Also, in July 2008, Symbian OS wasn't open source, that wasn't official until last February. And of course, neither Nokia nor any other Symbian supports promote the OS in the USA. If I didn't follow embedded and smart phone technology, I wouldn't know about it (the way 0% of the regular smart phone buying public in the USA knows about it).
If it's so good, why no attempt to market it here? Nokia couldn't have been scared away by Apple... Symbian is older than iPhone.
While I completely agree, there's one problem... it's not just the geeks complaining. Sure, we do, and loudly, and for the wrong reasons... you're not going to change Apple, neither am I. So don't support The Bad Thing by buying it and than hoping for a change. I was smart enough to wait, not just for Android, but the Android device I really wanted. Thus, no need to complain... well, other than to complain in the service of point out the problem with Apple.
See... that's the problem. Geeks know these things, buy anyway, and then complain or jailbreak or whatever. But there are something on the order of 80 million iPxxx devices out there (sold... some, presumably, no longer in use). This isn't geek purchases, the bulk of the buyers are regular old folks. And they don't know up front about the limitations of an Apple product, and don't know until it hits them on the head. Or until they play with an Android device. They are lured into this, and they do have a right to complain.
The iPhone became the USA's second-most-popular line of smartphones by catering directly to consumers, that was the whole big win Apple came up with. RIM, Microsoft, even Palm were all thinking business, since of course, "everyone" knew that regular consumers had no use for a smartphone. Apple leveraged it, not from PDA DNA, but from the very successful iPod, and dropped it right into the same sales model. And you know what -- regular folks actually like smartphones. Imagine that?
No reason to expect any better treatment once they added the PDA features than you got with music or video... but in fact, you got worse. I can load my own music or video on an iPhone by ripping it, but I can't even write a simple BASIC program... not even in Commodore 64 BASIC! That is not the kind of limitation anyone would expect without being told up front... particularly not non-techies. Just an example... obviously, non-techies are less interested in writing in BASIC 2.0 than, well.... I don't suspect many here want that either. But it's apparently such a threat to Apple. And most regular users are oblivious to these things.
It's good to educate them. And to notice that no one's made much of a business of any kind catering only to geeks, but particularly, nothing at this level. Android or other Linux-based smartphone platforms may have more geek appeal, but they have to be just as consumer friendly as Apple or as business friendly as RIM, or they'll fail.
Also, for more than a year before the iPhone came out, there were rumors of a phone from Apple. And pretty much everyone expected the next major device, phone or iPod, to be some kind of "all-screen" thing. I mean, every other company was headed that way, too, but most expected Apple to get there first. There wasn't as much about the eventual look and feel of the touch screen interface, but even back then, most tech pundits were expecting a finger-based interface (some of the goofier guesses had a virtual iPod "Classic" wheel coming up on a touch-screen), no stylus.
Thing is, these sorts of things are fairly easy to guess anyway. If Apple wants to just ensure the "Apple's working on a tablet" meme gets out, there will be all sorts of talk, rumors, claims of leaks, artists renderings, etc. That's in part Apple, in part the fact it's fun, and in part that you know someone's going to do this soon enough. Of course, the same things can happen without Apple being responsible for establishing that meme. But then everyone's disappointed when they don't product That Thing We All Expected.
It's not just Apple... the world was buzzing about the Google Phone, various "iPhone Killers" long before they materialized (and failed to kill the iPhone, or usually, even be very good, though more than a few recent Android phones hold their own), etc. The rumor mills had the whole idea of the Microsoft Zune being a blatent iPod ripoff (a bad one at first, but nonetheless) long before that showed up. Things leak and the community as a whole is good at guessing.
I think you've seen "Zoolander" a few too many times. Unless you have baby hands, a 1/4 iPhone will be too small for on-screen typing to work. And it's iPhoneOS, not Android, so you can't just talk to it. Yet.
Of course, the primary reason the iPad used the microSIM was supposedly just to that iPhone users couldn't just pop their iPhone SIMs into the device, but had to sign up for another $30 per month to use the iPad in cell modem. That's defeated if the new device supports the microSIM.
Right. The story so far -- some unnamed novice finds a phone in a bar, turns it on, gets zapped... oops. Now making the rounds at the various tech blogs, since the device is now not cool enough for any higher-level attention getting.
Probably a fake, but the "yawn" factor, relative to the weekly announcements of cool new Android phones, does match the reality of the Apple situation. And even the 960x460 screen is just a guess... all they really estimated was "higher resolution". And a really bad one at that... Apple's not going to depart from their favored 4:3 aspect ratio, despite that looking all Ozzie and Harriet now, and all the might of the world moving on to 16:9. If they were doing this for iPhone 2010, they'd have done for iPad. Better guesses would be 640x480, 720x540, or 850x640. They'd still run old apps in a 480x360 window, just as they do on the iPad. Less stupid new apps might use the actual screen rez, like most Android apps do today.
