE. He was very balanced too - he even highlighted the problems with the Apple ecosystem, of which there are several.

What he didn't even get into though is how dismally bad the tools are for Android dev - or do you think a wait of several minutes for the debugger to launch is acceptable in 2013 still? And that's on hardware - I won't even get started on spinning up an emulator. Google is trying hard to catch up to Xcode with their new Android Studio (it hasn't eaten my project file for a at least a month now!) but it is laughably bug ridden still, and yet (sadly) still a superior alternative to the mess of Eclipse, which was the previous "standard". Laying out screens for Android SUCKS, and the tools they give are appallingly weak for developing rich apps across many screen sizes - which is an issue because Android crosses many screen sizes (and DPI sizes too). Unless you want your app to look like a late 90's joke with shitty 9 patch buttons you are left to go down a very deep rabbit hole of multiple layouts, size definitions and graphics. You want things to scale automatically? Well tough luck - you will get no help with that from Android, it can't even scale a font to fill a text box properly.

What really gave you away as a fandroid (and probable koolaid drinking Google employee) is your dismissal of such a large proportion of users still being on Gingerbread as being only a problem for "crap programmers" - what a pathetic defense mechanism you have there. What kind of human being can look at hard facts (95% of iOS users upgraded to the latest within a year) and yet still spout the dribble you do about Android being just as good because you don't have to use any of the new features if you don't want to? And then you further make yourself look like an absolute idiot when you state that vendor specific issues can me magically resolved by not buying from bad vendors - well, genius, that might work when you're nothing more than a bedroom shut-in writing some sad little app that only you will use on your original Nexus, but those of us who have to write apps for real consumers need to deal with that very real problem. Do want to guess how many vendor specific customizations there are out there now? Hundreds? Thousands? I'd love it if you could extoll the "open" virtues of Android some more too - perhaps you missed the memo but Google is doing everything in their power to lock down Android and turn it into nothing more than a Trojan Horse to scrape user data for directed ads. Ars did a great write up on how "open" android is the other week, you would do well to read it, as well as their KitKat write up which goes into the massive expansion of search.

You obviously haven't done any iOS dev - in fact I doubt you've even done any real Android dev. Nobody with any real industry experience would write a post like you did because they all KNOW that Android is a nightmare to deal with and wouldn't bother trying to defend the indefensible. What Android has is a massive user base, and that alone will guarantee that poor sods like me have to knuckle down and write for the platform, but it doesn't make it a good platform, not by a long shot.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Bing Tsher E]

People like you badly need for there to be products other than Apple products. For some reason it matters that you have a company's product-line to champion.

It's really a strange phenomenon and Apple takes great advantage of it.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Bing Tsher E]

You can't afford $99? For any decent programmer that's not even 3 hours of pay.

That's $99 per year, to even be able to try coding for iOS. Plus, you need a recent/current Apple computer running the current MacOS to run the dev tools on.

The Android tools are freely available and run on every commonly available desktop platform.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Bogtha]

That's $99 per year, to even be able to try coding for iOS.

That's not true. It's free to download Xcode, free to develop applications, and free to run them on the iOS simulator. You don't have to have a paid account to learn how to develop for iOS. The fee is to publish applications in the App Store and on devices.

Plus, you need a recent/current Apple computer running the current MacOS to run the dev tools on.

The multi-platform thing, I'll grant you. As for recent, well you need a Mac from 2007 onwards. The oldest I've personally tried was 2008, and it was a bit slow, but perfectly usable for professional purposes. Try running the Android emulator on a six year old computer - it's incredibly slow on brand new ones.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

You're not limited to 3 screens. Long press on the home screen and drag to a new screen or move an icon or widget to the new screen by dragging it to the right.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[smash]

Where did I say anything about reliability? I own one (E39) and I will freely admit that repairs send me broke. But it is worth it for the actual driving experience.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[smash]

On the other hand I have plenty of Android owning friends who have sworn to buy an iPhone next time around based on severe dis-satisfaction with the Android device they have dealt with on contract for the past 2 years.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

If you really are a "mobile" developer you must really be shitty at it. I'm guessing you never attained a post secondary education in the discipline.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

iOS apps are already compiled for Intel on a regular basis - how do you think xcode's iOS simulator runs on a Mac? No, it's not emulating ARM, the binaries compiled for the simulator are compiled for the Intel architecture. If Apple ever wanted to switch to (for example) Atom processors, the ability has been baked in since the beginning.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[iluvcapra]

The most common reason I usually get from non-technical people on why they want or why they purchased an iPhone (or iPad) was because they are 'cool' or 'trendy'.

I call shenanigans. This may be the underlying reason, but no self-respecting human with a pulse will openly, flatly admit to doing something because it was "cool" or "trendy".

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[iluvcapra]

It seems like Apple changes arch on something every two years, constantly and at different times in all their lines. They have this issue utterly figured out, if you stick with their toolchain things just work.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[ADRA]

Sorry, not all trend follwers are self loathing hipsters with a complex. Some people like something because its hip/cool/cred/cache. Nobody on earth buys a Ferrari and says 'well, the engine performance is just makes the money relevant'. Not they buy Ferrari's because they're Ferrari's. There's dozens of cars that are better suited for racing / etc.. but there is only one reason to own one.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, that really rebutted his points, thanks for that.

Insulting him doesn't make the Android emulator run any faster you know.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Skuld-Chan]

The architecture is different though - Android runs everything under a VM. I suspect if the iPhone ran everything under a VM with the processor it currently sports it would be a different picture.

There are advantages and disadvantages with this approach - the advantages you went over - the iPhone is faster with less CPU. Android however can take advantage of newer processors and new features quicker however. A VM for instance lends itself more useful at distributing load much better at non SMP aware apps.

The iPhone really can't make any /major/ architecture changes without breaking userspace. Where as Android has proved that the cpu doesn't matter really - I've seen Android apps run on x86, mips and many different ARM systems for example.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[SirMasterboy]

Because perhaps for some people it doesn't cost more.

I know for me on AT&T I would have to pay $350 to get a Nexus 5, or I can pay $200 to get an iPhone 5s. The plan is the same $50/mo I pay either way.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

Good lord that's some serious spin. You are essentially saying that because Qualcomm's chip *almost* beats Apple's chip, it means that Qualcomm's chip is better?

The Snapdragon CPU takes the opposite approach with simpler cores that run at higher clock rates. Such cores are cheaper to manufacture and have power consumption advantages when not running flat out at their maximum clock rate.

The Krait cores are architecturally similar to Cortex A15 which are historically so power hungry and complex that most other vendors stick in companion cortex A9 cores to do the typical workload, and only turn on the A15s for heavy work loads (ex. Tegra 3 & 4, Samsung Exonysys octa, the whole big.LITTLE thing). It is difficult to find maximum and typical power numbers for the CPU itself, but I would be very surprised if Snapdragon's power measure per performance were lower than A7's at any condition.

Also note that the benchmarks they ran don't saturate all four cores, and neither do most mobile games

Well, the multi-core benchmarks do "saturate" all four cores (to the point that they get too hot and have to under clock after a while). And if most mobile games do not "saturate" all 4 cores, then what the heck is the point of them?

It's pretty amusing that Apple spent so much time and money to develop their CPU and it ended up costing far more than the much simpler and equally fast competition. 64 bit turned out to be completely irrelevant at this stage.

You do realize that the Krait cores are custom designed by Qualcomm, yes? So how is it that Qualcomm didn't have to spend "so much time and money" to design their chips? They just magically found the designs, layouts, etc. on their computer one day? (hint: the design isn't licensed, just the ISA; same as what Apple does) Anyway, the proof will be in the pudding when Qualcomm moves to a similar architecture that the A7 is using on their future designs.

Regardless of all this , I think both chips are absolutely in the forefront of this very competitive space, and I'm sure that Qualcomm's chips performance will eventually leapfrog Apples design (and after that Apple will again leapfrog Qualcomm), but claiming that Apple isn't ahead at the moment is 100% disingenuous and 100% incorrect.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

I must be a really shitty programmer why? Because I have mastered both the main mobile platforms and recognize that one is vastly superior to the other? Is that sad little butthurt comeback really all you have? You cannot try and refute even one of my points?

Yet another sign that you are clueless and have no real programming experience is that you think you need a degree to be a good programmer - if you ever get into a proper software job (you won't, because you're obviously a moron, but imagine if you did) then you'd know that some of the best coders out there don't have any formal education beyond high school.

Oh, and one more thing you should work on to not look like a tard when mobile developers are talking - when you put quotes round a word like "mobile" to insinuate its usage is in some way strange or wrong you look particularly stupid because in many parts of the world other than whatever inbred shithole you live in that is the normal way to refer to cell phone development, and not strange at all. If you actually had any real mobile experience you would know that. But let's be real here - you are nothing more than a sad little troll with no cognitive skills beyond hurling abuse at real programmers who have the experience to compare two platforms and give a balanced critique. You are nothing, and will always be nothing - enjoy your sad little life.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what you tell yourself to rationalize your beliefs about apple and people who buy apple. The benefits and reasons to go apple have been details and quantified to absurd ends, yet you continue to believe that those things aren't relevant.

They key word in your post here is "what features". It's not about features, stupid. A phone is not a list of fucking features. I've heard the same fucking argument here since the original ipod launched (No wifi, less space than a nomad, lame) and still you autistic morons can't seem to grasp why apple is so fucking successful. They've created and led two major consumer electonics spaces and yet you still won't shut the fuck up about "Trendy" "Sheeple" "Fanboys" and other fucking nonsense. People buy apple products because they work and work well. Done. End of story. No more whiny theories about how everyone is a moron.

