iPhone 4S Test Notes: App Speed [Video]

By Casey Chan Oct 14, 2011 9:15 PM 24,215 23

It's faster. Screens slide smoother, apps launch quicker and stuff just works better. But that shouldn't really come as a surprise—we've seen the difference between an A4 and an A5 processor before. What IS surprising is just how fast the 4S' camera is. That thing KILLS.

We tested the iPhone 4S against the iPhone 4 and iPad 2 and though the 4S felt better when compared to the iPhone 4, it's not an iPad 2/iPad 1-sized difference where you feel like the old generation is trudging trough slowsand and it's impossible to ever go back. However! It'd be foolish to discredit the speed difference because it clearly exists and it definitely improves the iOS app-launchy, screen-slidey experience. iOS is just slicker on the 4S, things work better and you get to do what you want to do faster.

Where the iPhone 4S truly blows the iPhone 4 away is in its camera speed. I tried to "rapid fire" the cameras in both devices—obviously more of a stress test than a real-world test—and the results were stunning. First, the iPhone 4 camera takes MUCH longer than the 4S camera to open. And then when I started taking pictures over and over and over again, the iPhone 4S handled it with ease. Saying the camera in the iPhone 4 struggled is a bit of an understatement; in a solid 10-15 seconds of button mashing, the iPhone 4S managed to take twice as many photos as its predecessor. The camera speed in the 4S is legit, folks.

The iPhone 4S also shines in more intensive games like Infinity Blade and NBA Jam. The iPhone 4 isn't even on the same level, actually, sword swipes swoop smoother and controls feel more responsive on the 4S. What we saw in our testing was the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 battling it out for first place while the old iPhone wasn't even close. And that's the real gist of it, the iPhone 4S compares more to the iPad 2 than the old iPhone 4. And that's a pretty good place to be.

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iOS 5 Synchronization Speed Tests: Is Wi-Fi Syncing Worth It? [Ios 5]

Republished from By Whitson Gordon Oct 14, 2011 5:25 PM 46,640 114

One of the big new features in iOS 5 is liberation from your sync cable. Now, you can sync your music, movies, and apps all over Wi-Fi—albeit a bit slower than over USB. How much slower? We put it to the test to find out whether it was still fast enough to be worth your time.

While syncing your latest album, movie, or apps over USB is pretty darn fast, there's something to be said for the convenience of wireless sync. From anywhere in the house, you can just tap a button on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad to get them all sent to your device—without even having to get out of your chair. The only problem is speed. Wi-Fi is notoriously slower than wired connections, but we set out to see just how much slower—for music, movies, and apps—to see whether it was worth the waiting. Here's what we found.

We ran these tests on a Windows desktop over Wireless G with a 4th generation iPod touch. We ran three tests for each syncing medium: a music test in which we synced four albums of music, a music and movies test in which we synced those four albums plus a movie downloaded from the iTunes store, and an apps test in which we synced 7 apps from the App Store. We timed it from the pressing of the Sync button to the moment the Apple logo reappeared in iTunes' playback bar, when the sync ended.

Music: Syncing four albums only took about 28 seconds over USB, which increased to about 6 and a half minutes over Wi-Fi. That's a pretty big difference—as in it was 14 times slower—but 6 and a half minutes still isn't a long period of time, as long as you aren't rushing out the door. And if you have less than four albums to sync, it becomes even less noticeable.

Music and a Movie: Syncing four albums and a two and a half hour movie over USB took significantly longer than just syncing music, but still not so much that you'd get bored while it was running. Syncing it over Wi-Fi, though, was absolutely painful—it took over 20 minutes to sync. If you're just sitting around, I suppose you could sync a movie or two over Wi-Fi, but be prepared for it to take a long time.

Apps: Apps are a completely different beast altogether. Syncing 7 apps over USB took a little over a minute, which isn't bad, but was surprisingly long considering each app is only 10-20MB large. Syncing over Wi-Fi only took twice as long—a little over 2 minutes. It seems like large part of app syncing is probably the unpacking and installation, which takes place on iOS, and has nothing to do with your connection speed. As such, syncing apps over Wi-Fi shows a much smaller difference compared to USB than does syncing media over Wi-Fi.

All: Syncing four albums, a movie, and 7 apps took about as much time as you'd expect on each. Add up the values from the other test and it's about the same as trying to sync them all in one fell swoop—which, by the way, we probably wouldn't recommend doing over Wi-Fi unless you have nowhere to go.

While music and movies take 13 times longer over Wi-Fi than over USB, it's still a relatively short amount of time—6 and a half minutes for 4 albums isn't bad. If you aren't rushing out the door, it's certainly worth the "not getting out of your chair" factor, and if you're only syncing one or two albums, it'll be even faster. This benefit grows with something like the iPad, which is more difficult to just keep docked at your computer all the time—instead of finding it and bringing it to your computer all the time, you can just hit the sync button on either device and let it go to town.