A resolution increase is obvious... every top of the line smart phone is 800x480 or better, since the last part of 2009. Apple would be fools to not boost the resolution.... despite that pushing into "iPad Mini" territory.
Also, most of the stuff on the list is just "keeping up with the joneses"... shutter button from camera, from the Droid. 1GHz CPU, your choice of "from the iPad" or "from the Nexus One". Square look, from the Droid... backing off on the bad chrome trim... well, that's distinguishing, but also the ugliest part of the iPhone... looked bad in 2007, looks old and bad today. Front facing cameras are on a bunch of the newer phones, and it's apparently a most-asked-for feature from current iPhonies. More battery... helps with complaints about the iPhone being the only phone on the planet without a replaceable battery, as well as competition with other phones that, currently, outlast the iPhone on a charge. Non-metallic case might well be a move to resolve the "crappy phone" complaints... though I rekon, moving to Verizon or maybe even Sprint would help there, too.
So in short... nothing to see here, folks, move along. Easily could be a fake, easily could be Apple's typical very incremental change in hardware, nothing exciting, and yet, it gets all the iPhonies panties in a twist every time, as they must make that annual pilgrimmage to the Apple store to get the features everyone else had last year. Ok, sure, and 180,000 apps, or whatever they're at now.
I wonder if they'll even have HSPA full implemented on this one (no iPhone does uploads faster than 384kb/s)?
That report is highly flawed, as they compared applications sales from everyone else to application downloads from Apple. No doubt Apple's way out front. They were the first to market PDA apps to consumers, not business, and to price them at around the price of a cup of coffee, usually. Android is growing with a similar model, though with far more free and ad-sponsored apps (in a large parts because they still haven't worked out for-pay apps in many countries).
RIM and Nokia are also working to improve their offerings, but they were caught by surprise at how well the iPhone did. Conventional wisdom held that regular consumers would have no use for smartphones. Oops.
ARM officially offers two kinds of IP licenses: "Processor" and "Architecture". There are hundreds of companies with Processor licenses, covering the full range of ARM CPU cores.
Actually, while most of the ARM licensees are not "Architecture" licenses, ARM will sell them, for a price... it's just more than you want to pay if you're not tweaking the CPU. It's just business. QualComm has an Architecture license, too... that's why they were able to make a 1GHz "Snapdragon' (essentially a Cortex A8), even though ARM only specs it for 600MHz. Intel still has an ARM license.. they didn't sell Marvell their license. Infineon also has an ARM Architecture license.
Marvell got an Architecture licence in the early 2000s, well before they bought Intel's Application and Communication Processor unit. Marvell's Sheeva is an internally developed superscalar ARM CPU, compatible with the Cortex A8, ARMv6 and ARMv7.
Apple had a Processor license before involving PA Semi in the ARM business, but today they have an Architecture license, which is how they put a 1GHz Cortex A8 into the iPad.
iPhone is already the Mac, Android is already the PC. You know this because it's just like 1984. Sure, there are still the Ataris and the Commodores around, but just about every phone company is making Android phones. And not just in the USA, but internationally.
It doesn't matter what Jobs does, the iPhone is inherently the Mac. And hey, better than being Atari. But a closed, proprietary system will never last long against an open system (don't say "Windows", that's an open proprietary system, and it did well largely because there were no viable FOSS competitors back in the early 80s). At least not once you have real businesses built on it, with the ability to promote it just as well as the one company is promoting their proprietary system.
Actually, Transmeta did wonders for battery life and heat, but not so much on performance. But much of that was due to the fast their FPU just plain sucked.. it had nothing to do with emulation.
The idea of Transmeta was to deliver larger chip performance using a smaller chip. That had some merit -- they did very nicely in blade computing until Intel revamped their laptop chips for the same purpose and blew them away.
I had a Transmeta laptop from Fujitsu. With the extra battery, I got 14 hours of use, back in the 90s. This, before AMD or Intel paid much attention at all to power consumption... their laptop CPUs were not different designs as they are now, just lower voltage versions of the desktop chips.
Yup.. Amiga 1000 shipped in September of 1985, with full multitasking. And of course, UNIX, VAX/VMS, and many other "big" machine OSs of the day were doing this before the Amiga, though it wasn't in home computers. Well, there were a few with OS/9, like the Rat Shack "Color Computer", that technically could.
And AmigaOS did multitasking before MacOS! And UNIX...
The Palm Treo did not support multitasking, and yet, you got incoming calls over any running application, and any music app could play in the background, not just Palm's own. They made use of interrupt routines... same tricks available going way back to the 8-bit era. So no, nothing you mention requires multitasking.
