It's glass. Sure, Gorilla Glass, which makes it very hard. But like many other very hard things, it's brittle. And like every other kind of glass, if you hit it just so, it'll crack or shatter.
Learned this the hard way when one of my cats knocked an Android tablet of my couch last weekend. The floor is laminate, not concrete or brick or anything, but somehow it managed to fall in an off way, which concentrated enough of the falling force at one point on the screen to crack it in three different directions.
Even Apple has learned that metal is a better material for phones than glass. I suspect it's still designed specifically to be as slippery as possible, but at least there's only a 50% chance of landing on the glass now. More or less... the design could favor one side over the other.
The other reason is design. When I had a PDA made of slippery metal like the Palm V and later the Palm T|X, the base was slightly fluted, so it didn't just naturally flee you're grip. The O.G. Droid was even better -- the whole back of it was rubberized. iOS devices, on the other hand, seem designed specifically to jump from one's fingers. And since they weren't breaking often enough, Apple did the glass-on-both-sides thing for awhile with iPhones 4 and 4S.
And yeah, sure, it's really a pocket computer that we still mysterious dub "phone". I use my desktop computer way more than my phone at home or work, I wouldn't expect anything different from my pocket computer.
Sometimes it's the phone, sometimes you just get lucky.
I was loading some stuff into a pickup truck shortly after I got my O.G. Droid, some years back. I had the Droid in a shirt pocket (yeah, a flannel shirt -- got to complete the image), and I jumped out. The Droid got this sill idea about obeying the wrong law of physics, so when I jumped up a bit to get off the truck, it kept going up for a second -- out of my pocket, followed me down, landed on asphalt, and bounced under the truck.
I was thinking both about my amazing stupidity on dropping a couple-week-old phone this way, and amazing intelligence having it fully insured. But upon fetching the device from beneath the Tacoma... not a scratch. Worked great for the nearly two years, no case every needed. Replace it with a Galaxy Nexus. That's a nice smartphone, but not rugged. It needs a case, the plastic scratches easily. And the glass, at best, is Monkey Glass... no Gorilla in sight.
While true, keep in mind that the 3GS was a current model up until last Wednesday. AT&T was still selling them... actually, they still are, while supplies last.
An iPad is just a big fat iPod Touch... they are very much not "very different" devices. Internally, they have the same hardware, other than the screen. Practically identical devices.
And on Android, there are many, many applications that lay out for tablets when on a tablet, for phones when on a phone, no special versions needed (the Apple pundits like to claim there are four tablet-only apps for Android... if that's real, sounds like a developer's mistake). So it's perfectly reasonable for someone not drinking the Apple kool-aid to point to that as fragmentation. Because that's precisely what it is.
Apple accepts apps that only work on the iPad, and won't scale down to smaller pads (the iPod Touch) or the iPhones. In fact, Apple seems to like to brag about the fact that it has 100,000 apps that only run on the iPad, won't just re-scale for a phone. Versus Android, where apps pretty much just work on any resolution, and those written since the tablet UI got standardized self-optimize for the screen resolutions available...no special version needed.
Thus, is it perfectly reasonable for someone without developer/insider information to expect that Apple would allow the same thing for the new iPhone screen resolution.
So... it's somehow magically easier to support any CPU from 600MHz single core A8 to 1200MHz dual core A15 (or whatever) on iOS than it is a similar range of things on Android? Or a 15:1 range of GPU performance on iOS than it is to support a bunch of different GPUs, er, sorry, to support same OpenGL API across different kinds of GPUs on Android? Or to support 256K-1GB memory limits on iOS, versus 512K-2GB on Android?
As for resolutions... most of the Android stuff is vector based. You can do different layouts based on screen density, but the actual need to know about specific resolutions.. not so much, unless you're building an app that is itself pixel-based. And in fact, the same layout engine makes it simple to deliver a single app that knows about small, medium, and large screens... so there's no need to release special tablet-only apps, as there is on iOS. The same app just does tablet-friendly things when you run it on a tablet (GMail, for example).
The implication of fragmentation is usually that new things won't run on older devices. So asking about current devices completely missed the point here (not that the article itself properly expressed the issue, either).
The other big thing... "fragmentation" is usually something iPhonies call on Android, without really understanding Android.
Hardware wise, it's pretty much a non-issue. On iOS, you pretty much do have to match the app to the resolution. So there are apps that don't work on different devices, apps that some in with empty screen space, custom apps for tablets, etc, due to things being so bitmap-oriented on iOS. Pretty much none of this is an Android issue. iPhonies are fond of tell you there are 100,000 custom tablet apps for iOS, something like four for Android. What they fail to realize is that custom tablet apps shouldn't exist at all for Android -- any app can include both small and large screen layouts. Many do. No fragmentation here, move along.
OS-wise, yeah, devices don't get the same kind of upgrade support that Apple provides. But that's also not a huge issue. It's fairly easy for an app to adjust to the API of the device it's running on. And when it really depends on a specific feature, as you say, the Play store knows the device, OS, and app capabilities (it's not that difficult to track) and doesn't sell you the non-compliant app. A few companies have abused this a little (the "HBO Go" people seemed to find it necessary to approve each individual device there for awhile), but for the most part, it just works.
