Early benchmarks show iPhone 4S just slower than iPad 2, lots faster than iPhone 4
Thanks to the early delivery of some German iPhone 4S devices, the first benchmarks of the A5-powered phone are now in. According to these early tests, it looks as if the new A5 processor in the iPhone 4S is running at 800MHz—slightly slower than the iPad 2's 1GHz A5 processor, but 68 percent faster than the iPhone 4's 800MHz A4 processor.
The first results began coming in as German iPhone 4S users started running Geekbench, which syncs its results to a searchable database online. Geekbench gives the device a score of about 622, with the iPad 2 scoring 749 and iPhone 4 scoring 370. The system information reported to Geekbench also indicates that the iPhone 4S may have 512MB of RAM, as was previously suspected thanks to the developer behind Infinity Blade 2.
Following the initial benchmark results, Anandtech went ahead and dug up other iPhone 4S benchmarks from around the Web, including SunSpider, RightWare, and GLBenchmark results. The iPhone 4S performance in the SunSpider benchmarks put it near the top of the list with a score of 2222, compared to a score of 2220 (lower is better) from the Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9—a 1GHz Tegra 2 device. And, thanks to the integer performance numbers out of Geekbench, Anandtech concludes that the iPhone 4S has been underclocked compared to its iPad 2 sibling—"[t]his naturally makes sense as the iPhone 4S has a much smaller 5.25 Whr battery," the site wrote.
The rest of us in the US are still waiting on the first batch of iPhone 4S devices to be delivered on October 14, though some customers began tweeting on Monday night that they had already received shipping notifications. Will Apple put a hold on early shipments like it has in years past, or will the company let them be delivered early? Either way, you can look forward to the Ars review of the iPhone 4S to arrive early next week with our own benchmarks and plenty more.
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The giant, prehistoric squid that ate common sense
We have a serious problem with science journalism. A big one, in fact, and today that problem takes the form of a giant, prehistoric squid with tentacles so formidable that it has sucked the brains right out of staff writers’ heads.
While making the rounds among a few California museums late last month, I kept hearing rumors of a bombastic, super-hyped presentation due to be presented at this year’s Geological Society of America meeting in Minneapolis. The scuttlebutt was that someone was going to give a talk about a super-intelligent, predatory squid which fed on huge ichthyosaurs during the Triassic. Fascinating, if true, but the reason that all the paleontologists I met were chuckling was because there was not a shred of actual evidence to back up the claims. Apparently, whoever was set to give the talk had apparently stayed up late watching It Came From Beneath the Sea too many times.
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Before Netscape: the forgotten Web browsers of the early 1990s
When Tim Berners-Lee arrived at CERN, Geneva's celebrated European Particle Physics Laboratory in 1980, the enterprise had hired him to upgrade the control systems for several of the lab's particle accelerators. But almost immediately, the inventor of the modern webpage noticed a problem: thousands of people were floating in and out of the famous research institute, many of them temporary hires.
"The big challenge for contract programmers was to try to understand the systems, both human and computer, that ran this fantastic playground," Berners-Lee later wrote. "Much of the crucial information existed only in people's heads."
So in his spare time, he wrote up some software to address this shortfall: a little program he named Enquire. It allowed users to create "nodes"—information-packed index card-style pages that linked to other pages. Unfortunately, the PASCAL application ran on CERN's proprietary operating system. "The few people who saw it thought it was a nice idea, but no one used it. Eventually, the disk was lost, and with it, the original Enquire."
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How Dance Central 2 gets its moves
Frenchy Hernandez has been dancing her entire life. She started when she was two years old, before eventually studying dance at school, teaching dance, and working for the likes of MTV, BET, VH1, and artists like Ashanti and Snoop Dogg. But for the past two years she's worked at a video game studio, serving as one of the resident choreographers at Harmonix, the developer behind the upcoming Dance Central 2.
There's a good chance that those moves you're busting while dancing in front of your Kinect are actually Frenchy's moves.
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How Windows 8's memory management modifications make for a better user experience
Continuing the trend started with Windows 7 of each new Windows version placing lighter demands on the system than its predecessor, Microsoft has been talking up some of Windows 8's new approaches to saving memory.
Some changes continue work started in Windows 7. Windows depends on a considerable number of system services to provide key functionality, and many of these system services start when the system boots and continue to run for as long as the operating system is running. This has two effects; it makes booting take longer, because the services all have to start before the operating system will log in, and these services use system memory.
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Feature: Bedrooms, boardrooms, and chicken farms: where the world's best indie games get made
Whenever I visit a developer, I always ask for a tour. Games aren't wished into existence; real people who hang out in real places create the titles we play, and I like to see where that happens. Unfortunately, the office buildings all begin to blend together. They're often dark spaces, they're often covered with action figures and other pieces of geek ephemera, and you'll often see some sad sack developer sleeping under a desk.