Dual-core and multitasking are related in the obvious way: if you don't have multitasking, you have no use for dual-core.
I used to have a Fujitsu P2000 laptop, which could manage about 14 hours of battery life, between the standard battery and the one that fit in the CD/DVD drive bay. Not much of a performer (kind of a netbook for the 1990s), but great for those transatlantic flights (and the three hour ICE train ride afterwards.. I used to commute to Germany).
Apple's lack of an interchangeable battery on all of their devices has absolutely nothing to do with cost and complexity. In fact, given that they're the most expensive devices in every category, I would be inclined to believe it makes them more expensive.
There's only one reason you can't replace the battery -- Steve Jobs doesn't like replaceable batteries. He doesn't like the effect the need for a battery bay has on the clean lines of the case. That's it. Well, that, and he likes it that Apple gets most of the battery replacement work, and can charge $70 for a battery swap, when, for any other device, you order up a new battery for $35 and swap it yourself.
Apple likes to quote at least 10 hours of full screen video, though they're careful not to say 1080p, because they're playing 720p, and the screen is lower resolution still.
All of the nVidia Tegra 2 based tablets (there were four or five) shown off at CES last January were delivering 16 hours of full 1080p video, more if you play it out via HDMI, rather than on-screen. So really, who's the epic fail here? Not to mention that these systems are about 2.5x as fast as the iPad on CPU-heavy stuff (not that you want CPU heavy work on a tablet, but I'll take the two ARM Cortex A9s over a single ARM Cortex A8... I already have the A8 in my phone), with graphics even more ahead.
With that said, what really matters to me in a tablet (and I'm very interested) are not so much the CPU. I want to be able to dock to my digital cameras (still or video), copy over media, and play it... on-screen, or on a TV. I want this built-in, not via some kludge of an adaptor I'll have to carry around. I should be able to backup from the tablet to a USB stick or drive as well. I mean, I even have a video camera that can hook to a USB device and dump media, there's no possible reason to accept a tablet that can't do that.
Second... the eBook reader function. I love the idea... a device with all-day battery life that can hold books. It needs to be able to display full page datasheets, color magazines, and it needs some add-in storage option... SD Card would be perfect (since I have dozens of these), but even a USB stick would work for me. And it needs to be readable in bright sunlight... so I can read books on the beach, see my guitar music while I'm playing in the park, etc. If it's only good indoors... well, I have that in my phone and laptop already. I don't need another display that fades in the sun.
This is the interesting year. All of the tablets coming out in the next 6-9 months were in development before anyone saw the iPad. They'll be going in different directions, even though the basic idea of "all screen tablet" was pretty much a gimme. Next year, you'll see the iPad clones, and more likely, fewer cool ideas. Unless some of the other tablets catch on. I'll bet some will... I'm totally in the target market. In fact, unlike so many iPad buyers, I already know what I want it for.
Right, for values of "right" that result in Apple maintaining complete control over everything an iPxx can do.
A properly written OS doesn't waste CPU time.. when there are no more tasks on the ready queue, it goes to sleep until the next interrupt. Every other smart phone multitasks. iPhones have no better battery life than any of these others.. in fact, my Droid seems to outlast the small army of iPhones which surround me. Then again, I never have to open an app to check for something... whatever it is, there's a notification pushed if it needs attention.
That's correct. Keep some perspective.. you could multitask effectively in 256K with the original AmigaOS. It got downright comfortable with 1MB. I first ran UNIX System V release 4.1, with X, on a 4MB 68030 machine. And it worked fine. Sure, you got paging with lots of activity, but only so much. And once you went to 16MB, things were roomy once again.
Now you're talking about a pocket computer with 20x the memory, much lower overhead, one would think, than X for graphics, and a relatively tiny screen (all iPods are 480x360... I ran 1024x768 for the SVr4 machines).
There's enough room for multitasking, for certain. I do this on my Droid all the time, running plenty of desktop apps, even with 2.6x the screen real-estate of the iPhone. I might save a little on memory for apps (most Android apps are shipped in Dalvik/Java byte code).. not to mention a few dozen daemons always running. Doesn't hurt battery life or slow things down, either.
These are pretty capable machines. Ok, not quite on par with my 4-core/8GB desktop PC (with 13TB of storage online at the moment), but it fits in my pocket!
Apple's dislike of multitasking has nothing to do with memory capacity, battery life, or performance. It's all about the dividing line between what developers are allowed to do, and what's reserved for Apple. To date, while the OS supported multitasking just dandy, Apple didn't allow 3rd party apps to multitask. Now they're introducing limited multitasking, but it's apparently something opt-in, not what you expect from a normal OS... maybe you get a wake-up message every so often, or something.