How is it a big jump from the iPhone 4? Everything is slightly better, but I may stick to 4 or get an android.
The CPU and GPU will be about 4x the performance of the iPhone 4. Best guess is that the "5" has dual ARM Cortex A15 processors running at around 1200MHz, versus the single ARM Cortex A9 processor in the iPhone 4 (or dual in the 4S) at 800MHz. The graphics difference will only be apparent if you run 3D games... it has no important effect on normal 2D graphics. The screen is actually a new LCD tech, but it appears to be essentially the same, only a bit longer.
Apple is very cautious about changing the iPhone. They're very successful, and won't risk that by trying something too different. A wider model would be more comparable to the larger Android models that pretty much dominate the flagship units from the big Android makers. Then again, every other company also offers a smaller screen option. If Apple's going to do just one new phone model each year, you can bet it's going to be pretty much like the previous year's model. They can't risk a misstep.
And a not-insignificant set of smartphone fence sitters who may jump onto the iPhone, now that the 4S is $99, the 4 is "free", on-contract.
Particularly if they buy phones at stores run by the carriers. Anyone visited any of these lately. I challenge you to find the dumb phones. I'm not paying for smartphones for my kids, so we did this. At the largest Verizon store in South Jersey, they had exactly three dumb phones. And they were well hidden in the store. There's an iPhone section, a Droid section, a generic Smartphone section, a 4G section... they're trying to get everyone on to smartphones.
Lots of users skip each upgrade from Apple. I mean, for one, you probably have a two-year contract if you bought an iPhone in the USA (could be three years on some carriers in Canada). It is absolutely true that more iPhone users pay off their contracts each year to buy the new device early... but it's still not a significant percentage of the iPhone user base.
And historically, if you look back, it's hard to find an iPhone introduction that wasn't playing catch-up, apart from the original introduction. I mean, the first device came out as a "feature" phone, not a smartphone, and 2G only... many years into the reign of 3G smartphones. The 3G model was pretty much just about the 3G. The 3GS was the same thing, only faster. The 2010 iPhone 4 boosted screen resolution to a bit more than everyone else had in 2009, and it finally delivered a full implementation of 3G (the earlier 3G models didn't do HSUPA -- uploads were capped at 384kb/s).
The big difference: all of those introductions has Steve Jobs selling them. So they really did seem exciting. Hell, even I recall those as being exciting, but when you look back at what was actually introduced, there's no reason to have recalled them that way. Only conclusion: the Reality Distortion Field was a real thing. With that gone, sure, the iPhone 4S and iPhone 5 introductions were rather so-so.
And of course they were. Apple's not going to go out on any limbs here.. they're not going for real innovation. A big change includes the possibility of failure. Jobs was actually ok with that, I guess, even as convinced as he was about being right about what consumers would want. That's not something the current Apple administration can or should do. They're on top -- it's easier for them to fall down, making a goofy attempt at innovation, than to slightly trail the innovators, add in the things that are proven to work as hashed out in the Android or other smartphone markets, and of course, deliver that in the right Apple wrapper. As long as they don't fall progressively further behind the other guys, there's every reason to believe they'll retain a dominant position in the smartphone market.
The other problem with Apple innovating -- all eggs in one basket. They do one smartphone per year. When Motorola gambled on the new RAZR introduction, they had a dozen other models out there in the market. Had that model not done well, it could have quietly gone away, to be replaced with the next educated guess at what consumers would buy from Motorola. It was a hit... so between the introduction of the iPhone 4S and that of the iPhone 5, Motorola put out five different RAZR models. And dozens of others. That's the kind of thing that makes both innovation possible... the need (Motorola regaining a strong position in the market) and some belief that one failure won't kill you.
Apple has a few patents on the SHAPE of their battery. Otherwise, exactly the same crap you get in other smartphones. In fact, the iPhone 5 battery is being made for Apple by a so-far unrelieved company based in China. Everyone knows Japanese cells are what you want.
Though perhaps with better quality control. Consumer battery manufacturing typically produces cells that range all over the place in capacity. I was working on a robotics project about eight years ago that demonstrated this. Our robot was using a high-end R/C car as a motion base, and we were using high-end consumer R/C batteries to power them. Once this ramped up into production, we were only getting about 30% approval on the batteries. Next generation, we switched over the BB390 military battery.
Apple has some patents on battery charging... that's pretty critical. And they were caught, last year, leaving some charge on the iPhone 4 battery when the phone said "empty"... which is actually a really good idea. All rechargeables dislike being full cycled. If you run any smartphone from full to empty every day, you'll be lucky to get 300 days of performance out of that battery... it's the same for the iPhone as anyone else. That's just Li-ion/Li-poly for you. However, if you only partially cycle the battery, it lasts a really long time. This is why the batteries in hybrid cars don't need replacement after a few months... and why those in full EVs might only last a few years (or have driven (sic) new battery technology).
The NiMh cells in my 2003 Prius only get cycled over 40% of the actual capacity of the battery. They extended this to 60% in the 2004 model. Same is true of the lithium cells in most of the plug-in hybrids.
And also the reason Apple can get away with sealing batteries in their devices. Most people just don't run them into the ground every day. Those that do will visit the Apple store, probably early in the second year of that device, and they'll get a swap.. and pay for it.