  It's about a complete end-to-end experience from purchase to use to upgrade. It's post-purchase customer care. It's the world's biggest and best collection of apps and music available to purchase with a few taps. It's knowing that your next iphone will work just like your old iphone, only better.

I just picked up a 5s. Coming from my 4, all I had to do was tap "restore" on the initial screen and log in with my icloud credentials. Everything came over automatically. Apps, 15 GB of music, 10 GB of photos, mail, text messages, phone books. Everything. - There isn't anything remotely like this in the android world, and I don't think there ever will be.

I've got a co worker. Sweet old lady. She was struggling with some shit android 2.x phone her carrier sold her. (Real piece of garbage. Was running up her data plan for no reason, had no battery life) I convinced her to get a 5c because really, if you grandma is going to get a phone she needs a fucking iphone. I was able to scrape out pictures and shit from her SMS archives with some 3rd party app, then copied it to her 5c. - All that's nice, but you know what was interesting? Face time. When I showed her she could video chat with her daughter (Who also has an iphone, duh) just by tapping facetime instead of call. She cried. Literally cried with joy. I'm not even kidding. - Easy to use video chat is a big deal for some people. Skype is easy, but facetime is grandma easy. (No logins, no special app, just phone number)

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not anti-Android. In fact, some of my best friends are Android users.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[mjwx]

There are reasons for people buying iPhones despite all this. Chief amongst them is that the average Joe DOES NOT CARE about what the numbers are with synthetic benchmarks, number of pixels on screen, etc. They care about how well a device performance the functions they want it to do. Despite what many in the slashdot crowd may think, things like look and feel, UI consistency, battery life and integration with other devices and services is important.

LoL,

I love it when Slashdot nerds think they know what the average person thinks.

The Parent poster doesn't have a clue about average people, they dont give a shit about UI, battery life, integration serivces or benchmarks.

The only reason a normal (non-fanboy) person buys an Iphone is because their friend Jamie has an Iphone and they want to be part of that crowd. End of story. Iphones have always had terrible battery life in the real world, are difficult for the average person to use (yes, watch one struggle trying to understand the "do it all for you" wifi hotspot) and become completely dumbfounded over the simplest operation before giving up and doing something else. The only reason they bought an Iphone is because they think it will make them cool.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

Nexus 5 also has almost twice the resolution that it must draw. That's the only reason iPhone 5s is even in the ballpark in the graphics test. Look at the other benchmarks and you'll get a more realistic CPU to CPU comparison.

Re: This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

Nexus 5: Li-Po 2300 mAh, up to 300h standby and up to 17h talk.
iPhone 5s: Li-Po 1560 mAh, up to 250h standby and up to 10h talk

You were saying?

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[AmiMoJo]

Android apps written in Java run in the Java VM, but you can write in native ARM assembler or C as well. In that case the app runs inside a sandbox, the same as iOS apps.

Android on x86 uses binary translation for native ARM code.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Falconhell]

I have had an iPhone 4S for nearly two years I will not buy another iPhone. The pathetic battery life has declined rapidly to almost useless. I have had more apps crash on iPhone in that time than in 25 years of owning windows PC.
On 3 occasions it has mysteriously lost random contacts. It is the most overrated piece of crap I have ever owned.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[AmiMoJo]

If I want to, say, modify my Xperia Pro so that a particular application that is useless to me isn't forcibly bundled, it's far more difficult than it should be.

That has nothing to do with Android and everything to do with Sony not wanting you to modify their proprietary ROM images. Also, how is it any worse than iOS which provides no mechanism at all?

Which means nothing when vendors customise the implementations of those APIs and break them.

Can you point to a specific example of a vendor doing this? I don't know of any. In fact one of the requirements of shipping a device with "Android" on it (as opposed to some custom OS that can't be called "Android", like the Kindle Fire OS) is that you don't break the standard APIs. There wouldn't really be any point doing that anyway as you would just get complains that apps don't work on your phone.

On another device, the rendering was completely fucked in some way, something like being a tenth of the size they should be or something.

Definitely sounds like a problem with your code, The Android Compatibility Test Suite checks for things like incorrect rendering settings when using the standard APIs, and vendors are required to use it if they want to use the Android trademark. Otherwise it's not Android, it's their own concoction.

No, not everyone gets via Play. You're confusing Play with Android. You don't have to license Play to deploy Android.

99% of Android devices have Play. Those that don't are almost all locked down by the manufacturer so you can't install any 3rd party apps other than the ones on their own market anyway, so are irrelevant to you.

You are repeatedly insinuating that we are crap developers simply because I am pointing out problems with Android.

No, I'm insinuating you are crap developers because you think there are problems with Android when in fact they are problems with your code or it wasn't even Android you were running on. You might want to think about that.

What are the non-shitty Android vendors? Because I was buying flagship phones with good reviews from mainstream vendors like Sony.

Sony are kinda shitty, especially with updates. They have tried to do better lately, but it remains to be seen if they have really made progress.

Obviously Google's devices are the best if you have a boner for running the latest version. Being a developer those would be the ones to go for. If you can stand to wait a few months for point releases Samsung are pretty good too.

Which Google phone did you have? What are you claiming was wrong with it?

Once you stop arguing against what I am saying, and put words in my mouth that are the opposite of what I believe, there really isn't much discussion to be had.

I was pointing out that you say you don't like Apple's policies, but prior to that complained about all the things you think are wrong with Android that stem from not having those policies. Devices don't always run the latest version of the OS because Google doesn't force vendors to release it for all current models and then ban downgrades. You complain about hardware variations because Google doesn't mandate one hardware platform with no variations. You seem to be saying that everything you "hate" about Apple's control over iOS is what makes it superior to Android, and that you think it is a good thing.

Re: This is not a fair comparison

[GrahamJ]

And half the size.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[AmiMoJo]

I have lots of iPhone owning friends who switching to Android. Sometimes it was simply because they saw they could have the same functionality for half the price, or because they wanted a bigger screen, or just didn't like Apple's policies and software.

Anecdotes are worthless though, so let's look at the stats. Android is 80% of the market and on an upward trend. iOS is about 14% and falling. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_Wide_Smartphone_Sales_Share.png

Re: This is not a fair comparison

[GrahamJ]

Samsung spends way, way, WAY more than apple on marketing. I forget the figure but it's staggering.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

Portable to what exactly?

Not to Apple devices, certainly. That's the main thing keeping me from buying an iPhone, having to find replacements for all of the Android apps I use.

Re: This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

This is bullshit. The CPU can always be challenged by well written software. Screen resolution is not as important because you can only hold a 4inch device so close.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[jbolden]

You mean like develop an alternative HTML rendering engine,

Alternative HTML rendering engines are fine. It is alternative JavaScript rendering engines that Apple is concerned about. And they are happy to work with developers on interpreters providing those developers are willing to offer appropriate safeguards. Which for a general purpose web browser are sky high. That being the case though, they have for example approached Microsoft about a trident based browser for iOS.

or set up their own app/book/music/video store

That's perfectly acceptable to them. Those applications exist now in huge numbers.

or write a better SMS messaging system,

That's a violation of FCC regulations. SMS is a regulated protocol. I'm not sure what you meant here.

or port their keyboard from Android,

I have 4 keyboard applications on my iOS device. They don't let you change default keyboards the same as they don't let you change any other default.

Yes, and now you get complaints that your app is dog slow because the OS runs like a dog on older hardware, but users were not clever enough to block the update and can't downgrade.

What does OS upgrades slowing the system down have to do with applications? That's not going to hit any particular application.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

What upgrades? Apple gets things right the first time, there's no need for upgrades.

Re: This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

Hence android sucks

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[jo_ham]

People like you badly need for there to be products other than Apple products. For some reason it matters that you have a company's product-line to champion.

It's really a strange phenomenon and Apple takes great advantage of it.

I do?

Or again are you just describing any company that makes a product that people like to buy.

Do you say the same thing about people who like Fords? Or Kellog's Cornflakes instead of the store brand?

What's wrong with having a positive opinion of a company? Other than the fact that you don;t like them of course.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[jo_ham]

I don't agree with Google's octopus policies regarding privacy but you are very right about the Nexus 5. It has single-handedly managed to make any prospective iPhone buyer look like a complete fool.

In the same way that store brand corn flakes make anyone who buys Kellog's brand corn flakes a complete fool?

Re: This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

Or it's more efficient. I don't know about you, but "smooth" scrolling is something I can easily do without. Multitasking is not.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[smash]

And based on the iPhone continually selling more than any previous generation as new models are released, the android market is being grown via the phasing out of dumb phones. Not at apple's expense.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[smash]

Pretty much this post. I myself am a nerd, and I prefer the iPhone because it does everything I want without me having to fuck with it. I have plenty of other things I'd rather be doing than customising my phone to make it usable. The fact that I get synchronisation between by Macbook, iPhone, iPad and AppleTV is awesome.

You also hit the nail on the head with regards to backups and restores. It's not just the iDevices either. Same with time machine for my mac. If my external drive is available, it backs up to it. If it's on battery, it doesn't. I get full versioning on my files, and if my backup drive is not available, get local backups i can roll back to.

I don't need to think about it. I fuck something up, i can just roll back without worry.

This is all basic stuff that shouldn't be hard to get right. Screwing around doing this shit manually doesn't make you 'leet or whatever. You're just wasting your time on drudge work.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[smash]

I love it when Slashdot nerds think they know what the average person thinks.

...Then goes off on a poorly reasoned diatribe about how iPhone users must be fashion whores/idiots.

I can play that game too.

Conversely there are only 2 reasons the average person buys a Samsung device: they're cheap, and they've been trolled into thinking that apple have tried to patent rounded corners (only) or something equally retarded.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[lazyBob]

You've got a Quad-Core ARM running at twice their Ghz and you barely post benchmarks ahead of a Dual-Core A7, you know you're stupid for buying one.