What you can't do is write your own daemons. Apple provides some: one for running GPS data, one that lets you play audio, a few others. It'll dramatically improve the user experience, but it's still Apple calling all the shots. This is the best reason to forgo Apple machines for something Linux based in the pocket.
And yet, Apple said "this summer" for the iPhoneOS 4 on iPods and iPhones, but "October" for iPhoneOS 4 on the iPad. Now, sure, that could be just ten days difference, but their implication was more like a couple of months. So one could conjecture that there's additional iPhoneOS work to be done, and some of that could be related to the A4.
Of course, there are easier explanations. One is that the iPad was based on fork of the iPhoneOS 3.x (which is was), and the iPhoneOS 4.0 was already well in progress for the usual phones and pods. So, once the iPhoneOS 4.0 is done, the iPad people have to apply those updates to iPhoneOS 4.0, finally yielding a common codebase. Thus, the extra two months.
There's also plenty of reason to believe that the new iPhones released in June or July (well, hey, they've done it every other year) will sport the A4, as long as Apple's got enough fab capacity under license for that. It's probably a win... serious volumes to reduce the cost of the iPad, and no sensitivity to DRAM supplies on the iPhone (since the A4 has that built-in DRAM).
This is so wrong it boggles the mind. Forget that people have already X-Rayed the A4 and found a normal ARM core inside... ignore that one bit of actual evidence for a minute, and let's do the usual slashdot thing and just conjecture.
Ok, first, the PA Semi PPCs. They made a nice efficient PPC core... the "PWRficient" architecture is dual core, and clocks up to 2GHz. Low power for PPC, the average is about 5W, with peaks up to 25W. Uh, riighhhtt.. you're gonna put that into an iPad? Unless that glow is coming from the heat given off on the bottom, not the unbounded love of anything Jobs from some of these fanbois, I'll have to give it a big "no" here.
Next, check out the benchmarks. I'll wait.... ok. Now, scale those by 6/10ths, and voila... anything CPU intensive (including any Javascript benchmark) comes in dead nuts on to the performance of the same thing on the iPhone 3GS. There's a 600MHz ARM Cortex A8 in the 3GS, so there's a 1GHz ARM Cortex A8 in the iPad. There's no slop in the comparison.... not even enough to suggest a Cortex A9, which is what ought to be in there (given that the iPad's major competition is likely to be from nVidia Tegra tablets, which will sport much faster graphics and TWO Cortex A9s).
They use this kind of loophole on smartphone plans:
You have unlimited use, with the provision you don't violate our plan. Really, we mean it. However, if you should pass out (possibly secret) threshold, we know you're violating the plan, because we believe it's totally and completely impossible to exceed that number in normal use of the device.
So, go past 5GB (or so) on your iPhone or Droid, and they'll come after you, claiming you're tethering a PC or committing some other heinous crime.
Presumably, there's some terms of use that exclude at least something that everyone actually does on the home plans (I'm on satellite, sadly, which has very explicit limits.. 500MB per 24-hour period before your connection makes dial-up look fast). So you pass their double-secret limit, and they'll say "oh, lookie, you downloaded music/video/etc.". Technically, hidden somewhere is a restriction. With a good lawyer, you could probably fight it -- they're ADVOCATING that very same use. But who's got the time and money for that?
Re:Sure, it's official
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Nope.
And on the other hand, you can keep your name, and yet still be a completely different person.
Even easier with non-people, like companies and gizmos.
I once had a PC... it was a very early model, a 16MHz 386SX I think. It had been a loner, but the company that loaner it to me didn't pay their bills, so I kept it. Over time, I changed out some pieces, and once in awhile, took the guys out an put them in a better/better case. Some new stuff added, old stuff removed. Today, it's 20+ years later. I have a PC.. it's got a Q9550 CPU, 8GB DDR2-DRAM, 3.5TB storage, nVidia 8000GT, etc. There was never a single time when the original PC was replaced, but it's been a completely different PC several times over.
So it goes with companies, and Apple's a particular example... they've changed several times since the Apple ][ days.
Re:Like Woz didn't move on a LONG time ago?
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The PET was essentially a followup to MOS/Commodore's kit computer, the KIM-1, which was introduced in 1975. Both were designed by Chuck Peddle... as was the 6502 itself. This was the first computer of any kind to use the 6502.
Neither the KIM-1 nor the Apple I were "personal" computers. Both the PET and the Apple ][ were, the PET being ironically more like Apple's modern computers, all-in-one, than the Apple ][, which was the clear inspiration for the way the IBM PC went (eg, modular, with slots and separate monitor).