IBM's one of the big guns in Lithium-Air technology. They think they'll be commercially ready with something in 2020... but they don't have a working prototype just yet. Some startups do, but they're not yet seeing anything like the improvements IBM's been suggesting. I haven't seen anything from Apple on lithium air. But they're all over the place on fuel cells. Based on patent filings, anyway, it seems pretty clear that's where Apple sees the not-too-distant future.
Yup. And they're going to do that.. play catch up. It's inevitable. It's close to inevitable for any market leader to be conservative, since it's hard for them grab more share, fairly easy to imagine screwing something up and losing market share. So they don't do anything crazy. And in the tech world in particular, "innovation" is well described as "crazy that works"... you had this nutty idea, a big chance to what came before, and hey, look, it's working. Like the first iPhone... there was lots of "what came before" rolled into the iPhone. The "crazy" part was selling a smartphone to consumers. Because everyone in the business, Microsoft, Palm, RIM, they all knew, with certainty, that only business folk wanted smartphones.
Add to the natural conservative nature of the market leader several of Apple's standard behavior, and I can pretty much make the case that Apple isn't going to innovate anymore. And for the part, past the first iPhone, they really didn't do that much innovation anyway.
Apple sells a crazy number of devices for a single manufacturer... somewhere between 33% and 40% of all the smart phones sold in the USA, for example. They have a very precise formula -- one new model per year. This does tend to make their business skewed seasonal, but it also allows them to generate huge profits, making just the one model. More recently, they've addressed the lower end market by selling the older products at a reduced price. So unlike every other smart phone vendor, they're not spending a dime to address the mid-range and low-end of the smartphone market. And they're seeding the market for future upgrades.
All of this is dependent on their ability to keep the numbers up... millions flocking to that same yearly new iPhone. If they were to do something in a new iPhone that drove customers away, their whole franchise could fail. Thus, they're never going to do anything particularly interesting with the flagship. There's also a bit of lock in for any smartphone platform... once you're serious about the iPhone, you're not looking closely at Samsung or Motorola or HTC or even Nokia for your next upgrade... you're waiting for that new iPhone. Apple needs to keep something of a parity with the competition... and that's pretty much what the iPhone 5 did. And about all it did. And I claim, that's more than enough. It doesn't do anything to upset the Apple cart:-)
Companies not in the lead are more likely to take risks. And companies with a broad product line are more likely to take risks. So look at Motorola. They had basically no presence in the smartphone business, they had been hurtin' for years. In 2009 they did the Motorola Droid/Milestone... in many way the anti-iPhone.. even THAT itself was a risk... you can tell, by all of the effort some other companies have gone to in order to make an iPhone-ish product. The iPhone was sleek and smooth, the Droid very industrial, and even with a keyboard. And a higher resolution display, which Apple wouldn't do for another year. This was a big success for Motorola, and led to a huge line of smartphones. But they're still struggling a bit. So last year, they took another risk and introduced the new RAZR. Again, kind of an anti-iPhone. More hard industrial edges. Rather than a phone made of mostly glass, they build theirs out of Kevlar -- the thing's as indestructible as phones get. This was a bit of a gamble, but Motorola has a full line of other devices.
It paid off... so a bunch more RAZR models. In fact, in-between the iPhone 4S and iPhone 5 introductions, Motorola introduced five different RAZR models, and a bunch of other devices. That's the other thing about innovation, which goes back to my original claim -- innovation is crazy made successful. If you can't afford to fail, you can't take the risk, you can't bring the crazy, and so, you don't do any significant innovations. Consider that the only significant innovation in the iPhone 4S was SIRI, Apple's integrated speech recognizer/actor... software you can swi
Probably not. In some situations, LTE can actually use less power than 3G. Mine, for example. I got all-day-plus performance on my Galaxy Nexus (with the 2100mAhr battery) at my old office. That was in Philadelphia, in a very old stone building... very good 4G signal, in fact, much better in-building than 3G ever was (most of the cells in the city are going to use 1900MHz on Verizon, for the increased bandwidth, which gets more attenuation through old stone walls than the 700MHz used for LTE).
These days, I'm in an office in Downingtown, PA, in a pretty fringy 3G area. Same phone won't last a work day on standby without sitting on a charger when not in use.
Going forward, LTE will eventually save power over any form of 3G. Right now, not necessarily -- the digital protocols still take more power than either sort of 3G, but that's going to vanish as chips shrink. What you can't shrink is the need for the power amplifier (PA). Most phones want to be able to put out a signal of at least 1/2W (27dBm). The typical OFDM modulation schemes used in 3G, however, basically sum a large number of independent carriers (subcarriers) to deliver the full signal. When things line up unfortunately, you have too many signals summing high, creating a temporary power "crest".. this is known as the crest factor of a modulation scheme. For 3G as a class, this is a 6-10dB crest factor (also sometimes expressed as a PAPR -- Peak to Average Power Ratio). This means that the PA actually has to be able to support no just 27dB signals, but 37dB signals... a peak of 5W. Now, certainly, your phone isn't constantly transmitting 5W. But the PA has to be able to transmit at 5W without crushing the signal. That means the PA is going to be much less efficient than it could be at 1/2W.
