Went to play with the Atrix (and some other phones)

[dguy6789]

What do you mean WP7 does it? I was playing with some WP7 phones yesterday and what stood out the most was how much longer every one of them took to load up the web browser than my Droid X. The fastest Android phones load just about everything faster than the fastest WP7, WebOS, and iOS devices.

 

[zerocool84]

What do you mean WP7 does it? I was playing with some WP7 phones yesterday and what stood out the most was how much longer every one of them took to load up the web browser than my Droid X. The fastest Android phones load just about everything faster than the fastest WP7, WebOS, and iOS devices.

He's saying smoothness NOT speed. He doesn't care about how fast something opens he just cares about how smooth it opens.

 

[ponyo]

He's saying smoothness NOT speed. He doesn't care about how fast something opens he just cares about how smooth it opens.

You can get some smoothness if you use Spare Parts program and set the Window animations to "Very Slow" and Transition animations to "Very Slow". That will give you some smoothness but at the expense of speed. I have mine set to "Fast" for both because I prefer speed over anything.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

Milestone phones are old? Surely you don't suggest... that Motorola released the Milestone 2 for nothing?

And just to remind you, being the worst handset company, Samsung was chosen as the manufacturer for the second Nexus phone instead of HTC. And the Nexus S has had 3 updates already. 2.3 to 2.3.1 to 2.3.2 and now to 2.3.3.

Good God. Milestone phones are so old it's only 2 months older than a Nexus One.

Look, you make it seem like the minute the next phone comes out, this one is already beyond outdated. Any problems with an n-1 phone is supposed to be solved with a current generation phone. While I understand that newer phones bring better features, is the iPhone 3GS completely outdated? Does it run like shit and Apple does nothing to solve any problems? Even the 3GS and its aging 400mhz ARM11 processor runs iOS 4.x. Sure it wasn't the fastest on 4.0, but at least we can acknowledge that being a whole 2 generations behind in CPU technology can really hold a handset up.

The Milestone is just like the Droid1. The Droid 1 got Froyo in August. The Milestone still does not have official Froyo yet.

There really is no excuse because an overclocked Droid 1 is still as fast as a Droid 2 or Droid X today. It's as fast as today's 1ghz phones. It might lack with its PowerVR SGX530 graphics, but it's no slacker in pure raw CPU power, which is all you should really need to do day to day tasks. So stop making the Milestone sound completely outdated and this is really just piss poor on part of Motorola. But what's new? Motorola's always been like this. I bet you the only reason they're half decent about updates for Verizon is because they're sucking on Verizon's tits to survive. Pretty much most of the world wide market laughs at Motorola.

You can get some smoothness if you use Spare Parts program and set the Window animations to "Very Slow" and Transition animations to "Very Slow". That will give you some smoothness but at the expense of speed. I have mine set to "Fast" for both because I prefer speed over anything.

Maybe, but honestly this is about achieving 60fps smoothness. There's a lot of things that make Android hiccup and the frame rate crashes, but this should be easily solvable with the monstrous GPUs we have in these phones. So when Google finally adds hardware acceleration, I think a lot of our problems will be gone.

 

[runawayprisoner]

You meant the iPhone 3G? It uses a 412MHz ARM11 CPU, just for the record. The iPhone 3GS uses a standard Cortex A8 CPU with 256K of L2 cache running at roughly 600MHz (according to shsh information from the device).

And the 3G had its firmware bugged with 4.0, so its performance was really sluggish in 4.0. Not a good point of reference. You might want to reference 4.2.1 on it.

Regarding the Droid and Milestone, you have to realize that although their CPUs can be clocked to 1GHz (or more), they only have 256MB RAM. That's shared between system and GPU. Which means if the Droid tries to take 128MB of its RAM for the GPU, then you'd only be looking at roughly 128MB left. Why 128MB? Because similar phones with similar resolutions take that much RAM for their displays. Hence you see so many Android phones with 512MB of RAM.

And if anything, Android is merciless when it comes to RAM usage, at least compared to iOS. You'll find that even the iPhone 3G can have more processes running at any time compared to the Milestone. That's just... ridiculous, but it's true. Android doesn't have any strict guideline regarding memory usage like iOS. So compared to the iPhone 3GS, the Droid will match in speed in some instances, but will fall behind when it comes to total number of apps run, and what kind of app can run (without Force Close), which makes it feel outdated compared to the iPhone 3GS, which is still able to keep up with various Android smartphones in the market, and it's only lagging behind the iPhone 4.

If you want to test memory usage, try opening about... 3 browser tabs in an Android phone, then go access the Marketplace and see if any of those tabs would be closed. Then compare them to the iPhone 3GS, which can hold those websites while accessing the App Store. Heck, you can even layer another app on top.