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Also, in July 2008, Symbian OS wasn't open source, that wasn't official until last February. And of course, neither Nokia nor any other Symbian supports promote the OS in the USA. If I didn't follow embedded and smart phone technology, I wouldn't know about it (the way 0% of the regular smart phone buying public in the USA knows about it).
If it's so good, why no attempt to market it here? Nokia couldn't have been scared away by Apple... Symbian is older than iPhone.
While I completely agree, there's one problem... it's not just the geeks complaining. Sure, we do, and loudly, and for the wrong reasons... you're not going to change Apple, neither am I. So don't support The Bad Thing by buying it and than hoping for a change. I was smart enough to wait, not just for Android, but the Android device I really wanted. Thus, no need to complain... well, other than to complain in the service of point out the problem with Apple.
See... that's the problem. Geeks know these things, buy anyway, and then complain or jailbreak or whatever. But there are something on the order of 80 million iPxxx devices out there (sold... some, presumably, no longer in use). This isn't geek purchases, the bulk of the buyers are regular old folks. And they don't know up front about the limitations of an Apple product, and don't know until it hits them on the head. Or until they play with an Android device. They are lured into this, and they do have a right to complain.
The iPhone became the USA's second-most-popular line of smartphones by catering directly to consumers, that was the whole big win Apple came up with. RIM, Microsoft, even Palm were all thinking business, since of course, "everyone" knew that regular consumers had no use for a smartphone. Apple leveraged it, not from PDA DNA, but from the very successful iPod, and dropped it right into the same sales model. And you know what -- regular folks actually like smartphones. Imagine that?
No reason to expect any better treatment once they added the PDA features than you got with music or video... but in fact, you got worse. I can load my own music or video on an iPhone by ripping it, but I can't even write a simple BASIC program... not even in Commodore 64 BASIC! That is not the kind of limitation anyone would expect without being told up front... particularly not non-techies. Just an example... obviously, non-techies are less interested in writing in BASIC 2.0 than, well.... I don't suspect many here want that either. But it's apparently such a threat to Apple. And most regular users are oblivious to these things.
It's good to educate them. And to notice that no one's made much of a business of any kind catering only to geeks, but particularly, nothing at this level. Android or other Linux-based smartphone platforms may have more geek appeal, but they have to be just as consumer friendly as Apple or as business friendly as RIM, or they'll fail.
... anything's legal, as long as you don't get caught. - Travelling Wilburys.
Also, for more than a year before the iPhone came out, there were rumors of a phone from Apple. And pretty much everyone expected the next major device, phone or iPod, to be some kind of "all-screen" thing. I mean, every other company was headed that way, too, but most expected Apple to get there first. There wasn't as much about the eventual look and feel of the touch screen interface, but even back then, most tech pundits were expecting a finger-based interface (some of the goofier guesses had a virtual iPod "Classic" wheel coming up on a touch-screen), no stylus.
Thing is, these sorts of things are fairly easy to guess anyway. If Apple wants to just ensure the "Apple's working on a tablet" meme gets out, there will be all sorts of talk, rumors, claims of leaks, artists renderings, etc. That's in part Apple, in part the fact it's fun, and in part that you know someone's going to do this soon enough. Of course, the same things can happen without Apple being responsible for establishing that meme. But then everyone's disappointed when they don't product That Thing We All Expected.
It's not just Apple... the world was buzzing about the Google Phone, various "iPhone Killers" long before they materialized (and failed to kill the iPhone, or usually, even be very good, though more than a few recent Android phones hold their own), etc. The rumor mills had the whole idea of the Microsoft Zune being a blatent iPod ripoff (a bad one at first, but nonetheless) long before that showed up. Things leak and the community as a whole is good at guessing.
I think you've seen "Zoolander" a few too many times. Unless you have baby hands, a 1/4 iPhone will be too small for on-screen typing to work. And it's iPhoneOS, not Android, so you can't just talk to it. Yet.
Of course, the primary reason the iPad used the microSIM was supposedly just to that iPhone users couldn't just pop their iPhone SIMs into the device, but had to sign up for another $30 per month to use the iPad in cell modem. That's defeated if the new device supports the microSIM.
Right. The story so far -- some unnamed novice finds a phone in a bar, turns it on, gets zapped... oops. Now making the rounds at the various tech blogs, since the device is now not cool enough for any higher-level attention getting.
Probably a fake, but the "yawn" factor, relative to the weekly announcements of cool new Android phones, does match the reality of the Apple situation. And even the 960x460 screen is just a guess... all they really estimated was "higher resolution". And a really bad one at that... Apple's not going to depart from their favored 4:3 aspect ratio, despite that looking all Ozzie and Harriet now, and all the might of the world moving on to 16:9. If they were doing this for iPhone 2010, they'd have done for iPad. Better guesses would be 640x480, 720x540, or 850x640. They'd still run old apps in a 480x360 window, just as they do on the iPad. Less stupid new apps might use the actual screen rez, like most Android apps do today.