Now to LTE.. the new SC-FDMA uplink modulation, presents only a single carrier on transmission, greatly reducing the PAPR/crest factor. Basically, it's a conventional OFDM modulation fed into a fourier transform, which has the effect of averaging out the high peaks. This can deliver 64QAM with a crest factor under 5dB. So you'd need an amplifier peaking at about 1.5W, rather than 5W, for the same uplink in 4G LTE vs. 3G HSPA. That's a huge win for the handset.
It's network dependent anyway.. since on CDMA2000 networks, you can't do 3G voice.
On the other hand, for GSM, you may want 3G voice, even if the power requirements are higher, because it's more reliable. GSM uses a hard call handoff on 2G... it fully drops one cell before connecting to the next. This is at least one reason AT&T seems prone to dropped calls over Verizon or Sprint (the other is poor placement of the cell towers, made so when the AT&T part of the AT&T/Cingular network upgraded from DAMPS -- which had greater range -- to GSM). On 3G voice, you get soft handoff... the phone maintains connections to two or three cells, and uses only the best connection at any given time. Same as CMDA2000 has always done.
Some of it's also based on your relative power requirements. With good cell connections, the screen is far more likely to be your power sink than the cellular modem. But if you're on a cellular fringe, the phone can output as high as 1/2W of power... which is a pretty big frickin' power sink for a small device (that's radio power, and of course, PAs are not all THAT efficient). Depending on your circumstances (walls, woodlands, etc) you may be better off with 4G than 3G, or AT&T/Verizon over Sprint/T-Mobile, just due to frequency characteristics.
The point is what it's always been -- streaming audio over the internet. Sure, FLAC is fine for LAN use.
The good: this does (in theory) AAC quality compress, but with much lower latency. A use case: playing music live over the internet. You need high quality, but if the latency is over 1ms, every musician is compensating for the delay already, and if it's over about 10ms, you just can't play together. And since it's music, the quality does matter.
Another good thing, the XKCD cartoon not withstanding, is that it scales all the way from voice to music in the same standard. So you can think of scaling the bitrate to the audio source, without worrying much about falling off the end of where it works. Of course, in reality, it's using two different technologies (the CODEC formerly known as SILK at voice rates, the CODEC formerly known as CELT at music rates -- looking at that, it's not quite as cool as it might have seemed).
The bad thing: this is 2012, and the standard only goes to 48kHz.
My toothbrush is very coffee proof.. of course, the simple act of brushing my teeth is a test of that. I had a laptop, once, that did not prove so immune to a 16oz cup of coffee being dumped on the keyboard. So yeah, coffee testing is very important here (sadly, that same laptop, after repairs, was seriously injured when kicked across a room by a runaway robot. Didn't kill it, but it was never the same).
The CAFE standards live independently of the highway speeds in any given location. I'm absolutely certain that they have no plans to both up the requirement and lower the results of the EPA tests at the same time. For one, they changed the test back in 2008, to make it more realistic (and lower the somewhat inflated results hybrids delivered on the old test), but it's still done in a lab, and still no faster than 50-55mph or so. The fact of faster highways doesn't invalidate the standard.
And in fact, if we really want to save energy and lower pollution, higher mileage cars does this far more effectively than lowering speed limits. Even at 75mph with the A/C on, I get ~42mpg in my Prius (and I'd do better with a newer model, mine is 10 years old). That's still twice the mileage I got in my old Ford Explorer, even below 55mpg... and a very tiny fraction of the carbon emissions.
Aerodynamics? Light weight? Rear wheel skirts? Sounds like the old version of the Honda Insight.. rated 61mpg on the highway. Of course, it only had a 1L 3-cylinder engine, mild hybrid (small electric motor to boost off-the-line performance, but no electric-only, none of the weird cooperative stuff you find in Toyota style hybrids, or the Chevy Volt)... lots of things that didn't lead to popularity in the USA. But it's certainly technically possible.
That's cheating.. they're all turbo diesels. Between the higher energy density of the diesel fuel and the efficiency of the engine, diesels get about 20% more mileage than similar petrol vehicles per gallon/liter. Of course, we could have them here... probably would, if fuel prices hit $6-7 per gallon. Excluding the fairly made-up numbers for electric or plug-in hybrids, you pretty much have to go diesel to get past 50mpg on EPA ratings (the Prius and Pruis c are both rates 50mpg combined for 2012, though when you break it down, they rate higher in the city than on the highway).
Texas just opened a highway with a posted 85mpg speed limit. And there's always Germany (though last time I was these, they were putting in speed limits in a few places that hadn't had them before... having to deal with more former East German drivers, I suppose).
There's no real wind resistance. They can program the dynomometer to account for auto weight and wind resistance -- there are guidelines for this as part of the standard. But yeah, it's done under lab conditions, and at much lower speeds than most people drive, even here in the relatively crowded East.
The cars are rated on a standards dictated by the Department of Energy, run on a dynamometer, at fairly reasonable speeds... like 50-55mph (they were revised in 2008 to be more realistic, but they're still not really representative of the way people actually drive). That's the basis for the CAFE standard they're talking about here, it has nothing to do with actual driving, but rather, a repeatable standard measurement of some sort. Automakers do their own tests; the EPA randomly verifies about 15% of them every year.