Stupid for buying a faster phone at half the price? You have a strange concept of stupid :-)

It's because Google is dumping Nexus 5 with almost no profits in US market. Nexus 5 sold by LG in Taiwan market costs me almost twice.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[rocket rancher]

Well, okay. Changing my words to enable a (feeble) reductio ad absurdum, and then asserting I represent some "corner" of your carefully arranged delusion regarding Apple pretty much puts you firmly in fanboi status. For the record, I was bashing people who buy Apple products, not Apple products. Steve Jobs is lauded as a marketing genius -- he figured out how to sell smart machines to well-heeled idiots. A high school buddy of mine, Steve Goldberg, was the product line VP of the only real failure Apple ever launched, the Lisa. His analysis: Apple tried to push a system on its specs and the people who were supposed to buy them said, "Huh?" and immediately lost interest. Looking at the demographics of Apple's target markets, it's pretty easy to deduce Jobs' genius -- market the computer as if it was part of some desirable life style, like it was just another status symbol like a high-end car, or a high-end watch, or a high-end girlfriend, and you will have people lining up for days to buy them. People buy Apple products because Jobs managed to create the illusion that owning one is actually desirable and (like an expensive watch or high-maintenance girlfriend) difficult to replace. Dell, HP, Digital, Compaq -- they could only dream of the lock-in achieved by Jobs, but their target demographic was very much different. That demographic pretty much cared about things like performance per dollar, ROI, and scalability, and not so much about how pretty it was or how dumbed-down the interface was. A much tougher demographic to please than Apple's. There's genius in finding the barrel with all the fish in it to shoot, and that's exactly what Jobs did.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Smurf]

Actually, if you look at the benchmarks it loses in everything but the GL benchmarks. Then go and look at the benchmarks at phonearena and the 5S hands the Nexus 5 it's ass on pretty much every test.

Actually, the Nexus 5 comes on top of the iPhone 5S in the GLBenchmark v2.5.1 tests in the HotHardware article, but loses in the GFXBench 2.7 tests in the Ars Technica article.

How did this happen? After all, GFXBench is the successor of GLBenchmark. My first guess was that maybe GFXBench 2.7 was compiled for 64-bits on the iPhone 5S, while GLBenchmark, being older, was probably running in 32-bit mode. (These tests measure mostly GPU performance, but getting the CPU to perform faster should help at least a little.) But it turns out that GFXBench 2.7 probably hasn't yet been recompiled to run in 64-bit mode on iOS yet.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

I have an iPhone 5 and just bought a Nexus 5 for my wife and spent some time setting it up. The Nexus 5 has very nice hardware, a big screen, and I am impressed with the "Ok, Google" search stuff. I do like KitKat too (the operating system variant and the candy). I use a Nexus 7 tablet too.

The iPhone 5 performs well, has a very nice Apps ecosystem and generally does what I need it to do. The Nexus 7 gives me more flexibility but I prefer to run my life off the iPhone. I am mixed on the screen sizes. The iPhone 5 is nice in that it can fit into jeans pockets but sometimes I prefer a bigger screen. The Nexus 7 generally fills the bill for the bigger screen but I don't always have it with me.

Apple is reportedly working on 4.7 and 5.5 inch screens for 2014. I would have to see the geometry to see whether or not it made sense for me.

I've made six figures in Apple stock in the last two years going both long and short so I figure Apple devices are free.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

If the store brand is just as good, then yes.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[AndrewX]

But with Android, you have to contend with thousands of different models, each with their own shitty customisations that break things. We deployed an application last week for Android. It was finished weeks beforehand for iOS. Despite only having to target three recent Android tablets (it was an in-house project), each tablet was broken in different ways. iOS development is a breeze by comparison.

Yes, you are potentially developing for many more phones with Android. With iOS, you are developing for one and one only. You're comparing developing for one device to developing for basically every other device (ignoring Windows phones), and that's not really comparable, is it?

So developing for iOS got your app on one device. With Android, you got your app on many devices with essentially only some tweaks needed to get it working on individual new devices, instead of having to develop for a completely new OS altogether for each.This is problem, how?

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

shut the fuck up, you don't understand computers or technology. don't talk about shit you have no clue about.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[jo_ham]

You just restated your argument.

It boils down to "people who buy Apple products are idiots". You can dress it up as much as you like, but that is what you're saying.

It's not at all accurate, of course, but you are entitled to your own opinion.

If pointing out that your large generalisation is not at all an accurate representation of Apple's customers, and that it actually follows a pretty standard distribution common to almost all retail products is somehow being a "fanboi" then I guess you are just having trouble seeing past the fog caused by your seeming hate of a company that makes products you do not personally want to use.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[jo_ham]

If the store brand is just as good, then yes.

Why?

Is price the only criterion that matters?

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[rtb61]

Nexus 5 resolution 1080 x 1920 pixels - iPhone 5 resolution 640 Ã-- 1136. Any graphics or gaming comparison is absolutely pointless, the Android phone is shifting about 2.5 times the pixels. First drop the resolution of the Android phone from 1080 x 1920 to 640 x 1136 then do the test or use a similar low res Android phone. In this case Apple has gone down the total bullshit route.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[riyad.parvez]

I think there is a recent wave of FUD against Android emerging.

Re: This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow love that 4" screen, itunes, the new Fisher Price look of ios7, the standard def screen the lack of wireless charging, no NFC, the $700 price tag and the drivel that comes out of the mouths of their users.

Re: This is not a fair comparison

[dl_sledding]

Citation: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1925

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

The smooth scrolling on the iPhone is implemented by the scroll view instructing every view inside one to draw a larger region than is actually composited into the final image. It looks smoother because it's just compositing already-drawn data into the exposed region, rather than having to do all of the rendering on demand. It's a pretty neat trick, but this trick comes at the expense of making the CPU do more work to render bits of a page that may never be seen, and used-CPU means used battery life. I don't know what the total cost is, but Apple has obviously decided that it's worth it and you apparently agree, but it's not a question of CPU speed it's a question of what the widget set does with it.

And yet iPhones have better battery life than Androids, despite wasting battery on it not sucking when scrolling.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, when i asked iphone owners about what was good about it, they can't tell so they use words as "good", "nice", "pretty". then i got to actually use one for a few days, and i can tell you:
- it's responsive
- just works
- does what i expect it to
- consistent interface
- good quality all around (with android devices you usually *have* to sacrifice at least the camera, responsiveness, performance or other aspect)
- support (most android devices lose support after at most 2 years, ios 7 runs even on iphone 4, 3.5 years old hardware)

When people don't know how to tell something is better than some other thing, that MAY be because they're dummy, but that may ALSO be because the thing is just "good", so they never cared to compare, and actually people pay for that.

Also notice nexus 5 is quad core and big screen, so it needs more battery, so it takes more time to charge, and that is to do not much better than even iphone 5.

I'm all for Android, but blind faith happens there too, and many times with dumb arguments, like "people buy Apple just for the shine/hype". That's just silly. The iphone camera alone is reason for many people preferring it, paired to "no sacrifice on other features".

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

And the Nexus 5 has a SoC with 2 more cores, 80% higher max clock rate and double the RAM. That it can only keep up is pretty amusing.

What is amusing is that the Nexus 5 costs half what the iPhone does.

It sure helps to sell below cost - and then restrain supplies so you don't lose too much money.

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[Anonymous Coward]

Well it's actually worse than that. A phone that has a SoC with double the cores, cores that have a max clock rate 1 ghz higher and double the memory is only able to win in a couple of tests and just keep up with the A7 in every other test. Sounds like pretty fail.

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[smash]

Now now that shit will get you down-modded here (as will this post, most likely). because here at slashdot we're all about software efficiency, not that bloated microsoft shit.

Owait..

Sooner or later, Google are going to have to admit that using a JVM was a bad idea. JVMs have been fail on the desktop since the mid 90s, and waiting for hardware to catch up has proven to be a mistake - especially in mobile. More cycles = more power = bigger battery required = more weight.

Re:Keep In Mind

[Desler]

So the screen resolution is why it was faster in Sunspider and Browsermark? Also in the off-screen GPU test (of which screen resolution makes no difference) it was only 10% slower which makes sense since the GPU cores on the Snapdragon 800 are clocked faster.

Re:Keep In Mind

[smash]

Uh... Apple has never pushed numbers. Try and find in any of their keynotes any mention of iphone screen res numbers, CPU clockspeed, etc?

Apple build hardware to do a job. At the screen size the iphone runs, the resolution it runs, at the typical use distance is plenty. Pushing any more pixels around on that device is pointless. So why do it? "Oh but it's not full HD!". On a screen that size, this point is irrelevant.

Re:Keep In Mind

[Desler]

To add even in the offscreen test done by Anandtech here against the Note III it only lost by 1 fps in 2 of the tests as in another it was 12 fps behind. But, in the test it was 12 fps lower it was 57 fps to 69 fps which means that basically it was only 5% lower than screen refresh rate.

This is going to seem out of place here

[symbolset]

They are both very nice phones. There. I said it.

Re:This is going to seem out of place here

[Anonymous Coward]

CRAM IT. Pick a side and defend it to the death, internet nerd, you're not allowed to appreciate competing products. That's just Internet 101!

Re:This is going to seem out of place here

[asmkm22]

They aren't really competing products with that kind of price difference.

Re:This is going to seem out of place here

[Desler]

Most people in the US buy an iPhone on contract at the $99 or $199 subsidized price.

Re:This is going to seem out of place here

[Nerdfest]

They are very nice phones. One gives much better performance for the money, but both are nice. Of course, one runs an open OS and the other is controlled very tightly. Choose based on your needs.