A resolution increase is obvious... every top of the line smart phone is 800x480 or better, since the last part of 2009. Apple would be fools to not boost the resolution.... despite that pushing into "iPad Mini" territory.
Also, most of the stuff on the list is just "keeping up with the joneses"... shutter button from camera, from the Droid. 1GHz CPU, your choice of "from the iPad" or "from the Nexus One". Square look, from the Droid... backing off on the bad chrome trim... well, that's distinguishing, but also the ugliest part of the iPhone... looked bad in 2007, looks old and bad today. Front facing cameras are on a bunch of the newer phones, and it's apparently a most-asked-for feature from current iPhonies. More battery... helps with complaints about the iPhone being the only phone on the planet without a replaceable battery, as well as competition with other phones that, currently, outlast the iPhone on a charge. Non-metallic case might well be a move to resolve the "crappy phone" complaints... though I rekon, moving to Verizon or maybe even Sprint would help there, too.
So in short... nothing to see here, folks, move along. Easily could be a fake, easily could be Apple's typical very incremental change in hardware, nothing exciting, and yet, it gets all the iPhonies panties in a twist every time, as they must make that annual pilgrimmage to the Apple store to get the features everyone else had last year. Ok, sure, and 180,000 apps, or whatever they're at now.
I wonder if they'll even have HSPA full implemented on this one (no iPhone does uploads faster than 384kb/s)?
That report is highly flawed, as they compared applications sales from everyone else to application downloads from Apple. No doubt Apple's way out front. They were the first to market PDA apps to consumers, not business, and to price them at around the price of a cup of coffee, usually. Android is growing with a similar model, though with far more free and ad-sponsored apps (in a large parts because they still haven't worked out for-pay apps in many countries).
RIM and Nokia are also working to improve their offerings, but they were caught by surprise at how well the iPhone did. Conventional wisdom held that regular consumers would have no use for smartphones. Oops.
ARM officially offers two kinds of IP licenses: "Processor" and "Architecture". There are hundreds of companies with Processor licenses, covering the full range of ARM CPU cores.
Actually, while most of the ARM licensees are not "Architecture" licenses, ARM will sell them, for a price... it's just more than you want to pay if you're not tweaking the CPU. It's just business. QualComm has an Architecture license, too... that's why they were able to make a 1GHz "Snapdragon' (essentially a Cortex A8), even though ARM only specs it for 600MHz. Intel still has an ARM license.. they didn't sell Marvell their license. Infineon also has an ARM Architecture license.
Marvell got an Architecture licence in the early 2000s, well before they bought Intel's Application and Communication Processor unit. Marvell's Sheeva is an internally developed superscalar ARM CPU, compatible with the Cortex A8, ARMv6 and ARMv7.
Apple had a Processor license before involving PA Semi in the ARM business, but today they have an Architecture license, which is how they put a 1GHz Cortex A8 into the iPad.
The CPU clock speed increase, 600MHz -> 1GHz, entirely accounts for the performance increase on all CPU intensive benchmarks so far.
iPhone is already the Mac, Android is already the PC. You know this because it's just like 1984. Sure, there are still the Ataris and the Commodores around, but just about every phone company is making Android phones. And not just in the USA, but internationally.
It doesn't matter what Jobs does, the iPhone is inherently the Mac. And hey, better than being Atari. But a closed, proprietary system will never last long against an open system (don't say "Windows", that's an open proprietary system, and it did well largely because there were no viable FOSS competitors back in the early 80s). At least not once you have real businesses built on it, with the ability to promote it just as well as the one company is promoting their proprietary system.
Actually, Transmeta did wonders for battery life and heat, but not so much on performance. But much of that was due to the fast their FPU just plain sucked.. it had nothing to do with emulation.
The idea of Transmeta was to deliver larger chip performance using a smaller chip. That had some merit -- they did very nicely in blade computing until Intel revamped their laptop chips for the same purpose and blew them away.
I had a Transmeta laptop from Fujitsu. With the extra battery, I got 14 hours of use, back in the 90s. This, before AMD or Intel paid much attention at all to power consumption... their laptop CPUs were not different designs as they are now, just lower voltage versions of the desktop chips.
Yup.. Amiga 1000 shipped in September of 1985, with full multitasking. And of course, UNIX, VAX/VMS, and many other "big" machine OSs of the day were doing this before the Amiga, though it wasn't in home computers. Well, there were a few with OS/9, like the Rat Shack "Color Computer", that technically could.
And AmigaOS did multitasking before MacOS! And UNIX...