The other awesome thing about Wi-Fi syncing is that you can still use your device while you sync, which is awesome. If you want to sit in one room and listen to music on your iPod, or read your Instapaper queue on the iPad, you don't need to sacrifice any of that time futzing with sync cables—just hit the sync button and keep on doing what you're doing. A little sync icon will show up in the menu bar while it syncs, and disappear when it's done, too.

Lastly, there seems to be a misconception that your iPhone has to be charging for it to sync with iTunes over Wi-Fi. This is not true. You can sync when unplugged, as long as you have enough battery left in your phone and as long as iTunes is open. It will, however, automatically sync itself whenever you plug it in, which is a great feature.

Overall, Wi-Fi syncing is mostly what we expected—a slower version of USB syncing. However, if you're syncing a small amount of media, it doesn't make a huge difference, and if you're syncing apps, there's almost no reason to plug in at all. Also keep in mind that we were using a wireless G network, and if you're on the newer wireless N standard, you might notice even faster Wi-Fi times. And with the ability to keep using your device while you sync, it is very freeing to have Wi-Fi sync around, as long as you don't have anywhere to be. Have you tried Wi-Fi sync on iOS 5 yet? Share your thoughts with us in the comments.

You can contact Whitson Gordon, the author of this post, at whitson@lifehacker.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.
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iPhone 4S Test Notes: Data Speed (It's Slow) [IPhone]

By Brent Rose Oct 14, 2011 9:00 PM 41,669 86

The iPhone 4S is here. One of new, not-so-visible features? A re-spiffed antenna, and stuffed inside the AT&T 4S, new guts that (should) mean faster data speeds. But theoretical max speeds are not real world experiences. So which iPhone is the fastest: AT&T, Sprint or Verizon? And how does the 4S stack up against the most jacked Android phones?

We tested the iPhone 4S on AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon; the iPhone 4 on Verizon and AT&T; the Samsung Galaxy S II on Sprint and T-Mobile; the Motorola Droid Bionic on Verizon, and the HTC Amaze on Sprint.

None of the iPhones proclaim to run at "4G" speeds, although AT&T has billed phones with the same potential data speed as the 4S as "4G." What you consider 4G may differ from what somebody else calls 4G, and sure enough, every Android phone we tested is a 4G phone, according to their respective carriers.

Let's talk speed limits, theoretically. Verizon and Sprint's iPhones use CDMA EV-DO Rev A, which has a theoretical max download speed of 3.1Mbps. The old AT&T iPhone 4 was technically capable of hitting 7.2Mbps downstream. AT&T's iPhone 4S uses a version of HSPA+ with a max speed of 14.4Mbps downstream. For the non-iPhones, the Amaze 4G and Galaxy S II on T-Mobile also run on HSPA+, but a version that theoretically allows a peak downstream speed of 42Mbps. The Galaxy S II on Sprint uses WiMax for 4G speeds, while Verizon's Droid Bionic runs on its LTE network, which claims speeds of up to 12Mbps (though we've seen them go well above 20Mbps). Obviously, theoretical max speeds are not real world speeds. Which is what we wanted to check. (Is this alphabet soup of network standards confusing? Read this.)

This is just a spot test, from our roof in our downtown NYC offices. We have pretty strong signalage from every carrier (every phone showed max bars, and though bars can be slightly misleading as a measure, they're ballpark). Of course, some networks are stronger than others in certain areas, which is why we've got more comprehensive, diverse network testing on the way, in lotsa different locations. (For something a little wider reaching, check out—and participate in!—the great national network test.)

Method: We ran at least five speed tests for each to make sure we were getting good data, and then averaged the results.

(BTW, click on the charts to embiggen.)

Most important, to most of you anyway, are download speeds. No surprise, perhaps, the 4G phones massacred the iPhones, beating them by nearly 1000 percent. AT&T's faster theoretical speeds with its iPhone 4S are indeed faster in real life, beating Verizon and Sprint on the iPhone 4S. And yes, the 4S was definitely faster than 4 on AT&T. No real gain for Verizon—our theory is that Verizon iPhone 4 already had a tweaked antenna design, so it had less to gain.

Upload speeds on phones have gotten more and more important, considering how many of us are now syncing our high-res photos and HD videos back to the cloud. The Droid Bionic's crazyquickness is way beyond anything else, which is why we love us some LTE. The iPhone 4Ses' speeds make us sad though, particularly AT&T's. (We re-ran the tests many, many times to see if they weren't a fluke. Perhaps there was a problem with the tower near us.) Sprint's iPhone 4S had the best upload speed of those we tested, at 0.89Mbps.