 

[BenSkywalker]

Do I believe in basic science and simple math, yes I do. If you want to see smooth get a high end. CRT monitor that can display 200Hz and then compare it to any cell device, they are all jerky and clunky by comparison. Once you realize that all of the devices have limitations then you start to assign a given value for each of these limitations. If you go on strictly performance, then iOS doesn't compete with the top tier competition from the alternatives. If all you are looking for is the smoothnesss of animmations while using the device then it is quite competitive, but certainly not dominant when you put them side by side. It really isn't a fair comparison at this point until iPhone 5 hits.

Opening 3 browser windows in the basse browser, 3 tabs in Dolphin HD, 3 in Opera mini, launching SportsCenter app, Robo Defense, playing PoowerAMP, launching Specctral Souls and typing this post, launched the Market and double checked, everything is still open, and this running on what is supposed to be a problematic 2.2 build? What is supposed to be the problrm?

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

Do I believe in basic science and simple math, yes I do. If you want to see smooth get a high end. CRT monitor that can display 200Hz and then compare it to any cell device, they are all jerky and clunky by comparison. Once you realize that all of the devices have limitations then you start to assign a given value for each of these limitations. If you go on strictly performance, then iOS doesn't compete with the top tier competition from the alternatives. If all you are looking for is the smoothnesss of animmations while using the device then it is quite competitive, but certainly not dominant when you put them side by side. It really isn't a fair comparison at this point until iPhone 5 hits.

Opening 3 browser windows in the basse browser, 3 tabs in Dolphin HD, 3 in Opera mini, launching SportsCenter app, Robo Defense, playing PoowerAMP, launching Specctral Souls and typing this post, launched the Market and double checked, everything is still open, and this running on what is supposed to be a problematic 2.2 build? What is supposed to be the problrm?

On a Droid 1? I did a test a few months ago on this board where on my iPod Touch I had Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, 4 safari windows, Echofon all save state properly.

On my Droid 1 I tried tweeting, then surfing and doing 1 other thing, and it lost my half typed Tweet. Angry Birds can't save state. The N1 and other 512mb devices showed that they could do WAY more than I could. 256mb vs 512mb seems to be a huge difference on Android. From what I estimate, Android needs about double the RAM of iOS to function properly especially with Google's memory management system.

I realize the D1/Milestone is dated in this respect, but it's still disappointing considering this was the first major smartphone we got in the US to compete against the iPhone.

 

[BenSkywalker]

No, it was an Atrix, compared best to best. I actually decided to push the phone a bit, got 35 apps running without issue including angry birds and all of them resumed state just fine. The closed system gives the benefit of tighter tuning, at the cost of reduced flexibility. At some point we will get to see GB parts running iOS, but until then comparing the best to the best iOS isn't competitive in this aspect.

Perhaps the iP5 will give us a chance to see if iOS scales as well as Android or if it had the same issues as the old Mac OS, great with little resources but sub par with exceptional amounts of RAM(the 9x Win builds had the same issue while the NT builds were horrible with limited RAM and did great when loaded up).

 

[runawayprisoner]

Well, when you are comparing a phone with 1GB of RAM to one with 512MB, something is seriously amiss. But it's not that far behind in reality.

I just grabbed my dad's iPhone 4 and performed a quick test. 9 tabs in iCabMobile (it's a browser based on the webkit engine), 5 tabs in Opera Mini, Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja happily stay in the background, downloaded 8 random free apps from the App Store in the process, set Photobucket app to sync 50 photos to an account, Pandora radio streaming in the background, IM client and Colloquy (IRC client) always connected in the background.

If you want to do it rigorously, the iPhone 4 was able to do AirPlay streaming of an HD video clip to our AppleTV in the background while running a 3D game (Fruit Ninja) with little to no hit to performance, at that point, there were still 4 apps downloading in the background, and my dad's push emails never turned themselves off.

Would you be able to elaborate on which lack of flexibility you mentioned?

 

[BenSkywalker]

Well, when you are comparing a phone with 1GB of RAM to one with 512MB, something is seriously amiss. But it's not that far behind in reality.

No need for the Apple bashing, the iPhone4 can certainly do better then the 9 apps to 35 that you indicated. Yes, they are behind the curve by a decent amount hardware wise, but it isn't the 4:1 ratio you are implying.

Would you be able to elaborate on which lack of flexibility you mentioned?

Everything? Hardware, software, retail channels, carriers, everything. Having a full in house device allows tight tuning, but at the cost of flexibility you can't hope to match on the open market. I'm not saying one approach is by default superior, but it is a trade off with ups and downs no matter how you approach it.

 

[MrX8503]

He's saying smoothness NOT speed. He doesn't care about how fast something opens he just cares about how smooth it opens.

Actually I care about both.

What do you mean WP7 does it? I was playing with some WP7 phones yesterday and what stood out the most was how much longer every one of them took to load up the web browser than my Droid X. The fastest Android phones load just about everything faster than the fastest WP7, WebOS, and iOS devices.

Android is fast at "loading" a page, but what happens to your Android device when you try to

1. Pan
2. Zoom
3. Scroll

??

It stutters, its unresponsive, no snap/spring, no physics, no kinetic scrolling, its shit.