Re:This is going to seem out of place here

[noh8rz10]

right, because the US = the entire feckin world, right? arsehole.

Re:This is going to seem out of place here

[davidhoude]

As far as we're concerned!

Re:This is going to seem out of place here

[ColdWetDog]

Yes, wonderfully open. Open to Google who gets to peer into your shorts and your soul.

Unless you root the thing and put Cynogen on your device (if you can) you're merely switching gardens. The number of people interested and capable of doing so are well in the noise floor.

Re:This is going to seem out of place here

[Nerdfest]

You need no contact with Google for _any_ version of Android that I know of.

Re:This is going to seem out of place here

[hawguy]

Most people in the US buy an iPhone on contract at the $99 or $199 subsidized price.

I wonder how the carriers can sell the phone for $500 off list price, there must be some catch somewhere. I wonder what it could be.

Re:This is going to seem out of place here

[Anonymous Coward]

Wonderful hardware with abominably actively user-hostile and untrustworthy software!

Re:This is going to seem out of place here

[smash]

They rape you on call costs for the duration of your contract.

Re:This is going to seem out of place here

[hawguy]

They rape you on call costs for the duration of your contract.

Naaa, that can't be it. Anyone that can do simple arithmetic would quickly see through that scheme!

Re: This is going to seem out of place here

[Anonymous Coward]

Android?

Re:This is going to seem out of place here

[symbolset]

I chose the N5 personally - I'm well invested in Android apps, and it automatically re-installs the apps I use with their data. But I do see why people like the iPhone. My daughters prefer it.

I wonder if the benchmarks enabled ART though. I'm enabling the new ART runtime on mine and will report back if the numbers are significantly different from the article. It takes a while to enable ART if you have a lot of apps...

At this level though the benchmarks seem ridiculous. Both phones have the power and display of a midrange laptop. It's difficult to imagine there is going to be some phone task for which either one is insufficient for the next few years. Maybe ever. This may be the knee of "good enough".

Re:This is going to seem out of place here

[behrooz0az]

Arsehole isn't a word in the entire fuckin world.

Re:This is going to seem out of place here

[symbolset]

Ice Storm Extreme benchmark on N5 with ART reports "Maxed Out! This test is too light for your device. Try running Ice Storm Unlimited instead." The only other device with this score is iPad Air. Ice Storm Unlimited reports Ice Storm score 16943. Details:

• Graphics: 17854
• Physics: 14376
• Graphics 1: 91.5 FPS
• Graphics 2: 67.4 FPS
• Physics: 45.6 FPS
• Demo 0 FPS

The other devices reported are Kindle Fire HDX 7, Acer Liquid S2, NVIDIA Shield and Pantech Vega LTE-A. The differences between these are not significant.

Re:This is going to seem out of place here

[symbolset]

BTW: with the score I got this: "Good news! This is one of the most powerful devices around and everything seems to be working normally."

Re:This is going to seem out of place here

[noh8rz10]

go get a fucking dictionary, my friend. then go get a woman so you can chill the fuck out.

Re:This is going to seem out of place here

[symbolset]

N5 with ART, GFXBench 2.7.2 reports for 2.5 Egypt HD Onscreen: 5727 - 51 FPS. With a *. This is a pretty amazing score for a mobile device.

Re:This is going to seem out of place here

[smash]

wrong

Re:This is going to seem out of place here

[smash]

Yes. Your point being?

Re:This is going to seem out of place here

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you didn't have a 1.* Android like a HTC Dream/T-Mobile G1 which presented the user with a Sign In To Google screen that could not be worked around. (Ignoring the -probably- unintended feature of all keystrokes being passed to a root shell behind the scenes.)

Re:This is going to seem out of place here

[Threni]

Where did you read that? Tin foil hat magazine?

Re:This is going to seem out of place here

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how the carriers can sell the phone for $500 off list price, there must be some catch somewhere. I wonder what it could be.

People buying low-end Android phones get the same contract deal and end up subsidizing Apple's profit margins. Suckers.

Re:This is going to seem out of place here

[behrooz0az]

I actually did that, guess what I Found:
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/asshole#Alternative_forms

Re:This is going to seem out of place here

[noh8rz10]

haha yeah. I like "basshole", which is a bowdlerized version, so frack off.

Re:This is going to seem out of place here

[noh8rz10]

also, it's fun to edit wikipedia. i added "butthole"

Re:This is going to seem out of place here

[jbolden]

There is no catch. They basically loan money to their customers and charge it back as part of the monthly fee.

Re:This is going to seem out of place here

[Black LED]

Now try using a real, legitimate dictionary like Oxford.

Re:This is going to seem out of place here

[behrooz0az]

And apparently someone reverted it.
I was going to refer to the history to show that I have not edited wikipedia to make a point, What i saw was not pleasant.

Re:This is going to seem out of place here

[behrooz0az]

Oxford is British, It refer to non-British words as US English, See: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/search/american_english/?multi=1&q=arsehole and http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/arsehole?q=arsehole
And for god's sake read the dictionary yourself before suggesting it.

Re:This is going to seem out of place here

[noh8rz10]

What are you talking about? Which part was not pleasant? Did you go to Wikipedia.xxx?

Re:This is going to seem out of place here

[Anonymous Coward]

Oxford is the highest authority on the English language.

You still don't get it! Specs do not matter...

[bogaboga]

Qualcomm's latest Krait 400 quad-core along with the Adreno 330 GPU that comprise the Snapdragon 800, is a powerful beast.

If they had not focused much on the specs, but rather on battery life that can last a day of average use, I'd be happier. I ask my self: -

"Of what use is having the"latest and greatest if by mid-afternoon, I will be holding a brick in hand?

This is what I do to these good phones that are limited in the battery department. I underclock them with acceptable results.

By the way: Can one explain to me how Motorola was able to cram a 3000mAH into a phone smaller than this but Google and its LG partner cannot?

Re: You still don't get it! Specs do not matter...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just get an extended AA battery source duh

Re:You still don't get it! Specs do not matter...

[NeoMorphy]

The LG G2 has a 3000mAH battery, so I am assuming it's an issue of keeping the cost down.

Re:You still don't get it! Specs do not matter...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm getting pretty good battery life out of my Nexus 5.

Re:You still don't get it! Specs do not matter...

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you had issues with your Nexus 5? Mine seems to be able to last all day starting at 6am and go all night with moderate use.

Re:You still don't get it! Specs do not matter...

[iONiUM]

It would seem, the mAH doesn't seem to matter: KitKat (and presumably, with ART as well, as people have reported, but not the example I'm about to cite) have improved battery performance immensely. Here is one example of many.

Personally, I am getting 4 hours screen-on with 16 hours standby, and still have 15% battery left, using Dalvik, Google now (all options on), WiFi+LTE (but GPS and bluetooth off), which is more than acceptable IMO and great.

So maybe, much like the CPU MHz, we should stop concentrating on the numbers so much, and instead concentrate on the actual results.

Re:You still don't get it! Specs do not matter...

[rahvin112]

I have yet to see real battery benchmarks but Google is claiming 17 hours of talk time and 300 hours of standby. If the phone gets even half that it's going to have better battery life than any device released in the last 7 years.

Re:You still don't get it! Specs do not matter...

[hawguy]

Qualcomm's latest Krait 400 quad-core along with the Adreno 330 GPU that comprise the Snapdragon 800, is a powerful beast.

If they had not focused much on the specs, but rather on battery life that can last a day of average use, I'd be happier. I ask my self: -

"Of what use is having the"latest and greatest if by mid-afternoon, I will be holding a brick in hand?

This is what I do to these good phones that are limited in the battery department. I underclock them with acceptable results.

By the way: Can one explain to me how Motorola was able to cram a 3000mAH into a phone smaller than this but Google and its LG partner cannot?

My N5 has been off the charger for 15 hours, I used it off and on today for Pandora streaming and web browsing, texting, and email, and the battery is down to 58%. What are you using the phone for that it won't last a day?

Re:You still don't get it! Specs do not matter...

[smash]

Lol. The talk time metric is so outdated now. Hands up who uses their phone for voice more than anything else? Anyone? Bueller?

Thought not.

Re:You still don't get it! Specs do not matter...

[drinkypoo]

My Nexus 4 running CM10.1.3 (and then diddled to not outright murder the battery) seems to get about 1.3% battery loss per hour on standby. I checked the partial wakelocks and the phone is using power mostly for making beeps and vibrating. I am not impressed by your anecdote; that's definitely not "great" battery life.

My Xperia Play running AuroraPlay, a gingerbread-based ROM, gets about four days of standby :) It's going away though. The support just isn't there any more, the primary kernel developer has got a Nexus or something too.

About to try a reportedly-working CM11 nightly on my Nexus 4.

Re:You still don't get it! Specs do not matter...

[AmiMoJo]

I never turn GPS off on my GS3. Android's power management is so good that there really isn't any point. Most of the time it uses the mobile network and wifi for location, but when I open Maps or Now the GPS powers up.

Re:You still don't get it! Specs do not matter...

[Threni]

Charger at work, charger at home. Problem solved.

Re:You still don't get it! Specs do not matter...

[jo_ham]

mAh rating of the battery is the next "Mhz myth" - just look at Apple's new iPad. The battery is smaller than the previous generation, but because of the hardware they put inside it, the battery life went up. This is mainly due to a large reduction in the power needed to run the screen and the backlight in this case.

The Nexus 5 is likely to be seeing similar gains as SoCs and screens etc get better power performance. Then it's just a question of your design brief - do you keep the battery the same size and push the performance envelope with this new headroom or do you shrink the battery and the device to make the device smaller for the same performance profile. Apple always chooses the latter it seems, or in the case of the jump to the new A7 arch, a bit of a middle ground.