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It's glass. Sure, Gorilla Glass, which makes it very hard. But like many other very hard things, it's brittle. And like every other kind of glass, if you hit it just so, it'll crack or shatter.
Learned this the hard way when one of my cats knocked an Android tablet of my couch last weekend. The floor is laminate, not concrete or brick or anything, but somehow it managed to fall in an off way, which concentrated enough of the falling force at one point on the screen to crack it in three different directions.
Even Apple has learned that metal is a better material for phones than glass. I suspect it's still designed specifically to be as slippery as possible, but at least there's only a 50% chance of landing on the glass now. More or less... the design could favor one side over the other.
The other reason is design. When I had a PDA made of slippery metal like the Palm V and later the Palm T|X, the base was slightly fluted, so it didn't just naturally flee you're grip. The O.G. Droid was even better -- the whole back of it was rubberized. iOS devices, on the other hand, seem designed specifically to jump from one's fingers. And since they weren't breaking often enough, Apple did the glass-on-both-sides thing for awhile with iPhones 4 and 4S.
And yeah, sure, it's really a pocket computer that we still mysterious dub "phone". I use my desktop computer way more than my phone at home or work, I wouldn't expect anything different from my pocket computer.
Sometimes it's the phone, sometimes you just get lucky.
I was loading some stuff into a pickup truck shortly after I got my O.G. Droid, some years back. I had the Droid in a shirt pocket (yeah, a flannel shirt -- got to complete the image), and I jumped out. The Droid got this sill idea about obeying the wrong law of physics, so when I jumped up a bit to get off the truck, it kept going up for a second -- out of my pocket, followed me down, landed on asphalt, and bounced under the truck.
I was thinking both about my amazing stupidity on dropping a couple-week-old phone this way, and amazing intelligence having it fully insured. But upon fetching the device from beneath the Tacoma... not a scratch. Worked great for the nearly two years, no case every needed. Replace it with a Galaxy Nexus. That's a nice smartphone, but not rugged. It needs a case, the plastic scratches easily. And the glass, at best, is Monkey Glass... no Gorilla in sight.
While true, keep in mind that the 3GS was a current model up until last Wednesday. AT&T was still selling them... actually, they still are, while supplies last.
An iPad is just a big fat iPod Touch... they are very much not "very different" devices. Internally, they have the same hardware, other than the screen. Practically identical devices.
And on Android, there are many, many applications that lay out for tablets when on a tablet, for phones when on a phone, no special versions needed (the Apple pundits like to claim there are four tablet-only apps for Android... if that's real, sounds like a developer's mistake). So it's perfectly reasonable for someone not drinking the Apple kool-aid to point to that as fragmentation. Because that's precisely what it is.
Apple accepts apps that only work on the iPad, and won't scale down to smaller pads (the iPod Touch) or the iPhones. In fact, Apple seems to like to brag about the fact that it has 100,000 apps that only run on the iPad, won't just re-scale for a phone. Versus Android, where apps pretty much just work on any resolution, and those written since the tablet UI got standardized self-optimize for the screen resolutions available.. .no special version needed.
Thus, is it perfectly reasonable for someone without developer/insider information to expect that Apple would allow the same thing for the new iPhone screen resolution.
iPhone users lead a pretty sheltered life. They don't know much about the other platforms, as a rule.
So... it's somehow magically easier to support any CPU from 600MHz single core A8 to 1200MHz dual core A15 (or whatever) on iOS than it is a similar range of things on Android? Or a 15:1 range of GPU performance on iOS than it is to support a bunch of different GPUs, er, sorry, to support same OpenGL API across different kinds of GPUs on Android? Or to support 256K-1GB memory limits on iOS, versus 512K-2GB on Android?
As for resolutions... most of the Android stuff is vector based. You can do different layouts based on screen density, but the actual need to know about specific resolutions.. not so much, unless you're building an app that is itself pixel-based. And in fact, the same layout engine makes it simple to deliver a single app that knows about small, medium, and large screens... so there's no need to release special tablet-only apps, as there is on iOS. The same app just does tablet-friendly things when you run it on a tablet (GMail, for example).
The implication of fragmentation is usually that new things won't run on older devices. So asking about current devices completely missed the point here (not that the article itself properly expressed the issue, either).
The other big thing... "fragmentation" is usually something iPhonies call on Android, without really understanding Android.
Hardware wise, it's pretty much a non-issue. On iOS, you pretty much do have to match the app to the resolution. So there are apps that don't work on different devices, apps that some in with empty screen space, custom apps for tablets, etc, due to things being so bitmap-oriented on iOS. Pretty much none of this is an Android issue. iPhonies are fond of tell you there are 100,000 custom tablet apps for iOS, something like four for Android. What they fail to realize is that custom tablet apps shouldn't exist at all for Android -- any app can include both small and large screen layouts. Many do. No fragmentation here, move along.
OS-wise, yeah, devices don't get the same kind of upgrade support that Apple provides. But that's also not a huge issue. It's fairly easy for an app to adjust to the API of the device it's running on. And when it really depends on a specific feature, as you say, the Play store knows the device, OS, and app capabilities (it's not that difficult to track) and doesn't sell you the non-compliant app. A few companies have abused this a little (the "HBO Go" people seemed to find it necessary to approve each individual device there for awhile), but for the most part, it just works.