But what if you're a tiny outfit who can't afford a fancy office tower—where do you create your next masterpiece? I contacted independent game studios that I respect and asked them to take a few minutes and a camera and show off their workspaces. Some were enthusiastic, others were hesitant, and many seemed almost ashamed; they all assumed that everyone else had better space in which to create games.
It's a silly fear, though; no one judges bands by the size of the garage from which they emerged. The more beat-up the work space, the more inspirational the success stories. You can do great work anywhere, even if you're keeping bees, putting in earplugs to drown out the sound of the chickens, or making sure your keyboard has no visible letters.
Let's explore where the (indie) games are made, in the developers' own words.
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A game we all win: Dumping DRM can increase sales while reducing piracy
The standard line that Digital Rights Management (DRM) functions as a bulwark against online music piracy is being challenged by a trio of economists from Rice and Duke Universities. Their game theory research sides with a growing sentiment that DRM technologies which restrict music file copying and moving sometimes encourage illegal file sharing instead.
"In many cases, DRM restrictions prevent legal users from doing something as normal as making backup copies of their music," contends one of the researchers, Dinahy Vernik, assistant professor of marketing at Rice's Jones Graduate School of Business. "Because of these inconveniences, some consumers choose to pirate."
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Siri is iPhone 4S-only today; where will it be tomorrow?
Apple is launching the iPhone 4S this week with the recently unveiled integration of Siri, a voice activated "assistant." Siri accepts voice input and can perform a range of actions on your iPhone, including looking up information, adding calendar events, and even composing short texts and e-mails.
Siri shows a lot of promise in realizing human computer interaction using natural language. Right now, however, Apple seems to be wisely keeping the feature firmly in the "beta" stage even as it seeks to popularize talking to your cell phone to get things done. As iPhone 4S users start using Siri en masse, it's worth considering where Apple might integrate the technology in the future. Will talking to computers and devices transcend conventional keyboard or touch input, à la Star Trek?
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Hands-on: Chrome Remote Desktop Beta free and easy to use, no speed demon
Google has unveiled a remote desktop service allowing connections between any two systems running the Chrome browser, regardless of operating system. As usual with Google, there’s a big emphasis on the “beta” tag in the Chrome Remote Desktop BETA, which is ready for the public to use, but mostly exists to demonstrate Google Chrome Remoting technology and get feedback from users.
In other words, Google is cautioning users not to expect a fully-fledged remote desktop experience. Yet despite some performance glitches, the beta shows promise. Remote desktop technology certainly is nothing new, but Google’s is free, at least for now, and extremely easy to set up. It is currently being targeted at IT helpdesk scenarios, but “additional use cases such as being able to access your own computer remotely are coming soon,” Google says.
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T-Mobile Galaxy S II: higher clock speed CPU, same speed
Despite its extra 300MHz per core, the T-Mobile version of the Samsung Galaxy S II is no faster than its counterparts on other carriers, according to our tests. The phone neither feels nor benchmarks differently than its 1.2GHz dual-core brethren, so it likely won’t be worth it to switch carriers just for the internal hardware.
The T-Mobile Galaxy S II was confirmed to have a 1.5GHz dual-core processor, making its later launch a little sweeter. We’d hoped that would mean even more blistering performance than the Sprint Galaxy S II that already impressed us, but that was not the case. Of course, the processors are of different makes, which accounts for the different somewhat (T-Mobile's is a Qualcomm, Sprint's is Samsung's own Exynos).
The T-Mobile Galaxy S II's Linpack scores, multi-threaded, left, and single-threaded
The T-Mobile Galaxy S II's Quadrant Standard score
The T-Mobile Galaxy S II sticks to a score of around 3600 in Quadrant tests—much better than most other phones available right now, but no better than the Sprint version we tested. And the T-Mobile Galaxy S II’s Linpack benchmarks were less impressive, with 47.606 MFLOPS in single-threaded processes and 72.953 multithreaded, compared to the Sprint version’s 53.877/93.392. In regular use, it feels no faster.
The reception wasn’t all that great, either: on three of four bars on T-Mobile’s 4G network, we clocked download speeds at 2.7 Mbps and upload at 344Kbps (though we're not in range of the 42Mbps connection speeds). T-Mobile is cheaper than the other carriers, and different networks serve different people better in different places, but that doesn't scream "4G" to us.
This doesn’t make the T-Mobile Galaxy S II a bad phone—the phone is, after all, basically the same as its Sprint cousin (with a couple of cosmetic differences), and the entire family of Galaxy S II’s are still arguably the best Android phones you can buy. Just don’t go switching carriers based on that processor clock.