Re:You still don't get it! Specs do not matter...

[jo_ham]

Charger at work, charger at home. Problem solved.

You know if you said that about an Apple device someone would come back with "ah, but that's just Apple's evil scheme to make you buy needless overpriced accessories! My Android phone doesn't need to have two chargers!"

Just saying, but you know it's the truth.

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[MrDoh!]

Got them running a lot of apps on a lot of hardware quickly though. Now things are settling, I'd imagine this new ART core will be improved on to keep trimming performance up and reducing battery drain. It's done the job it was designed for pretty well so far.

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[Desler]

The physics test is quite telling and shows just how limited the low speed, dual core

The physics test seems to have little relevance to actual gaming performance since even against the Note III in offscreen tests the iPhone 5S was pretty much neck and neck on rendering rate.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7376/samsung-galaxy-note-3-review/4

In that review the iPhone 5S won 4 of the 7 CPU tests that it was in. It won 3 of the 6 GPU tests measuring FPS rendering speed. In 2 of the tests that it lost it only lost by 1 fps, in the other offscreen test that it lost at it was 57 fps vs. 69 fps. Which means the 5S was only 5% slower than native refresh rate.

dual core? really? that is fucking ancient) CPU in the iPhone is.

And yet it beat the quad-core in both of the CPU tests. Can't even beat an "ancient" CPU? Pathetic...

Re:Keep In Mind

[timeOday]

Actually I noticed the 5S release was different (for Apple) in that very respect - they trumpeted very little besides behind-the-scenes specs. 64 bit! New co-processors! Look at these benchmark graphs!

Re:Keep In Mind

[Nerdfest]

Actually, their last keynote did mention that sort of thing. 64 bit?

Re:Keep In Mind

[FlyHelicopters]

Steve Jobs is gone and they've already forgotten what he taught them.

Shame...

Can I get kitkat on all the past versions of Nexus

[Anonymous Coward]

So can get a supported version of Kit Kat on all past versions of my Nexus Phones?

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[noh8rz10]

the article doesn't touch on this, but I wonder how much untapped power is in that 64bit processor in iPhone. what's cool is, that's dormant in my phone right now, but will be unleashed next year so it will be like getting a new phone.

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[Anonymous Coward]

No it didn't, it only scored a pathetic 7431 in physics compared to more than twice that amount for the Nexus 5. iPhone 5 got its ass handed to it due to the weak CPU in it.

I don't care if they use GNU/Linux...

[Anonymous Coward]

NSA/Google fucking sucks.

Can't I just have (cheap android phones)

[Jonah Hex]

... something better than my old HTC 3G EVO that runs latest android for a decent price? I'm switching to Ting and don't mind buying behind the curve, but it's not easy to get something at the same budget I'm used to when I get the phone(s) mostly subsidized from Sprint. Maybe I'm looking at the wrong review sites to find a peppy cheap android.

Re:Can't I just have (cheap android phones)

[davidhoude]

While $350 isn't 'cheap' it may well be considered a 'decent price' depending on what you are looking for. It is certainly cheaper than any other similar spec'd phone.

Re:Can't I just have (cheap android phones)

[hawguy]

... something better than my old HTC 3G EVO that runs latest android for a decent price? I'm switching to Ting and don't mind buying behind the curve, but it's not easy to get something at the same budget I'm used to when I get the phone(s) mostly subsidized from Sprint. Maybe I'm looking at the wrong review sites to find a peppy cheap android.

Last I heard, Ting was waiting to see if Sprint would let them activate the Google Play Nexus 5's, or if they could only activate ones bought from Sprint or from Ting.

Re:Can't I just have (cheap android phones)

[Anonymous Coward]

Buy a used phone. I picked up my Samsung Galaxy S3 to use on Ting off eBay 2 months ago with barely a scratch on it for under $200. I'm on track too save that much in monthly bills by my 4th monthly bill.

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[MacDork]

New phone almost as fast as month old phone.

Xperia Z1 was released same day as iPhone 5s. It is faster, waterproof, and has higher res 1080 screen. It also has a 20.7MP camera with a much larger 1/2.3" sensor.

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[stenvar]

Android already supports applications using native code. But a lot of apps just don't need it.

Breathtaking Ignorance

[SuperKendall]

The original iPhone caught on because it could play DRM iTunes.

You know, I don't think I've ever seen as horribly misguided a reason for the adoption of the iPhone as that one.

By your logic, the Motorola ROKR would have been a smash hit.

Re:Breathtaking Ignorance

[tepples]

Then why was the original, 2G, pre-App Store iPhone adopted if not for DRM iTunes?

Re:Breathtaking Ignorance

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it was the easiest-to-use, web-capable smartphone on the market? Perhaps you android fans have forgotten just how different things were in 2007 when nobody else had large multitouch screens or fully-fledged web browsers.

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[Lluc]

the article doesn't touch on this, but I wonder how much untapped power is in that 64bit processor in iPhone. what's cool is, that's dormant in my phone right now, but will be unleashed next year so it will be like getting a new phone.

Please tell me you're being sarcastic... Even if all your apps get recompiled to 64-bit versions, you are not going to get a massive performance boost. Have you ever tried running a 32 vs. 64 bit install of Windows or Linux on the same hardware? Not too much difference for average use cases...

The Edge

[SuperKendall]

Android Apps are actually portable (unlike iPhone apps)

Given the screen sizes of modern Android phones I'd say iPhone apps are actually quite a lot more portable. :-)

less hostile to develop for

Because good tooling is inherently bad for your health, just like using hammers is far inferior to the strength-building task of pounding in nails with railroad ties.

I was testing my N5 against a 5S at lunch today

[YesIAmAScript]

We ran Sunspider (1.0.2).

The iPhone 5S (and a Nokia Lumia 920) pasted my Nexus 5 on Sunspider. Both were about twice as fast as the Nexus 5.

I like the Nexus 5, it's very snappy. But when using it, it doesn't feel faster than a 5S.

The N5 is a heck of a value.

Now, about the awful pictures it takes... Is there any chance a better camera app (which also sucks) can improve them some?

Re:I was testing my N5 against a 5S at lunch today

[Anonymous Coward]

Very interesting, as I ran that exact same benchmark on my Nexus 5 versus a 5s, and the results were so close no human would notice. Granted I used the ART runtime instead of Dalvik, which likely played a big part. Sadly I don't have (or even know anyone who would buy; my hardcore Windows friends all use Android) any Windows phone at all, so I couldn't test those.

Did you notice the 5s getting extremely hot while benchmarking? I only tested two of them, but both of them went into cooldown mode after the benchmark finished.

Re:I was testing my N5 against a 5S at lunch today

[Anonymous Coward]

have you seen the crappy picture the 5s takes?

omg that noise grain. wtf.

Re:I was testing my N5 against a 5S at lunch today

[AmiMoJo]

All that suggests is that Chrome for Android isn't optimized for Sunspider, where as Safari for iOS is. Since it is impossible to run the same browser on both platforms (Chrome for iOS is just a wrapper for Apple's crippled HTML renderer that runs about half the speed that Safari does) there is no meaningful comparison here.

The Ars review of the camera was a bit harsh. Performance in most conditions is pretty good and they didn't even try out the optical image stabilization. Other reviews have been more favourable, and well frankly it costs half the price so 10% worse low light performance than a phone costing $350 more seems like a reasonable trade-off. Image stabilization is going to be more valuable to most users anyway, especially for video.

Re:I was testing my N5 against a 5S at lunch today

[jo_ham]

All that suggests is that Chrome for Android isn't optimized for Sunspider, where as Safari for iOS is. Since it is impossible to run the same browser on both platforms (Chrome for iOS is just a wrapper for Apple's crippled HTML renderer that runs about half the speed that Safari does) there is no meaningful comparison here.

The Ars review of the camera was a bit harsh. Performance in most conditions is pretty good and they didn't even try out the optical image stabilization. Other reviews have been more favourable, and well frankly it costs half the price so 10% worse low light performance than a phone costing $350 more seems like a reasonable trade-off. Image stabilization is going to be more valuable to most users anyway, especially for video.

My goodness, does it make you feel any shame to spout the clearly obvious lies that you do?

"Crippled renderer that runs at half the speed of Safari". You have a future in political campaigning, kid. First, it's the JS engine, not the HTML renderer, but even then, there's no "half the speed" anywhere to be found.

First google result:
http://www.guypo.com/mobile/ios-browsers-speed-bakeoff/

Conclusion: both browsers have benefits that make them fast in certain situations, but overall they are pretty close. The wild lies you're claiming about half the performance on Chrome are so laughably inaccurate that it's almost not worth replying because I know you're simply so set in your entrenched little worldview, there's no changing your mind with anything as absurd as actual facts.

Re:I was testing my N5 against a 5S at lunch today

[Anonymous Coward]

In terms of running simple HTML5 animations (requestAnimationFrame), it's absolutely true that Safari blows Chrome out of the water. I haven't found an Android device that can do much more than 30 FPS, with a lot of variability, while even an old-ass iPhone 4S does a consistent 60FPS. (This can easily be tested in about 10 lines of js.)

Chrome is a fine browser in other respects, its just not as good for HTML-based games or apps.

Re:I was testing my N5 against a 5S at lunch today

[jo_ham]

In terms of running simple HTML5 animations (requestAnimationFrame), it's absolutely true that Safari blows Chrome out of the water. I haven't found an Android device that can do much more than 30 FPS, with a lot of variability, while even an old-ass iPhone 4S does a consistent 60FPS. (This can easily be tested in about 10 lines of js.)

Chrome is a fine browser in other respects, its just not as good for HTML-based games or apps.