The Palm Treo did not support multitasking, and yet, you got incoming calls over any running application, and any music app could play in the background, not just Palm's own. They made use of interrupt routines... same tricks available going way back to the 8-bit era. So no, nothing you mention requires multitasking.
Dual-core and multitasking are related in the obvious way: if you don't have multitasking, you have no use for dual-core.
I used to have a Fujitsu P2000 laptop, which could manage about 14 hours of battery life, between the standard battery and the one that fit in the CD/DVD drive bay. Not much of a performer (kind of a netbook for the 1990s), but great for those transatlantic flights (and the three hour ICE train ride afterwards.. I used to commute to Germany).
Apple's lack of an interchangeable battery on all of their devices has absolutely nothing to do with cost and complexity. In fact, given that they're the most expensive devices in every category, I would be inclined to believe it makes them more expensive.
There's only one reason you can't replace the battery -- Steve Jobs doesn't like replaceable batteries. He doesn't like the effect the need for a battery bay has on the clean lines of the case. That's it. Well, that, and he likes it that Apple gets most of the battery replacement work, and can charge $70 for a battery swap, when, for any other device, you order up a new battery for $35 and swap it yourself.
Apple likes to quote at least 10 hours of full screen video, though they're careful not to say 1080p, because they're playing 720p, and the screen is lower resolution still.
All of the nVidia Tegra 2 based tablets (there were four or five) shown off at CES last January were delivering 16 hours of full 1080p video, more if you play it out via HDMI, rather than on-screen. So really, who's the epic fail here? Not to mention that these systems are about 2.5x as fast as the iPad on CPU-heavy stuff (not that you want CPU heavy work on a tablet, but I'll take the two ARM Cortex A9s over a single ARM Cortex A8... I already have the A8 in my phone), with graphics even more ahead.
With that said, what really matters to me in a tablet (and I'm very interested) are not so much the CPU. I want to be able to dock to my digital cameras (still or video), copy over media, and play it... on-screen, or on a TV. I want this built-in, not via some kludge of an adaptor I'll have to carry around. I should be able to backup from the tablet to a USB stick or drive as well. I mean, I even have a video camera that can hook to a USB device and dump media, there's no possible reason to accept a tablet that can't do that.
Second... the eBook reader function. I love the idea... a device with all-day battery life that can hold books. It needs to be able to display full page datasheets, color magazines, and it needs some add-in storage option... SD Card would be perfect (since I have dozens of these), but even a USB stick would work for me. And it needs to be readable in bright sunlight... so I can read books on the beach, see my guitar music while I'm playing in the park, etc. If it's only good indoors... well, I have that in my phone and laptop already. I don't need another display that fades in the sun.
This is the interesting year. All of the tablets coming out in the next 6-9 months were in development before anyone saw the iPad. They'll be going in different directions, even though the basic idea of "all screen tablet" was pretty much a gimme. Next year, you'll see the iPad clones, and more likely, fewer cool ideas. Unless some of the other tablets catch on. I'll bet some will... I'm totally in the target market. In fact, unlike so many iPad buyers, I already know what I want it for.
Right, for values of "right" that result in Apple maintaining complete control over everything an iPxx can do.
A properly written OS doesn't waste CPU time.. when there are no more tasks on the ready queue, it goes to sleep until the next interrupt. Every other smart phone multitasks. iPhones have no better battery life than any of these others.. in fact, my Droid seems to outlast the small army of iPhones which surround me. Then again, I never have to open an app to check for something... whatever it is, there's a notification pushed if it needs attention.
That's correct. Keep some perspective.. you could multitask effectively in 256K with the original AmigaOS. It got downright comfortable with 1MB. I first ran UNIX System V release 4.1, with X, on a 4MB 68030 machine. And it worked fine. Sure, you got paging with lots of activity, but only so much. And once you went to 16MB, things were roomy once again.
Now you're talking about a pocket computer with 20x the memory, much lower overhead, one would think, than X for graphics, and a relatively tiny screen (all iPods are 480x360... I ran 1024x768 for the SVr4 machines).
There's enough room for multitasking, for certain. I do this on my Droid all the time, running plenty of desktop apps, even with 2.6x the screen real-estate of the iPhone. I might save a little on memory for apps (most Android apps are shipped in Dalvik/Java byte code).. not to mention a few dozen daemons always running. Doesn't hurt battery life or slow things down, either.
These are pretty capable machines. Ok, not quite on par with my 4-core/8GB desktop PC (with 13TB of storage online at the moment), but it fits in my pocket!
Apple's dislike of multitasking has nothing to do with memory capacity, battery life, or performance. It's all about the dividing line between what developers are allowed to do, and what's reserved for Apple. To date, while the OS supported multitasking just dandy, Apple didn't allow 3rd party apps to multitask. Now they're introducing limited multitasking, but it's apparently something opt-in, not what you expect from a normal OS... maybe you get a wake-up message every so often, or something.
