Technology Android

[Casey]

their tablets are better optimized than Android tablets, even comparing Tab 10.1 to Ipad 2 the Ipad 2 works faster and smoother. You can see it especially in apps, even Google apps like maps.

Two words - hardware acceleration. iOS4 has it. All current Android tablets do not.

But.....

Ice Cream Sandwich has it, so it will be able to match the speed and smoothness. In fact, most Android tablets will run faster and smoother, because they'll have better hardware and also have the acceleration.

 

[dilla]

Well, I have to give it to Apple that their tablets are better optimized than Android tablets, even comparing Tab 10.1 to Ipad 2 the Ipad 2 works faster and smoother. You can see it especially in apps, even Google apps like maps. So while I don't think that power is needed for phones, Android tablets need optimizations and it's harder to achieve with Android because of its power-draining nature. Looks like manufacturers would rather use brute power to achieve what they want. Personally I hope that Ice cream sandwich will help.

Something about Android phones running Android on a virtual machine as compared to iPads and iPhones running it natively?

 

[Casey]

Something about Android phones running Android on a virtual machine as compared to iPads and iPhones running it natively?

No, it's just hardware acceleration.

 

[masta247]

Coonie - What do you mean? Do you mean how it works via a Java machine?

---

The new Android Xperia looks awesome:

http://www.gsmarena.com/sony_ericsson_xperia_nozomi_lt26i_leaks_in_live_pictures_-news-3353.php



 

[Casey]

That's the Nozomi, right? I already liked it cos of the name LOL. It looks pretty sweet. Only 700MB of RAM tho? My S2 has 1GB.

 

[masta247]

Yeah, that's the Nozomi. I really like this year's Sony design. Arc was one of the most stylish phones and now Nozomi. I also like the name. I hope it'll have better screen and even better camera.

 

[Casey]

I read it'll be called Xperia Arc HD when it ships. Sony have really stepped up their game. Remember back in the day when they announced the X10 and then it didn't come out for like another year? lol. And it was on Eclair for the longest time.

Having said that, my uncle has one and I was quite impressed with how well it ran an official Gingerbread update it got.

 

[Casey]

Also, out of the all the Android tablets I've seen in real life, the Sony one has been my favorite.

 

[masta247]

Yeah Sony really does well with Android devices lately. The 2.3 update for X10 was a huuge improvement over their Eclair release. Looks a lot like Xperia Arc's software.

About ram - well, 700mb of ram is a bit strange. I guess it has 768mb and only 700mb visible. Nozomi doesn't look like a performance demon, it's more of a "that's enough for a modern droid" I think. Early 2012 it'll be what Xperia Arc was early 2011 I guess, actually even more. It'll be fast enough for everything but not the fastest around, not even trying to be one. I guess it'll shine in other areas and juding by the images it already does.

Strange thing nobody there noticed how it maches "Retina display"'s pixel density. 720p on a 4,3 inch screen is crazy.

 

[dilla]

Coonie - What do you mean? Do you mean how it works via a Java machine?

---

The new Android Xperia looks awesome:

http://www.gsmarena.com/sony_ericsson_xperia_nozomi_lt26i_leaks_in_live_pictures_-news-3353.php



I dunno, but someone told me that before. That Android had to compensate for running a VM with better hardware specs compared to the iPhone because it ran it natively. Or something. I don't know what much about it so I was asking.

 

[masta247]

I dunno, but someone told me that before. That Android had to compensate for running a VM with better hardware specs compared to the iPhone because it ran it natively. Or something. I don't know what much about it so I was asking.

No it's not that. I mean, iOS is written in C so it works in a different way than Java. You need a "virtual machine" on anything that runs Java. You can run C programs precompiled so in theory they may work faster but it's not necessarily true. Especially these days. A Java program can work as fast and usually more troublesome than C/C++ programs. C programmers have to be more careful though, so they sometimes come up with better solutions. With Java you just code and bugs don't show up as often, so Java programmers don't think about how something works as much. They don't have to. That's one of the reasons why (apart from C being a lower level language and the fact that you can run programs pre-compiled) programs written in C run faster. But nevertheless errors also happen because they have to manually declare memory allocation.

Android is more power-demanding because it's much more complex. The process management itself is complicated to offer what they think is best multitasking possible. Also, Casey said that Honeycomb had no hardware acceleration. That would explain the huge difference on tablets.

 

[Flipmo]

This comment about the phone made me laugh:

• nick​

they'll probably release it running 1.6 donut

 

[Casey]

This is from the FroYo days, but it should clear things up for you regarding that. Essentially, if you had an identical app on a premium Android device written in Java and the latest iPhone written in Objective-C, the app would run faster on Android because Java is a superior language.