He's talking about Chrome on iOS because third party browsers are limited to the non-sandboxed older version of the JS engine on iOS, whereas Safari gets to used the sandboxed and higher performance rewritten Nitro engine. (Sandboxing doesn't make it faster, but it creates a technical barrier since the third party devs don't have direct access to those APIs).

This segregation was cried and wailed about by people like the OP as "Apple crippling third party browsers". In practice, as has been demonstrated by various tech blogs running benchmarks, it doesn't affect real world use very much. Yes, the new JS engine is faster, but it's hardly "crippling" other browsers - especially since all browsers on iOS use the same Webkit engine (unless they do server-side rendering).

Implementation is real weakling

[SuperKendall]

iPhone 5 got its ass handed to it due to the weak CPU in it.

Weak CPU, or weak physics engine that didn't use OpenCL or the Accelerate framework...

In fact the benchmark technical guide says explicitly:

The GPU load is kept as low as possible to ensure that only the CPUâ(TM)s capabilities are stressed.

Which is a really stupid way to compare things as anything that relied on advanced physics would be using some kind of accelerator for computation other than the CPU. It also means it's not using any of the real-world physics engines a game would be using.

Sure the iPhone Physics score will be down a lot if you tie both hands behind its back and throw it in a river.

Re:Implementation is real weakling

[Anonymous Coward]

Excuses, excuses. The benchmark was identical for all of the phones. If it were the fault of the software, it would have showed on the others too. It didn't.

iPhone sucks.

Re:Implementation is real weakling

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why Android is switching to ART because it doesn't lag. Oh wait...

Re:Implementation is real weakling

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why Android handed iPhone its ass on these benchmarks. More than twice as powerful.

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[binarylarry]

Yeah but that phone is half the price of the iPhone.

Pretty impressive to me.

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[binarylarry]

yeah but if you use your iphone as a media transcoding server, the gains with be iMazing!

Re:Keep In Mind

[smash]

64 bit is a bit different to e-peen measuring with clockspeed numbers or screen resolution numbers. 64 bit is a significant step, not just "this is better because the number is teh bigggar!!"

Re:Is it a phone ?

[smash]

Yeah because when I am out and about, i much prefer to carrry a map, a compass, a walkman, a mobile phone, a laptop, a pager, a camera, a tape recorder and a gaming console. Fuck those integration guys in the neck.

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[smash]

I've heard people claiming "oh but wait until XXXX, you won't need to write native code anymore!" regarding Java performance for ages. Since 1996. Java still sucks compared to native code.

Re:Can I get kitkat on all the past versions of Ne

[hawguy]

So can get a supported version of Kit Kat on all past versions of my Nexus Phones?

Google said there's an 18 month update window, and anything Nexus than the Nexus 4 (like the Galaxy Nexus) won't get Kitkat:

https://support.google.com/nexus/answer/3468085

Is Google releasing Android 4.4 as a system update for Galaxy Nexus?

No, Galaxy Nexus phones won’t be receiving the update for Android 4.4 (KitKat).

Why isn’t Galaxy Nexus receiving the update to Android 4.4?

Galaxy Nexus, which first launched two years ago, falls outside of the 18-month update window when Google and others traditionally update devices.

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[smash]

Yup, because burning CPU cycles at twice the rate to run "fast enough" is the way to awesome battery life.

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[smash]

Not really. They still had to do an SDK for the phone, they could just as easily written an SDK for native code rather than Java. I suspect use of Java was a hedge against either ARM or Intel providing the better mobile CPUs, whereas apple made the decision and bet on ARM.

Re:Can I get kitkat on all the past versions of Ne

[Anonymous Coward]

an 18 month update window

The iPhone might not be any better (I don't know and don't care) but that's fucking pathetic.

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[Anonymous Coward]

Weird thing is the way android is headed, apps will be compiled via llvm to native code (its an option with kitkat now and will be default at some point in the future). It's just done at install time so that android can run on any cpu instead of at compile time.

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[Anonymous Coward]

omg, larger numbers!

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[smash]

Sony could release a phone that claimed to cure cancer, solve world poverty and establish peace in the middle east. They're still not getting a cent of my disposable income.

Re: New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[Anonymous Coward]

Java has always been meant to be an underperforming hog to justify new hardware sale for Sun corp.

Re:Can I get kitkat on all the past versions of Ne

[hawguy]

an 18 month update window

The iPhone might not be any better (I don't know and don't care) but that's fucking pathetic.

As a Galaxy Nexus owner (who just bought a Nexus 5) I agree, an 18 month update window is pretty bad in an industry where 2 year contracts are common. There is a petition to get Google to release Kitkat for the Galaxy Nexus, but behind the scenes, Google is blaming it on TI:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57610844-94/galaxy-nexus-owners-petition-for-taste-of-kitkat/

Re: New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[Anonymous Coward]

JVM should have been optional on Android, just like anywhere else.

Re:Keep In Mind

[Anonymous Coward]

iZealots like to boast numbers

Funny. This has to be the first time I've seen iPhone fanboys accused of being the number folks by Android fanboys.

"Snapdragon" sounds like a pornstar's name

[JoeyRox]

And one with private parts possessing a particularly desirable physical attribute.

Re:"Snapdragon" sounds like a pornstar's name

[samwichse]

Or, you know, a wildflower in the Scroph family.

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[stenvar]

Yup, because burning CPU cycles at twice the rate to run "fast enough" is the way to awesome battery life.

It makes no difference to battery life; almost all the battery usage on Android phones goes to the display and the radio. And CPU-bound applications (e.g., PhotoSphere) are written using native code anyway.

Re:Keep In Mind

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it a significant step? What does it actually _give_ you as a phone user?

It's an irrelevant detail.

I'm guessing you haven't use anything but Android

[Anonymous Coward]

... crapware phone. If that is all you have done, and you are down to 58% then you have nothing but crapware.

Apps can't improve the quality of cheap lens

[Anonymous Coward]

When it comes to taking photos, the key is in the lens. Cheap lens will produce crappy images no matter how much you auto-photoshop them.

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[citizenr]

whereas apple made the decision and bet on ARM.

Apple has experience and proven track record in quickly changing archs. If anything new cpu arch would mean more money for them - forced upgrade cycle in ecosystem where users currently upgrade almost only when old stuff breaks or new one looks nicer.

18 months vs. 3 years

[Anonymous Coward]

The Nexus comes with only 18 months of support.
KatKrap isn't broadly available.

Re: 18 months vs. 3 years

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you know. Let's not let the facts get in the way of a good story.

Re: Keep In Mind

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2013-09-27-arm64-and-you.html

5s kills N5

[Anonymous Coward]

If you actually RTF, you'll see the 5s wasn't tested uniformly but it killed the Nexus 5 in several performance tests, including battery life.

Re: 5s kills N5

[Anonymous Coward]

And screen size, resolution, NFC support, wireless charging and price.

Re: 5s kills N5

[Anonymous Coward]

And iTunes reliance, ouch.

Really Awesome Phone

[Anonymous Coward]

I have owned iPhones since the iPhone4. I currently own the iPhone 5. My wife owns the Nexus 5. I can tell you that there is *** NO LAG *** on either the Nexus 5 or the iPhone 5. They are equally fast, both very smooth and instantaneous response times. Both phones are very, very sweet.

The iPhone 5 presentation is slightly nicer, but for the price??? The Nexus 5 is king. There is NO comparison. When you consider the cost difference, Apple gets kicked to the curb.

My initial thoughts? I love the new IOS7 - particularly the new control center - where I can easily turn off my WIFI when away from home, to save battery life. But I love Android's ability to just copy your song collection where you want, when you want. I FUCKING HATE HATE HATE iTunes with a passion - it makes Windows 8 look like an Adonis. If they made a vaccum cleaner suck as hard as iTunes does, you'd have cornered the market and destroyed all competition. It really is that much of a steaming pile of shit. Kill it with fire. iTunes is about the only Achilles heel left for Apple.

Re:Really Awesome Phone

[smash]

Use iTunes match and just play everything on whatever device you want?

Re:Really Awesome Phone

[mjwx]

Use iTunes match and just play everything on whatever device you want?

Hold on, I have to go back to a computer that has Itunes on it and is authourised with this phone (usually this is a trip home, unfortunately home is 14,000 KM away at the moment) and then wait for it to load (takes ages because I dont waste money on overpriced Mac's) then wait for it to sync. Finally it chucks an error and wipes my device.

Try just plugging your phone into any computer with a standard USB micro cable, Windows, Linux or Mac and have it just work as a MTP device. You can transfer whatever you like in less time than it take Itunes to load an just have done with.

Re:Keep In Mind

[YesIAmAScript]

They talked about the fingerprint reader, the secure storage and how the new M7 processor will give you better battery life. These are real things that impact customers. Didn't they talk about faster LTE throughput too? Maybe I misremembered.

It wasn't just specs.

Re: New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why they are switching to ART.

Re:Can I get kitkat on all the past versions of Ne

[dottrap]

an 18 month update window

The iPhone might not be any better (I don't know and don't care) but that's fucking pathetic.

iPhone 3GS shipped with iOS 3.0 in June 17, 2009.
Final iOS update was 6.1.3 in March 19, 2013.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_version_history

That is 45 months. (Past performance does not guarantee future results.)

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[smash]

Then explain why these benchmarks show that with about 2x the CPU hardware, the Nexus5 is not comprehensively beating the crap out of the iPhone.

What do I do with all the processing power?

[Bender_]

Please recommend good applications. I bought a Nexus 5, because I recently dropped my previous smartphone. But what do I do with it?

Google also has taken the scalpel

[Anonymous Coward]

Google also has taken the scalpel to Kit Kat in all the right places, whittling down the overall footprint of the OS

What was problem with Linux in Android 4.3? Operating System footprint was very small, just ~300KB of storage and little over 1MB of RAM. So seriously, how much they really got down Linux operating system footprint in Android 4.4 as it gains so much notice?