Again, these are preliminary tests, but so far Sprint seems to average out the best of the iPhone 4Ses, with the second fastest downloads and fastest upload. Plus you get unlimited data. If all you care about is downstream and you've got good AT&T service, that's going to be your best bet. Of course, the bigger take away? iPhones are officially slowwwww when it comes to raw data speeds. Next year, right?

Image credit: Shutterstock/Ra Studio

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Hands On iPhone 4S Video Shows 3x Speed Boost (And Siri!) [Iphone 4s]

By Sam Biddle Oct 10, 2011 10:23 AM 23,436 29

Somehow, someone in China's gotten their mitts on an iPhone 4S already. Or so this video claims. The brief vid, dug up by MacRumors, shows off some impressive benchmarking and Siri settings. It seems faster!

Safari launches near-instantly, which is kind of impressive. It is, after all, Safari, and might have just been recently closed. But the real pudding lies in the BrowserMark demo, in which the 4S doubles the 4's performance. With the Java-bending Sunspider benchmark, the 4S clocks in at around a third of the time as a 4 running iOS 4, according to GigaOm's numbers. Thanks, new A5 processor! It'd be nice to see our Chinese friend boot up Infinity Blade instead of a synthetic browser benchmark, but hey, numbers are numbers.

The video also shows Siri, which we've seen, as well as Siri's settings pane, which we haven't seen. It looks like we'll be able to trigger the AI secretary just by lifting the phone, allowing us to talk into it like an actual conversation, instead of speaking to it from afar like lunatics. [MacRumors]

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Students Break Electric Car Land Speed Record in a Salty Blur [Video]

And they say electric cars don't go fast. A group of BYU engineering students have built an electric streamliner that peaked at speeds of 175 mph. With that quiet electric motor I'll bet the "whoosh" it makes is gorgeous.

It took seven years and the work of more than 130 students to make it happen. The car, called Electric Blue, barreled down the Bonneville Salt Flats for two runs, averaging 155.8 mph and peaking at 175 (they got it up to 180 last year but rolled the car in the process, so it didn't count). Students custom built the body out of carbon fiber after intensive modeling in a virtual wind tunnel. Fueled by a trunk full of lithium iron phosphate batteries, this sucker officially broke the world land speed record for electric cars under 1,100 pounds.

Batteries that are powerful enough to accomplish such a feat are extremely heavy, and before this no one had been able to get enough juice in while keeping it under weight. While, obviously, this type of car is in no way street-legal, it's another important step in showing what battery-powered cars are capable of.

Big congrats to everyone involved in the project, now can you please make something I can take down the Pacific Coast Highway? Preferably with a sunroof? Thanks. [PhysOrg]

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First Quantum Computer Simulator Operates the Speed of Light [Science]

Celebrated physicist Richard Feynman first proposed it in 1982, and now it exists: the first universal, digital quantum simulator.

Austrian scientists, who published how they created the mind-blowing simulator in the September 1 issue of journal Science, haven't yet returned my emails (they're probably popping champers), but they've got to be pretty stoked.

"We show in our experiment that our method works and that we can virtually recreate and investigate many systems," said Benjamin Lanyon from the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, in a press release. "When we want to study another phenomenon, we only need to reprogram our simulator."

Basically, they found a way to process a crapload of information - an amount that would require a supercomputer today - using just a few bits of memory, at close to the speed of light.

The memory is in the form of a handful of trapped ions controlled by laser pulses that can be used to process giant mathematical descriptions of whatever phenomenon a scientist would like to study, such as protein folding, semiconductors, or any other mysterious behavior of super tiny things.

"This is one of those computations that can be done on quantum computers that always takes second fiddle to discussions about cryptography," Slowe said. "Honestly, being able to factor huge numbers is pretty amazing, but being able to efficiently simulate other quantum systems is even more amazing."

Since Feynman's proposal in the '80s, others have made incremental progress on creating a simulator. In 1996, Seth Lloyd showed a standard quantum computer could be programmed to simulate any local quantum system efficiently. Two years ago, some of the same scientists who performed the current work showed an analog simulator was possible. In that experiment, they simulated Zitterbewegung (which means quivering motion, but that sounds way boring compared to Zitterbewegung) of relativistic particles, a phenomenon that had never been observed directly in nature before. In February that same group showed that a quantum computer was possible.

The fully realized simulator opens the door for incredible amounts of information processing.

"Think of it this way," Slowe said. "They did a calculation on a handful of qubits that would probably make your fans kick in on your gigaflop with gigabytes laptop."

[Science]

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