How is it a big jump from the iPhone 4? Everything is slightly better, but I may stick to 4 or get an android.
The CPU and GPU will be about 4x the performance of the iPhone 4. Best guess is that the "5" has dual ARM Cortex A15 processors running at around 1200MHz, versus the single ARM Cortex A9 processor in the iPhone 4 (or dual in the 4S) at 800MHz. The graphics difference will only be apparent if you run 3D games... it has no important effect on normal 2D graphics. The screen is actually a new LCD tech, but it appears to be essentially the same, only a bit longer.
Apple is very cautious about changing the iPhone. They're very successful, and won't risk that by trying something too different. A wider model would be more comparable to the larger Android models that pretty much dominate the flagship units from the big Android makers. Then again, every other company also offers a smaller screen option. If Apple's going to do just one new phone model each year, you can bet it's going to be pretty much like the previous year's model. They can't risk a misstep.
And a not-insignificant set of smartphone fence sitters who may jump onto the iPhone, now that the 4S is $99, the 4 is "free", on-contract.
Particularly if they buy phones at stores run by the carriers. Anyone visited any of these lately. I challenge you to find the dumb phones. I'm not paying for smartphones for my kids, so we did this. At the largest Verizon store in South Jersey, they had exactly three dumb phones. And they were well hidden in the store. There's an iPhone section, a Droid section, a generic Smartphone section, a 4G section... they're trying to get everyone on to smartphones.
Lots of users skip each upgrade from Apple. I mean, for one, you probably have a two-year contract if you bought an iPhone in the USA (could be three years on some carriers in Canada). It is absolutely true that more iPhone users pay off their contracts each year to buy the new device early... but it's still not a significant percentage of the iPhone user base.
And historically, if you look back, it's hard to find an iPhone introduction that wasn't playing catch-up, apart from the original introduction. I mean, the first device came out as a "feature" phone, not a smartphone, and 2G only... many years into the reign of 3G smartphones. The 3G model was pretty much just about the 3G. The 3GS was the same thing, only faster. The 2010 iPhone 4 boosted screen resolution to a bit more than everyone else had in 2009, and it finally delivered a full implementation of 3G (the earlier 3G models didn't do HSUPA -- uploads were capped at 384kb/s).
The big difference: all of those introductions has Steve Jobs selling them. So they really did seem exciting. Hell, even I recall those as being exciting, but when you look back at what was actually introduced, there's no reason to have recalled them that way. Only conclusion: the Reality Distortion Field was a real thing. With that gone, sure, the iPhone 4S and iPhone 5 introductions were rather so-so.
And of course they were. Apple's not going to go out on any limbs here.. they're not going for real innovation. A big change includes the possibility of failure. Jobs was actually ok with that, I guess, even as convinced as he was about being right about what consumers would want. That's not something the current Apple administration can or should do. They're on top -- it's easier for them to fall down, making a goofy attempt at innovation, than to slightly trail the innovators, add in the things that are proven to work as hashed out in the Android or other smartphone markets, and of course, deliver that in the right Apple wrapper. As long as they don't fall progressively further behind the other guys, there's every reason to believe they'll retain a dominant position in the smartphone market.
The other problem with Apple innovating -- all eggs in one basket. They do one smartphone per year. When Motorola gambled on the new RAZR introduction, they had a dozen other models out there in the market. Had that model not done well, it could have quietly gone away, to be replaced with the next educated guess at what consumers would buy from Motorola. It was a hit... so between the introduction of the iPhone 4S and that of the iPhone 5, Motorola put out five different RAZR models. And dozens of others. That's the kind of thing that makes both innovation possible... the need (Motorola regaining a strong position in the market) and some belief that one failure won't kill you.
Apple has a few patents on the SHAPE of their battery. Otherwise, exactly the same crap you get in other smartphones. In fact, the iPhone 5 battery is being made for Apple by a so-far unrelieved company based in China. Everyone knows Japanese cells are what you want.
Though perhaps with better quality control. Consumer battery manufacturing typically produces cells that range all over the place in capacity. I was working on a robotics project about eight years ago that demonstrated this. Our robot was using a high-end R/C car as a motion base, and we were using high-end consumer R/C batteries to power them. Once this ramped up into production, we were only getting about 30% approval on the batteries. Next generation, we switched over the BB390 military battery.
Apple has some patents on battery charging... that's pretty critical. And they were caught, last year, leaving some charge on the iPhone 4 battery when the phone said "empty"... which is actually a really good idea. All rechargeables dislike being full cycled. If you run any smartphone from full to empty every day, you'll be lucky to get 300 days of performance out of that battery... it's the same for the iPhone as anyone else. That's just Li-ion/Li-poly for you. However, if you only partially cycle the battery, it lasts a really long time. This is why the batteries in hybrid cars don't need replacement after a few months... and why those in full EVs might only last a few years (or have driven (sic) new battery technology).
The NiMh cells in my 2003 Prius only get cycled over 40% of the actual capacity of the battery. They extended this to 60% in the 2004 model. Same is true of the lithium cells in most of the plug-in hybrids.
And also the reason Apple can get away with sealing batteries in their devices. Most people just don't run them into the ground every day. Those that do will visit the Apple store, probably early in the second year of that device, and they'll get a swap.. and pay for it.