Android Dalvik VM performance is a threat to the iPhone


One of the peculiarities of Apple is that they have set themselves down a path where every Apple developer needs to learn Objective-C (and C/C++) to build applications for their platform. The biggest characteristic of Objective-C vs Java is dynamic dispatch. At runtime Objective-C can send arbitrary messages to objects and they may or may not respond to them. This has the nice property that you can write code that is very dynamic and loosely bound but it also has the property that method calls in Objective-C are very slow and the more code that you write in Objective-C instead of in C/C++ the slower your codebase becomes. Up until Android 2.2 (Froyo) the JVM (really a Dalvik JVM for licensing reasons) on the Android platform was playing with one hand tied behind its back. Different from desktop/server Java, the JVM was still an interpreter, like the original JVM back in the Java 1.0 days. It was very efficient interpreter but an interpreter none-the-less and was not creating native code from the Dalvik bytecodes that it uses. As of Android 2.2 they have added a JIT, a just-in-time compiler, to the stack that translates the Dalvik bytecode into much more efficient machine code much like a C/C++ compiler. You can see the results of this in the benchmarks of Froyo which show a 2-5x improvement. As they add more and more JIT and GC features that have appeared in HotSpot, JRockit, etc, you will likely see even more improvements over time — without having to change or recompile the 3rd party developed software.

This wouldn’t be that big a deal if Android software wasn’t already approaching the speed of the Apple iPhone even when running its applications through the interpreter (see the HTC EVO 4G running 2.1). This is likely going to mean that 3rd party developer applications created for Android, running on the same hardware, is going to be faster than the same code written against the Objective-C libraries that Apple provides for the iPhone. You’ll be able to get more done, have smoother user interfaces and all around build more powerful applications easier. A better experience for the user and the developer on Android is a bad thing for Apple.
The final issue that Apple has is that far more people know and need to know Java than Objective-C. Except for their platform, there is no need to ever learn it. The tool chain is much more robust, information is much easier to come by, garbage collection is available, and there are thousands more libraries written in Java than Objective-C and far more portable libraries than are written for C/C++. You might argue that you can always drop down to C/C++ code to make up for the lost performance of using Objective-C (at a significant cost development-wise). You can do that, except places where you need to make a call into Apple’s Objective-C runtime libraries or where you want to write callbacks from those libraries. Those are mostly Objective-C libraries and use the dynamic dispatch mechanism which I showed in 2004 was very much slower than Java. I’d really love to see the whole computer language shootout written with Objective-C calling conventions just to show how much slower it is at that level.
Obviously performance is not the only consideration, but it is a big one. Android has other issues like a fragmented operating system base, hardware feature base and a more complicated user experience. All those things will conspire to hold it back but I think we can see the writing on the wall that Android is going to dominate iPhone market-share wise which will eventually make it a more attractive platform business-wise.

 

[Prize Gotti]

That's the Nozomi, right? I already liked it cos of the name LOL. It looks pretty sweet. Only 700MB of RAM tho? My S2 has 1GB.

I don't think "Nozomi" is a good name for any hardware. It means "Hope" in japanese, and you only need hope when you're not sure if somethings gonna work out right haha!

 

[Casey]

Meh, I don't care about that, it's also the name of Ryo's "female companion" in Shenmue, aka the girl that clearly wants to bang him but he's too busy trying to get revenge for his murdered father. Dammit Ryo.

 

[masta247]

Esperanza means "hope" in Spanish yet it hasn't stopped them from manufacturing cds and dvds with that brand name. And there you literally hoped that they would work. Actually a lot of things are named after "hope" in some language. And in most languages the word meaning "hope" sounds very nice. I think Nozomi is a beautiful word, perhaps a bit too girly for a phone but nice anyway.

 

[Preach]

A girly word?

The number 3 is too feminine for my liking. I am a much bigger fan of the number 1. It has quite the musk.

 

[masta247]

Lol. Nozomi reminds me of Nozomi from Shenmue, Nozomi the Japanese Shinkansen and Japanese little girls.. for some reason.
I know that "Hope" is also a name but somehow it sounds like a good product name and doesn't sound that feminine. Nozomi is more like.. They could as well call the phone "Lily" as far as 'being girly' goes. I like the name Nozomi though.

 

[Flipmo]

Leaked image of the HTC Edge, possibly the world’s first quad-core phone

By Ian Hardy on November 7, 2011 at 1:20pm in Mobile News

If you think the current set of devices are powerful, it’s best you hold tight as quad-core smartphones are coming up soon! The above pic is what’s being called the HTC “Edge” and apparently it’ll be available late Q1/early Q2. This Android device is expected to come packing some serious power: NVIDIA AP30 Tegra 3 1.5GHz quad-core CPU, 4.7-inch touchscreen display with a 720p HD resolution, 10mm thin, 1GB of RAM, 8-megapixel camera with 28-millimeter, f/2.2 lens. In addition, the Edge might come with Beats Audio, HTC Listen (music store), HTC Read (bookstore), HTC Play (gaming hub), HTC Watch (movie portal) and possibly the first smartphone with Sense 4.0… sounds very promising!

 

[S O F I]

Mobile phone makers are going in the wrong direction. The key is to utilize and optimize less processing power, not more. Look to Apple goddamnit.