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[Fri13]

Native in this case means C or C++......

Xcode spits out 64 bit binaries automatically.

[glennrrr]

It's even simpler than that. Upgrade to Xcode 5, do a Archive build to send it to the App Store and it'll include a 64 bit version with no programmer intervention. Apple is really confident in the compatibility of their LLVM builds. If nothing else, you should get in the habit of testing in the 64 bit simulator until you get an A7 device.

Re:Can I get kitkat on all the past versions of Ne

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that is the reason. The OMAP programme is simply gone - everyone's been sacked, and they've all been EOLed. Ti's drivers are closed, and with no official support, and no source release, there's no-one to update them for any version of Linux past 3.0 (someone's got them booting - barely - on 3.4, but you can forget 3.13).

You can see it in the AOSP builds, which you definitely can build for the maguro - it's all good, except the graphics, which periodically corrupt (especially in screen rotations) and after a while that causes the GPU to freeze, the watchdog kicks in and the phone resets.

You CAN run KitKat on the Galaxy Nexus, but it's not stable - and it will take a LOT of work to get it stable - possibly work modifying or working around blind binary blobs. (This is yet another reason why blind binary blobs are bad.)

I'm waiting past the Nexus 5: non-removable battery in a developer phone is an absolute dealbreaker. What if I get an Oops and the watchdog doesn't kick in? That happens maybe twice a month for me... plus what I do requires batteries out of phones sometimes - which mandates phones with removable batteries, period.

I want an ARMv8 in my phone, whether it be a Cortex or Qualcomm's take on it (Apple's is actually a surprisingly vanilla, machine-laid-out, first pass). I dearly hope that things settle down a bit so the ARMv8 SoCs don't have the terrible problem previous versions did with kludgey hardware support and needing out-of-tree Linux forks.

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[stenvar]

I doesn't have "2x the CPU hardware"; the number of cores bears little relationship to the amount of "CPU hardware" a chip has. For mobile systems, people often use more cores but slower cores to save battery life, because for most tasks only one core needs to be activated. You'd use all cores only on compute-intensive tasks. And for benchmark comparisons, it gets even trickier because some benchmarks may be able to take advantage of lots of slow cores, while others prefer fewer faster cores. In the end, what really matters is the price/performance on real software, and the Nexus 5 certainly "beats the crap" out of the iPhone in that regard, giving you similar performance at a fraction of the price. (FWIW, I think both Java and Objective-C suck, but that's an entirely different discussion.)

Too obscure a reference for you droids

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

> "and Qualcomm's latest Krait 400 quad-core"

That's better than Apple's latest Kreetle 400 duo-core!

Price matter

[harshal.tawade]

Now waiting for a price. Hope it shouldn't cost as much as Iphone.

Re:Is it a phone ?

[Taco Cowboy]

Yeah because when I am out and about, i much prefer to carrry a map, a compass, a walkman, a mobile phone, a laptop, a pager, a camera, a tape recorder and a gaming console.

I am curious ...
 
Before 2011, did you regularly go out and about with a map, a compass, a walkman, a mobile phone, a laptop, a pager, a camera, a tape recorder _and_ a gaming console ?
 
Don't get me wrong, I'm just curious ...

You're forgetting the emotional dimension

[residents_parking]

Every purchase has an emotional dimension. Judging by my friends who own iPhones, I'd say it is considerably higher than average in this case. One even said he decided not to buy another iPhone, but went ahead and did it anyway. He couldn't explain why, and seemed totally happy with that.

Re:Is it a phone ?

[TheRaven64]

No, it's not a phone. It's a pocket-sized computer that can also make phone calls. We call it a smartphone for historical reasons. Do you also complain that we say 'computer' as shorthand for 'electronic computer', when we all know that a computer is a person who prepares logarithm tables?

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[The Grim Reefer]

Sony could release a phone that claimed to cure cancer, solve world poverty and establish peace in the middle east. They're still not getting a cent of my disposable income.

Well aren't you a selfish bastard. We must think of the children!

More importantly, will it run Linux? And for how long?

Re: Can I get kitkat on all the past versions of N

[Anonymous Coward]

May have got 6 bit didn't get all the features including tethering. So a Clayton's update.

Deeply flawed benchmarks

[edxwelch]

I find it hilarious that they are trying to benchmark CPUs using javascript on *different* browsers. Do they not realise that the javascript performance of Chrome is radically different than Safari?

Re:Is it a phone ?

[dreamchaser]

I am curious...

Before the 20th Century did the average person drive an automobile?

Before the Industrial Revolution did the average person have access to cheap, mass produced good?

Before the Agricultural Revolution, did the average person have access to plentiful grain?

Before the Paleolithic, did the average person have access to crafted stone tools?

Don't get me wrong, I'm just curious...

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[dreamchaser]

The main advantage of 64 bitness is access to a far larger memory address space. Yes there can be a few minor performance improvements with proper use of larger registers, but it's really not that big an advantage. Until smartphones and tablets start exceeding 4 gigabytes of RAM there is really not much point other than marketing to use 64 bit code on such devices.

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[gnasher719]

The main advantage of 64 bitness is access to a far larger memory address space. Yes there can be a few minor performance improvements with proper use of larger registers, but it's really not that big an advantage. Until smartphones and tablets start exceeding 4 gigabytes of RAM there is really not much point other than marketing to use 64 bit code on such devices.

That has been debunked again and again and again.

There has been iOS code that was measured to be 45% faster just by being recompiled to 64 bit. There are plenty of tricks in the Objective-C runtime and the C++ libraries that make it _significantly_ more efficient when running on a 64 bit processor. For example, a std::string up to 22 chars doesn't allocate any memory on the heap in 64 bit code but just uses three 64 bit words.

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you actually trust Android benchmarks? Or benchmarks in general?

When Samsung cheated on benchmarks

[gnasher719]

lots of people claimed that it didn't really matter because nobody is interested in benchmarks. And now we have this whole article and huge discussions because of benchmark results. Quite interesting.

Any opinions whether benchmarks matter or not are welcome. On the other hand, there was an old joke about a potential customer asking what was the horse power and top speed of a Rolls Royce. Answer: "Enough".

Re:When Samsung cheated on benchmarks

[jo_ham]

Benchmarks only don't matter when Apple is winning them. At all other times they are the gold standard of how good a phone is, and should be used to bash Apple's "slow, outdated, weak" hardware at every turn.

However, when Apple is on top in the benchmarks, switch to Plan B and talk about price.

Re:When Samsung cheated on benchmarks

[mjwx]

lots of people claimed that it didn't really matter because nobody is interested in benchmarks. And now we have this whole article and huge discussions because of benchmark results. Quite interesting.

Any opinions whether benchmarks matter or not are welcome. On the other hand, there was an old joke about a potential customer asking what was the horse power and top speed of a Rolls Royce. Answer: "Enough".

You see, it's quite interesting to us.

But for the other 99% of phone buyers they couldn't care less. Taking your car analogy, there are realistically only two types of people who buy a Subaru Turbo Impreza WRX, those who have poured over the spec's and know exactly how many Horsepowers and Torques it has and the other 99% who just like the loud BROOOM, BROOOM noise it makes. The same is true with phone buyers.

I personally don't trust benchmarks these days, every company is rigging their test phones (and if you think Apple isn't one of the worst, I have a bridge to sell you). I'm more interested to see how the N5 performs in the real world, more specifically how well it performs on Australian mobile networks.

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what "native" means in every case. Android supports C/C++ programming.

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[Antonovich]

After using an Xperia S for the last year and a half, I tend to agree but waterproof with a much better camera...

apple makes products, not ics

[Anonymous Coward]

if you, as a company specializing in soc design, cant crush a chip released half a year ago, you should step up your game. especially when the number of chips you move is so high. apple did a "by-hand" design. if thats what it takes to maximize power efficiency and performance, do that. but do it better. if i buy a tent made by Jeep (yes, i really used to own one), or a television made by Ford (yes, my neighbor did back in 1994 maybe) i will not expect it be as good as proper specialty team designed products

Re: New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[Anonymous Coward]

More and more people are feeling that way about apple. Bill Gates a great humanitarian, Steve Jobs an asshole.

Re: New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[iamhassi]

Where is the Nexus 5 half the price? Everyone is selling the Nexus 5 for $350 with contract while the iPhone 5s is $200 with contract.

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[Anonymous Coward]

With Sony I can move to different phones without losing any of my music, movies or data. They are not locking me down if I disagree with their practices or corporation actions!

Re:Is it a phone ?

[Jerry Smith]

No, it's not a phone. It's a pocket-sized computer that can also make phone calls. We call it a smartphone for historical reasons. Do you also complain that we say 'computer' as shorthand for 'electronic computer', when we all know that a computer is a person who prepares logarithm tables?

Yes, yes, so much yes. My smartphone is hardly used in the phone-kind of way (not much of a caller anyway, hardly touch those 'free' minutes) but as an internet-computer/pdf-viewer/musicplayer/calculator/watch SO much more. It doesn't do any of those functions really well, but just good enough and the fact that it's all in one single handheld device makes me happy.

When I ONLY want a good mobile phone I'll get my old trusty Siemens.

Re: New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[Tynin]

Where is the Nexus 5 half the price? Everyone is selling the Nexus 5 for $350 with contract while the iPhone 5s is $200 with contract.

Incorrect.

The Nexus 5 is $350 for the one with 16GB of space, $400 for the 32GB one, and that is with NO contract.

iPhone 5s is only $200 with a contact, if you want to buy it outright without a contract, it costs $650 for 16GB and $750 for 32 GB.