IBM's one of the big guns in Lithium-Air technology. They think they'll be commercially ready with something in 2020... but they don't have a working prototype just yet. Some startups do, but they're not yet seeing anything like the improvements IBM's been suggesting. I haven't seen anything from Apple on lithium air. But they're all over the place on fuel cells. Based on patent filings, anyway, it seems pretty clear that's where Apple sees the not-too-distant future.
Yup. And they're going to do that.. play catch up. It's inevitable. It's close to inevitable for any market leader to be conservative, since it's hard for them grab more share, fairly easy to imagine screwing something up and losing market share. So they don't do anything crazy. And in the tech world in particular, "innovation" is well described as "crazy that works"... you had this nutty idea, a big chance to what came before, and hey, look, it's working. Like the first iPhone... there was lots of "what came before" rolled into the iPhone. The "crazy" part was selling a smartphone to consumers. Because everyone in the business, Microsoft, Palm, RIM, they all knew, with certainty, that only business folk wanted smartphones.
Add to the natural conservative nature of the market leader several of Apple's standard behavior, and I can pretty much make the case that Apple isn't going to innovate anymore. And for the part, past the first iPhone, they really didn't do that much innovation anyway.
Apple sells a crazy number of devices for a single manufacturer... somewhere between 33% and 40% of all the smart phones sold in the USA, for example. They have a very precise formula -- one new model per year. This does tend to make their business skewed seasonal, but it also allows them to generate huge profits, making just the one model. More recently, they've addressed the lower end market by selling the older products at a reduced price. So unlike every other smart phone vendor, they're not spending a dime to address the mid-range and low-end of the smartphone market. And they're seeding the market for future upgrades.
All of this is dependent on their ability to keep the numbers up ... millions flocking to that same yearly new iPhone. If they were to do something in a new iPhone that drove customers away, their whole franchise could fail. Thus, they're never going to do anything particularly interesting with the flagship. There's also a bit of lock in for any smartphone platform... once you're serious about the iPhone, you're not looking closely at Samsung or Motorola or HTC or even Nokia for your next upgrade... you're waiting for that new iPhone. Apple needs to keep something of a parity with the competition... and that's pretty much what the iPhone 5 did. And about all it did. And I claim, that's more than enough. It doesn't do anything to upset the Apple cart :-)
Companies not in the lead are more likely to take risks. And companies with a broad product line are more likely to take risks. So look at Motorola. They had basically no presence in the smartphone business, they had been hurtin' for years. In 2009 they did the Motorola Droid/Milestone... in many way the anti-iPhone.. even THAT itself was a risk... you can tell, by all of the effort some other companies have gone to in order to make an iPhone-ish product. The iPhone was sleek and smooth, the Droid very industrial, and even with a keyboard. And a higher resolution display, which Apple wouldn't do for another year. This was a big success for Motorola, and led to a huge line of smartphones. But they're still struggling a bit. So last year, they took another risk and introduced the new RAZR. Again, kind of an anti-iPhone. More hard industrial edges. Rather than a phone made of mostly glass, they build theirs out of Kevlar -- the thing's as indestructible as phones get. This was a bit of a gamble, but Motorola has a full line of other devices.
It paid off... so a bunch more RAZR models. In fact, in-between the iPhone 4S and iPhone 5 introductions, Motorola introduced five different RAZR models, and a bunch of other devices. That's the other thing about innovation, which goes back to my original claim -- innovation is crazy made successful. If you can't afford to fail, you can't take the risk, you can't bring the crazy, and so, you don't do any significant innovations. Consider that the only significant innovation in the iPhone 4S was SIRI, Apple's integrated speech recognizer/actor... software you can swi
Probably not. In some situations, LTE can actually use less power than 3G. Mine, for example. I got all-day-plus performance on my Galaxy Nexus (with the 2100mAhr battery) at my old office. That was in Philadelphia, in a very old stone building... very good 4G signal, in fact, much better in-building than 3G ever was (most of the cells in the city are going to use 1900MHz on Verizon, for the increased bandwidth, which gets more attenuation through old stone walls than the 700MHz used for LTE).
These days, I'm in an office in Downingtown, PA, in a pretty fringy 3G area. Same phone won't last a work day on standby without sitting on a charger when not in use.
Going forward, LTE will eventually save power over any form of 3G. Right now, not necessarily -- the digital protocols still take more power than either sort of 3G, but that's going to vanish as chips shrink. What you can't shrink is the need for the power amplifier (PA). Most phones want to be able to put out a signal of at least 1/2W (27dBm). The typical OFDM modulation schemes used in 3G, however, basically sum a large number of independent carriers (subcarriers) to deliver the full signal. When things line up unfortunately, you have too many signals summing high, creating a temporary power "crest".. this is known as the crest factor of a modulation scheme. For 3G as a class, this is a 6-10dB crest factor (also sometimes expressed as a PAPR -- Peak to Average Power Ratio). This means that the PA actually has to be able to support no just 27dB signals, but 37dB signals... a peak of 5W. Now, certainly, your phone isn't constantly transmitting 5W. But the PA has to be able to transmit at 5W without crushing the signal. That means the PA is going to be much less efficient than it could be at 1/2W.