What you can't do is write your own daemons. Apple provides some: one for running GPS data, one that lets you play audio, a few others. It'll dramatically improve the user experience, but it's still Apple calling all the shots. This is the best reason to forgo Apple machines for something Linux based in the pocket.
And yet, Apple said "this summer" for the iPhoneOS 4 on iPods and iPhones, but "October" for iPhoneOS 4 on the iPad. Now, sure, that could be just ten days difference, but their implication was more like a couple of months. So one could conjecture that there's additional iPhoneOS work to be done, and some of that could be related to the A4.
Of course, there are easier explanations. One is that the iPad was based on fork of the iPhoneOS 3.x (which is was), and the iPhoneOS 4.0 was already well in progress for the usual phones and pods. So, once the iPhoneOS 4.0 is done, the iPad people have to apply those updates to iPhoneOS 4.0, finally yielding a common codebase. Thus, the extra two months.
There's also plenty of reason to believe that the new iPhones released in June or July (well, hey, they've done it every other year) will sport the A4, as long as Apple's got enough fab capacity under license for that. It's probably a win... serious volumes to reduce the cost of the iPad, and no sensitivity to DRAM supplies on the iPhone (since the A4 has that built-in DRAM).
The iPad makes some people downright crazy.
This is so wrong it boggles the mind. Forget that people have already X-Rayed the A4 and found a normal ARM core inside... ignore that one bit of actual evidence for a minute, and let's do the usual slashdot thing and just conjecture.
Ok, first, the PA Semi PPCs. They made a nice efficient PPC core... the "PWRficient" architecture is dual core, and clocks up to 2GHz. Low power for PPC, the average is about 5W, with peaks up to 25W. Uh, riighhhtt.. you're gonna put that into an iPad? Unless that glow is coming from the heat given off on the bottom, not the unbounded love of anything Jobs from some of these fanbois, I'll have to give it a big "no" here.
Next, check out the benchmarks. I'll wait.... ok. Now, scale those by 6/10ths, and voila... anything CPU intensive (including any Javascript benchmark) comes in dead nuts on to the performance of the same thing on the iPhone 3GS. There's a 600MHz ARM Cortex A8 in the 3GS, so there's a 1GHz ARM Cortex A8 in the iPad. There's no slop in the comparison.... not even enough to suggest a Cortex A9, which is what ought to be in there (given that the iPad's major competition is likely to be from nVidia Tegra tablets, which will sport much faster graphics and TWO Cortex A9s).
Murdoch loves the iPad? Proof positive that he's evil.
They use this kind of loophole on smartphone plans:
You have unlimited use, with the provision you don't violate our plan. Really, we mean it. However, if you should pass out (possibly secret) threshold, we know you're violating the plan, because we believe it's totally and completely impossible to exceed that number in normal use of the device.
So, go past 5GB (or so) on your iPhone or Droid, and they'll come after you, claiming you're tethering a PC or committing some other heinous crime.
Presumably, there's some terms of use that exclude at least something that everyone actually does on the home plans (I'm on satellite, sadly, which has very explicit limits.. 500MB per 24-hour period before your connection makes dial-up look fast). So you pass their double-secret limit, and they'll say "oh, lookie, you downloaded music/video/etc.". Technically, hidden somewhere is a restriction. With a good lawyer, you could probably fight it -- they're ADVOCATING that very same use. But who's got the time and money for that?
Nope.
And on the other hand, you can keep your name, and yet still be a completely different person.
Even easier with non-people, like companies and gizmos.
I once had a PC... it was a very early model, a 16MHz 386SX I think. It had been a loner, but the company that loaner it to me didn't pay their bills, so I kept it. Over time, I changed out some pieces, and once in awhile, took the guys out an put them in a better/better case. Some new stuff added, old stuff removed. Today, it's 20+ years later. I have a PC.. it's got a Q9550 CPU, 8GB DDR2-DRAM, 3.5TB storage, nVidia 8000GT, etc. There was never a single time when the original PC was replaced, but it's been a completely different PC several times over.
So it goes with companies, and Apple's a particular example... they've changed several times since the Apple ][ days.
The PET was essentially a followup to MOS/Commodore's kit computer, the KIM-1, which was introduced in 1975. Both were designed by Chuck Peddle... as was the 6502 itself. This was the first computer of any kind to use the 6502.
Neither the KIM-1 nor the Apple I were "personal" computers. Both the PET and the Apple ][ were, the PET being ironically more like Apple's modern computers, all-in-one, than the Apple ][, which was the clear inspiration for the way the IBM PC went (eg, modular, with slots and separate monitor).