In other words, about 1/2 the price.

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[Anonymous Coward]

Then explain why these benchmarks show that with about 2x the CPU hardware, the Nexus5 is not comprehensively beating the crap out of the iPhone.

Because obviously you are a wittless moron that doesn't know the first thing about... well judging by your posts... anything.

All of those benchmarks are not designed to use multiple cores..... So it doesn't matter if I have 4 or 400 cores, it is not going to make the bench marks work any faster. So it has double the cores than the iphone big deal, it doesn't matter in the benchmarks. On the other hand it does matter if you are running multiple applications at once (or services in the background).

Long Overdue

[gepheral]

My major p is to have tool whoose power house can serve.. else it equals crap!!! Something Similar

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that Android doesn't have JVM.

Dalvik is a virtual machine and sandbox. You can write native C and C++ code what gets executed in native speeds without any penalty from any virtual machine (read Dalvik). Meaning you write a software what only needs packed as APK and few dozen of lines code with java what is about how application is shown in launcher etc.

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[maccodemonkey]

The main advantage of 64 bitness is access to a far larger memory address space. Yes there can be a few minor performance improvements with proper use of larger registers, but it's really not that big an advantage. Until smartphones and tablets start exceeding 4 gigabytes of RAM there is really not much point other than marketing to use 64 bit code on such devices.

Oh c'mon. Slashdot is supposed to be the smart nerds.

One advantage of a 64 bit architecture (such as x86_64 or the A7) is that in order to hold 64 bit data. But if you're still working with 32 bit data (and most of us are), you can simply load each register with two 32 bit chunks, basically doubling the amount of data you can hold on chip, and the processor has functions to support this.

And if you look at what Apple did with the A7, not only does their 64 bit chip do this, but the new ARM64 specifications double the number of registers in general:
"The ARMv8-A instruction set doubles the number of registers of the A7 compared to the ARMv7 used in A6.[13] It now has 31 general purpose registers that are each 64-bits wide and 32 floating-point/NEON registers that are each 128-bits wide."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A7

So basically you now have an crazy amount of registers, and an insane amount of registers if you are dealing with 32 bit data still. The NEON registers are 128-bits wide and there are 32 of them. If you have 32 bit data, you can process 128 chunks at a time! If you're working in float_16 with NEON, you can work through 256 chunks at a time. That's crazy good compared to ARM32. That would really speed up anything that works with media, images, video, animations, etc, most of which a modern window server does.

But that's not really the end of optimizations. If your registers are large enough, why bother using pointers? And that's what Apple did with the Objective-C runtime on ARM64.
http://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2012-07-27-lets-build-tagged-pointers.html

Basically, if you've got a small enough object type, like an object that holds an 32 bit type, you can skip the allocation of extra memory to hold this data, and just store it in the pointer itself. A lot of the low level and frequently hit methods in Obj-C (like the entire memory allocation tracking system) have been optimized for this, so you should see a speedup in even basic applications.

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[smash]

With apple I can move to different phones without losing any of my music, movies or data. Sony get a big thumbs down based on their treatment of customers in the past - reneging on PS3 OtherOS support post-sale, installing the cd-rootkit on Windows machines, their massive fail at online service security and being coy about the extent of their break in, etc.

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[Anonymous Coward]

Your argument falls apart the second you realize the Nexus has BOTH more cores AND faster cores.

Re:Is it a phone ?

[smash]

Whoosh. But no, I had to deal with paper based maps, guess at direction, not be able to check on things at work away from my desk, fail at documentation (convenient video/audio/photos = awesome) and basically be bored out of my brain on public transport.

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[smash]

More importantly, will it run Linux? And for how long?

Exactly. Until a mandatory firmware update some time after purchase.

Re: New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[smash]

My reasons for hating sony have zero to do with humanitarian stuff. And besides, have you forgotten about product red, which has been going on for well... a decade or so at a guess?

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell, Apple and iOS developers have been compiling for Intel architectures from the beginning: the iOS simulator that runs on the Mac is not an ARM emulator; Xcode compiles intel-native binaries for it.

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[noh8rz10]

cool explanation bro, but if so why isn't the i5s already crazy stupid faster than nexus 5?

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[maccodemonkey]

cool explanation bro, but if so why isn't the i5s already crazy stupid faster than nexus 5?

A few reasons. The A7 is a dual core chip at 1.3 ghz. The Nexus 5 is a 2.3 ghz quad core chip. So basically Apple is fighting with brains and LG/Google are fighting with brawn.

There are a few reasons Apple's approach is probably smarter. First, the more you increase a chip's clock speed, the more power it's going to consume. Apple is taking the strategy of basically keeping the clock speed constant but making the chip more efficient, hopefully keeping energy usage in check. The Nexus 5's fast clock speed doesn't pan out so badly because it's a larger device with a larger battery, but in the long term it's probably not sustainable.

The other thing Apple has going in it's favor is that in order to get the power out of the Nexus 5 processor, you've really got to get your app optimized for quad core, which isn't very common. Most apps are single or dual core, both of which the iPhone 5S's A7 is much stronger at. Sure, 64 bit requires optimization too, but for most developers, that just means a recompile in Xcode instead of implementing the trouble more threading (and Android's threading APIs are not at all easy compared to iOS's.) So more likely in real world situations, with single core and dual core apps, you're going to see far better performance from the A7.

Google/LG do have a few things going in their favor. If they ever moved to 64 bit but kept the same 2.3 ghz frequency with quad cores, they'd have a monster on their hands. And with all their apps running under a virtual machine/JIT, they could recompile all their applications to run under 64 bit without the developer having to do anything at all.

But, on the other hand, there is nothing to stop Apple from building a larger device with a bigger battery and doing the exact same thing, and they're already done the hard part. Moving a chip to 64 bit is not easy, but adding a few extra cores and bumping up the clock speed is easy by comparison. And there have been constant rumors Apple is building a larger device. Apple could also forgo doubling their cores and upping their clock speed and just pocket the power savings. It might make them look bad in future benchmarks compared to "Hummer" phones, but if they could extend their battery life dramatically people might not care.

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[tangent3]

The NEON registers are 128-bits wide and there are 32 of them. If you have 32 bit data, you can process 128 chunks at a time!

I don't think you understand how SIMD is used. NEON instructions only apply to 1 register, so it only processes 4x 32 bit at a time.

Re: New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[melchoir55]

Nexus 5 $350 no contract, direct from google:
https://play.google.com/store/devices/details/Nexus_5_16GB_Black?id=nexus_5_black_16gb&hl=en

iphone5s is $650
http://store.apple.com/us/buy-iphone/iphone5s

The only real comparison is to compare phone prices without contract, because on contract the additional cost of the phone is included in your bill which you pay over the term of the contract.

The N5 is so close to half price of the iphone5s as to make no difference. I used to grudgingly admit iphones could beat out androids back in the G1 days. The only thing apple has left these days is brand.

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[maccodemonkey]

The NEON registers are 128-bits wide and there are 32 of them. If you have 32 bit data, you can process 128 chunks at a time!

I don't think you understand how SIMD is used. NEON instructions only apply to 1 register, so it only processes 4x 32 bit at a time.

You're right, I misspoke. The number of registers is great for pipelining and loading vectors of data, but you can only do an operation on one register at a time. Still a nice gain.

Who gives a ....

[photosonic]

Can we put this in the "don't give a rats ass" category please.

Re:Is it a phone ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Stupid comparison. The earliest thing you listed happened over a hundred years ago. What GP is talking about was only a few years ago.

Perspective and context: try to gain some.

Re: Is it a phone ?

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Everything except the laptop and the tape recorder, yes. Yes I did.

Re:Is it a phone ?

[Qzukk]

Before 2011 I had a smartphone that did all that.

Before "smartphones" I regularly went out and about with a Key Map (the only way to get where you're going in Houston), a compass (one of them cheap suction cup ones that kept falling off), a mobile phone (a nokia "candy bar"), a cd player (with a tape adapter to plug into the car stereo) and a gameboy.

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[ignavus]

New phone almost as fast as month old phone.

Xperia Z1 was released same day as iPhone 5s. It is faster, waterproof, and has higher res 1080 screen. It also has a 20.7MP camera with a much larger 1/2.3" sensor.

I thought you could get an app that makes the iPhone waterproof?
Yeah, here's the ad.

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[lazyBob]

Yeah but that phone is half the price of the iPhone.

Pretty impressive to me.

It's because Google is dumping Nexus 5 with almost no profits in US market. Nexus 5 sold by LG in Taiwan market costs me almost twice.

Re: New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[geekangel]

I think you're talking about Android again... Media transcoding software wouldn't be allowed through the Apple app store, surely?

You have your head stuck up Google's ass.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you're so far stuck up Google's ass, you can't see that Apple might actually be better from a developers perspective.

I'm also a developer, but a web app developer, and My God, Android was an outright nightmare...
We finished the iOS app _MONTHS_ before and launched it.

Android behaved exactly like IE6, it was a nightmare, the UI and app behaviour was a nightmare... after countless head-screaming meetings about why we couldn't launch for Android, and after pulling my hair out and fixing for one or two popular android handsets at the time... I resigned altogether.
To this day, they're only been able to make the app work for a small subset of Android devices - namely the popular S2/S3/and S4, along with one HTC device.

I'm now back to java web app development for desktops, but if I was to step back in the mobile world... there's no way I'm going near Android, in the same sense I don't go near IE6.

Re:Is it a phone ?

[dreamchaser]

There's nothing stupid about it. I could have included the radio to TV transition as the primary media source if you want something more recent. Or perhaps the advent of cheap microwave ovens, or cable television vs. OTA broadcast. It's not my fault you were not able to grasp the point that new technology supersedes the old in many cases. It's called progress.