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Giant viruses may have evolved from cellular organisms, not the other way around
About five years ago, biologists were surprised by the first discovery of an extremely large virus. Viruses are generally stripped down, efficient predators, only carrying as much DNA or RNA necessary to hijack their host and make extra copies of themselves. The newly discovered virus, called Mimivirus, was anything but stripped down; it carried a genome nearly the size of some bacterial species. And, instead of simply hijacking its host, the viral genome carried a lot of genes that replaced basic cellular functions, including some involved in DNA repair and the maufacturing of proteins.
The unsual size and gene content of the virus led one scientist to suggest that viruses could explain the origin of DNA-based life. If viruses carried all these genes, then it's possible to imagine that one could set up shop in a cell and simply never leave, gradually taking over the remaining functions once performed by its host's genetic material. This would explain the origin of DNA, which would distinguish the virus from its host's genetic material, a holdover from the RNA world. It could also explain the existence of a distinct nucleus within Eukaryotic cells.
A paper is being released today, however, that argues that this scenario has things exactly backwards. Giant viruses, its authors argue, have all these genes normally associated with cells because, in their distant evolutionary past, they were once cells.
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How Super Mario's latest adventure plays with 3D
Part of the initial appeal of a new Mario game is pressing buttons and watching what happens. In Super Mario 3D Land, the most magical button is the 3D slider.
The Nintendo 3DS lets you adjust the “volume” of the system’s glasses-free 3D visual effects by using a sliding control that sits to the right of the screen. If you’ve played other 3DS games at length, you’re probably used to just setting the 3D slider somewhere comfortable and forgetting about it. But Super Mario 3D Land, designed from the bottom up for this new display, seems to want you to constantly play with the 3D slider to see what happens when you go back and forth between two and three dimensions.
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Hands-on: Checking out library books with Kindle clunky, but awesome
Public libraries have long lived by the "Blockbuster model": require people to drive to a physical location, pick up a physical book, then drive home, only to repeat the driving a few weeks later when the book is due. And how well did that approach work out for Blockbuster as iTunes and Netflix made digital delivery a reality?
But books haven't gone digital as quickly as music and then movies did. Early attempts at e-book lending were execeptionally clunky affairs involving special OverDrive software, few choices, and a poor browsing interface. Getting books onto devices involved downloads and USB cables.
Enter the Kindle. Amazon's hugely popular e-reader hardware and apps recently opened access to public libraries in the US, which can use the Amazon account and distribution infrastructure to control and distribute time-limited e-books to library patrons. Will we ever drive to physical libraries again? After testing the new system, it's safe to say: yes. Yes we will. But Kindle library lending provides a glimpse of the future rushing so quickly at us.
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Google aims Dart at "the Visual Basic of the Web"
Google has released an early version of
Dart, a new programming
language designed to take some of the pain out of developing
applications for the Web. But while it's an evolutionary improvement
on JavaScript, Dart faces a hard uphill battle for acceptance.
Dart is an object-oriented, structured
programming language designed to ease some of the problems that
developers run into writing large Web-based applications. It has a
structure that will be familiar to most developers who have worked with
JavaScript.
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New mobile management platform locks down Android for businesses
In a bid to make Android phones more business-friendly, mobile device management technology company Three Laws of Mobility (3LM) will start making its enterprise security platform for Android devices available this week. Founded by Gaurav Mathur and Tom Moss, two former members of Google's Android team, 3LM has developed an Android-specific technology that gives IT administrators the ability to enforce security policies not just on applications on handsets, but the underlying Android operating system as well.
While 3LM, acquired by Motorola Mobility in February, isn't the first to deploy a security solution for Android, 3LM president Tom Moss said in a statement that 3LM's technology is the first to secure the entire Android environment instead of just specific applications. Other solutions either are focused on securing specific applications through integrated management, such as App47, or creating a sandbox on the device like Odyssey Software's Athena.
According to a statement from 3LM issued at the CTIA Enterprise and Applications conference in San Diego today, the company has worked with a number of Android handset manufacturers to make them compatible with 3LM's mobile device management platform. The MDM system provides encryption of all data on the device (including SD cards), password policy enforcement, application whitelisting and blacklisting, and full device or selective remote wiping of data if the device is lost.
Applications can be managed remotely and pushed to or remotely deleted from the phone. And administrators can lock required applications down to prevent the user from removing them. The system can also be used to "breadcrumb" the phone, tracking its movements to locate it if it is lost (or check to see if the user is really out on that sales call). 3LM's technology also provides built-in VPN access to corporate data and applications; the activity of each handset on the network can be tracked by its unique IP address on the VPN.