Now to LTE.. the new SC-FDMA uplink modulation, presents only a single carrier on transmission, greatly reducing the PAPR/crest factor. Basically, it's a conventional OFDM modulation fed into a fourier transform, which has the effect of averaging out the high peaks. This can deliver 64QAM with a crest factor under 5dB. So you'd need an amplifier peaking at about 1.5W, rather than 5W, for the same uplink in 4G LTE vs. 3G HSPA. That's a huge win for the handset.
It's network dependent anyway.. since on CDMA2000 networks, you can't do 3G voice.
On the other hand, for GSM, you may want 3G voice, even if the power requirements are higher, because it's more reliable. GSM uses a hard call handoff on 2G... it fully drops one cell before connecting to the next. This is at least one reason AT&T seems prone to dropped calls over Verizon or Sprint (the other is poor placement of the cell towers, made so when the AT&T part of the AT&T/Cingular network upgraded from DAMPS -- which had greater range -- to GSM). On 3G voice, you get soft handoff... the phone maintains connections to two or three cells, and uses only the best connection at any given time. Same as CMDA2000 has always done.
Some of it's also based on your relative power requirements. With good cell connections, the screen is far more likely to be your power sink than the cellular modem. But if you're on a cellular fringe, the phone can output as high as 1/2W of power... which is a pretty big frickin' power sink for a small device (that's radio power, and of course, PAs are not all THAT efficient). Depending on your circumstances (walls, woodlands, etc) you may be better off with 4G than 3G, or AT&T/Verizon over Sprint/T-Mobile, just due to frequency characteristics.
The point is what it's always been -- streaming audio over the internet. Sure, FLAC is fine for LAN use.
The good: this does (in theory) AAC quality compress, but with much lower latency. A use case: playing music live over the internet. You need high quality, but if the latency is over 1ms, every musician is compensating for the delay already, and if it's over about 10ms, you just can't play together. And since it's music, the quality does matter.
Another good thing, the XKCD cartoon not withstanding, is that it scales all the way from voice to music in the same standard. So you can think of scaling the bitrate to the audio source, without worrying much about falling off the end of where it works. Of course, in reality, it's using two different technologies (the CODEC formerly known as SILK at voice rates, the CODEC formerly known as CELT at music rates -- looking at that, it's not quite as cool as it might have seemed).
The bad thing: this is 2012, and the standard only goes to 48kHz.
My toothbrush is very coffee proof.. of course, the simple act of brushing my teeth is a test of that. I had a laptop, once, that did not prove so immune to a 16oz cup of coffee being dumped on the keyboard. So yeah, coffee testing is very important here (sadly, that same laptop, after repairs, was seriously injured when kicked across a room by a runaway robot. Didn't kill it, but it was never the same).
The CAFE standards live independently of the highway speeds in any given location. I'm absolutely certain that they have no plans to both up the requirement and lower the results of the EPA tests at the same time. For one, they changed the test back in 2008, to make it more realistic (and lower the somewhat inflated results hybrids delivered on the old test), but it's still done in a lab, and still no faster than 50-55mph or so. The fact of faster highways doesn't invalidate the standard.
And in fact, if we really want to save energy and lower pollution, higher mileage cars does this far more effectively than lowering speed limits. Even at 75mph with the A/C on, I get ~42mpg in my Prius (and I'd do better with a newer model, mine is 10 years old). That's still twice the mileage I got in my old Ford Explorer, even below 55mpg... and a very tiny fraction of the carbon emissions.
One benefit of the Prius-style hybrid -- no transmission at all. Fixed gears.
Aerodynamics? Light weight? Rear wheel skirts? Sounds like the old version of the Honda Insight.. rated 61mpg on the highway. Of course, it only had a 1L 3-cylinder engine, mild hybrid (small electric motor to boost off-the-line performance, but no electric-only, none of the weird cooperative stuff you find in Toyota style hybrids, or the Chevy Volt)... lots of things that didn't lead to popularity in the USA. But it's certainly technically possible.
That's cheating.. they're all turbo diesels. Between the higher energy density of the diesel fuel and the efficiency of the engine, diesels get about 20% more mileage than similar petrol vehicles per gallon/liter. Of course, we could have them here... probably would, if fuel prices hit $6-7 per gallon. Excluding the fairly made-up numbers for electric or plug-in hybrids, you pretty much have to go diesel to get past 50mpg on EPA ratings (the Prius and Pruis c are both rates 50mpg combined for 2012, though when you break it down, they rate higher in the city than on the highway).
Texas just opened a highway with a posted 85mpg speed limit. And there's always Germany (though last time I was these, they were putting in speed limits in a few places that hadn't had them before... having to deal with more former East German drivers, I suppose).
There's no real wind resistance. They can program the dynomometer to account for auto weight and wind resistance -- there are guidelines for this as part of the standard. But yeah, it's done under lab conditions, and at much lower speeds than most people drive, even here in the relatively crowded East.
The cars are rated on a standards dictated by the Department of Energy, run on a dynamometer, at fairly reasonable speeds... like 50-55mph (they were revised in 2008 to be more realistic, but they're still not really representative of the way people actually drive). That's the basis for the CAFE standard they're talking about here, it has nothing to do with actual driving, but rather, a repeatable standard measurement of some sort. Automakers do their own tests; the EPA randomly verifies about 15% of them every year.