To get a quicker foot in the door with enterprises, 3LM also announced a partnership with enterprise mobile device management platform provider BoxTone. By hooking into BoxTone's multiplatform MDM environment, 3LM gets hooked up with BoxTone's installed customer base, and BoxTone gets improved support for Android devices out of the deal (as well as license agreements with Motorola and other Android handset manufacturers).
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RIM tries pushing NFC forward with BlackBerry Tag sharing system
Research in Motion has announced a new NFC-based service that will let BlackBerry users share content and information with each other. The service, called BlackBerry Tag, lets customers beam content from one phone to another by touching them together, a process we estimate is seconds faster than e-mail, text, or a number of other conventional sharing options.
BlackBerry Tag will be incorporated into the next BlackBerry 7 OS update, and will allow users to share items like links, pictures, contact information, and documents. RIM also stated it has plans to release APIs on the BlackBerry platform so developers can incorporate Tag into their apps, to share information or perform interactions.
While much of the mobile industry is anxious to get on board with NFC, it’s still new and only included in a smattering of new phones. As of now, only the BlackBerry Bold 9900/9930 and BlackBerry Curve 9350/9360/9370 smartphones are NFC-capable, so the Tag system will be available on those handsets first. As more BlackBerry 7 OS phones are released, the base of Tag-able phones will grow.
With the new system, near-field communications will ensure that two BlackBerry users hanging out together will never have to show each other their phones, or even look up. RIM also notes that two users can use Tag to add each other as BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) contacts—finally, some recourse for that girl or guy who won’t give out their number. RIM has announced no official date for the system, as it still must go through its certifications.
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Nuance swipes Swype in $102 million deal
Speech recognition software company Nuance has acquired Swype, a startup that produces an efficient text input system that has become popular on smartphones. Nuance is reportedly paying $102.5 million for the deal.
Swype's touchscreen keyboard system, which we reviewed on Android last year, allows users to input text by sweeping a finger or thumb across the letters of the word that they wish to write. It represents a major breakthrough for touchscreen typing, greatly improving both speed and accuracy.
We have been very impressed with the efficacy of Swype's keyboard during day-to-day use and consider it (or any of the relatively good clones that emerged over the past year) a must-have feature on touchscreen Android phones. A growing number of Android handset manufacturers are licensing it to include it on their devices.
We have long suspected that the startup, which was founded by T9 inventor Dr. Cliff Kushler, would be acquired by a major mobile industry player. Due to the growing importance of Swype in the Android ecosystem, Google seemed like the most likely candidate. Nokia, which has partly funded Swype, also seemed like a contender. Nuance sweeping up Swype comes as a bit of a surprise, but the acquisition makes plenty of sense when you take a closer look.
Nuance happens to be the current owner of T9 and is seemingly interested in making a bigger play for the mobile market. The company sells a custom Android keyboard application called FlexT9 that supports T9, speech recognition, and a tracing input mechanism that mimics the one in Swype's keyboard. Acquiring Swype will give Nuance the valuable underlying IP behind the tracing input model.
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Ubuntu will power HP's new cloud service
Ubuntu Linux will be the primary operating system powering HP’s upcoming cloud service, Ubuntu maker Canonical said last week. HP recently opened a private beta program for an infrastructure-as-a-service cloud that will offer both compute and storage capacity, using the OpenStack open source cloud platform.
OpenStack, which was recently spun off from Rackspace, is designed to work with multiple operating systems and virtualization platforms. Options include VMware, Hyper-V, Windows and Xen. HP is going with an all-open source lineup, with the Linux-based KVM as its hypervisor, and Ubuntu for the operating system.
“HP has chosen Ubuntu as the lead host and guest operating system powering their Public Cloud,” Canonical said in a blog post. “HP and Canonical are working closely together during the current private beta to make certain that we provide the most secure, scalable, business-class cloud to companies of all sizes.”
While Ubuntu serves as the “reference OS” for OpenStack, HP isn’t required to use it. “This is an important announcement on several fronts—that OpenStack is seen as the platform of choice for building out the largest Public Clouds, and that Ubuntu has what it takes to power OpenStack clouds as a scalable and hardened host OS and responsive and flexible guest OS,” Canonical said.
Although Ubuntu is getting favorable treatment, HP could still allow customers to host multiple operating systems, just as its competitors do. Rackspace Cloud Servers and Amazon EC2, which both use Xen virtualization, allow hosting of various operating systems including Windows and various flavors of Linux.
The HP cloud is targeted at developers, ISVs and business customers, with the ability to deploy virtual machines and object storage capacity on demand. HP has reached its initial limit for customers during the private beta, but people can still sign up to get access when the beta is expanded.
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Available Tags:iPad 2 , iPhone , iPad , iPhone , Windows 8 , Windows , Chrome , Galaxy , other , 3D , Kindle , Google , Android , BlackBerry , Ubuntu ,
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