Palm Pre teardown shows iPhone-inspired design - Page 4

[QUOTE=anantksundaram;1427218]
That's not as bad as all the dummies who talk about their Apple computer as a MAC.

It's super easy

http://www.tech-faq.com/change-mac-address.shtml

Just a registry change.

Oh wow. I guess there's no backpedalling with you....... </mild sarcasm>

And, as to the latter part of your comment, I suppose it 'bye for now.

See you back here soon, with your new name/IP address/MAC address/whatever.....

Remember that the Pres apps are pretty much ac OS X Dashboard Widgets. I do think Apple wold be able to offer an option to allocate 32MB(?) of the 256MB for background apps. Keeping it sandboxed would allow 3rd-party developers the ease of not having to work around varying app usage that could negatively affect their development process. Ive read that this is one of the downfalls of Android.

While it seems possible, will they have it ready immediately? Will they require developers to run their app through a more restrictive acceptance process to make sure that the CPU and RAM usage falls within acceptable usage?

Since Push Notifications have just gotten out of the testing phase, Im not sure Apple will try will get this going right away when they have other things on their plate to deal with, but I do hope they have worked it out.

I request he comes back with new attitude. He writes like he was born yesterday, which is a good thing because we can start his personality from scratch.

PS: You’d think he’d have figured out how to quote a reply at this point. Though it comes pre-quoted so he is purposely messing up the formatting. I can’t think of a single rational reason for that. Oh, there I go trying to use the word rational in reference with Seahawk Fan. No wonder I can’t think of a reason.

As I already stated. English isn't my first language. However the meaning of a word is something totally different than the spelling of a word. And the word banter as I learned the word and after looking it up in a dictionary is not a synonym for talking. As I already stated, it means to speak to or address in a witty manner. And I never did that. I never wrote to him in a witty manner. That was my only point. But thanks for pointing out that spelling mistake.

Clearly this post is the result of poring over a "thesaurus" (?) in order to "sound smart."

Your original post, sans thesaurus, would have read something like:

Mmmm... If the S60 is as good as you say, and the iPhone as bad... Why do you have an iPhone at all? You could just use the S60 and spare yourself (and the rest of us) your disappointment.

Dick

What Cameronj posted. Ive never done it on any PC OS. Ive done it on routers, but to state that means Im lying because Seahawk Fan is adamant that I have no technical knowledge at all. He probably also thinks hes levelheaded and compos mentis. He probably thinks I had to look up that term, too.



Wilco probably wont reply back and he doesnt really care about having a conversation. He just does guerilla-like posting every now and then, but they are very tame.

Ok, this I agree with...


That I disagree with. Heck, you can't even terminate programs on windows mobile without resorting to third party apps or development tools!


Intelligent multitasking that's user oriented is a new fangled feature.


Wow, what incredible insight. How long have you been on the iPhone dev team?

How about this - like with any project, there are a list of goals and features. Those get prioritized. Since Apple is user oriented instead of useless feature, geek checklist oriented, multi-tasking is further down on the list. Just like copy paste and the SDK. So far their strategy seems to be effective (their sales success speaks volumes), and only improving.

Bottom line - yes, the iPhone could stand for more features like multitasking. But here's the deal - even if they froze the OS right now it's still light years ahead of any other smartphone on the market - and from I have seen, that includes the Pre. Thing is, Apple isn't standing still. Unlike any previous smartphone (or PDA) I have owned, they are pushing out updates. Regularly. I get new functionality, supported by the manufacturer (not hacked in), on a routine basis. How cool is that?

With apologies to Shel Silverstein:

All the Woulda-Coulda-Shouldas
Layin' in the sun,
Talkin' 'bout the things
They (Apple) woulda coulda shoulda done...
But those Woulda-Coulda-Shouldas
All ran away and hid
From one little Did.

That's good to know.

Actually the bad sim that caused the dropped calls caused no errors in and of itself, other than the sporadic "call failed". It didn't report that the sim wasn't inserted or anything of the sort. The AT&T folks told me there are two issues common with sim cards. The contacts will get dirty or degraded causing dropped calls, or the card itself will warp causing the same issue.

If your having dropped calls, just take it to an AT&T store and request a new one. It might solve your issues. I didn't have to pay for mine, although I'm told that they will sometimes try to charge you for a new sim.

Well put.

And, as I and others have noted, prioritizing a processor heavy OS that enables a lot of user facing features down the road is simply planning ahead.

Sure, it might mean some constraints early on, but hardware gets faster. Apple didn't make the iPhone until they could get a fair bit of OS X running on the available hardware, and having built the underpinnings of a seriously capable mobile OS that works seamlessly with their desktop OS (because they are, for all intents and purposes, the same thing) they can extend functionality as far as tomorrow's hardware will permit.

MS and Nokia, on the other hand, made Windows CE and Symbian to run on the far more constrained hardware of some years ago, and are now obliged to bolt on parts in order to make their respective choices act more like "real" operating systems, now that handheld machines are capable of running such.

Palm has elected to use the light weight WebOS to get zippy performance and multitasking out of the gate, but will have to deal with the built in constraints that tradeoff engenders, down the road.

As DocNo42 notes, it's always about tradeoffs and priorities and what the designer considers the most important goals. Apple's goal is to erase the distinction between "computer" and "phone", and they brought the OS to do it.

As far as I can tell, the goal of most of the rest of the industry is to jam as many bullet point features as possible onto each new release, and come up with some pretty splash screens and animations that will look nice in ads.

The Pre and Android are bucking the trend, but they, of course, have their own limitations and compromises based on what their designers deemed top priority.

Not surprising given that Rubenstein was probably able to poach a bunch of former Apple engineers.

Besides the keyboard which seems to be very small and uncomfortable for male hands, the Palm pre looks very nice. The next-gen 600Mhz ARM Cortex-A8 is blazing fast --- twice as fast as the older iPhone ARM11 at a given frequency and running 50% higher clockspeed --- and the PoweVR "SGX-530" graphics core is also a lot better than the "MBX lite" in the iPhone.

The OS and interface is well designed and engineered and provides a very good experience. I think one major challenge will be how well they integrate the programming API into the lower-level subsystems. If developers are stuck with basic HTML/CSS and Javascript without things like hardware accelerated SVG/Canvas, javascript->OpenGL bindings, custom high-level 3D Javascript library, etc, then the applications will be pretty limited, and you can forget about advanced iPhone-level games.

The only thing stoping the iPhone from doing user multitasking is Apple. Simple as that. People seem to forget that iPhone is multitasking anyways to support the GSM connection and mail in background. Even when notifications come you still need a background process to monitor for and process those notifications.

The issue with battery drain is bogus anyways. If you have processes that eat up battery life simply don't run them unless needed. How much power a background app will use is dependant on how it is written an how often it is scheduled.

As a side note it was just pointed out to me that yes indeed mail runs in background or at least part of it does. How do I know; because just before the new mail announcement is made typing gets really slow. If nothing else it demonstrates that iPhone needs either faster processors or SMP hardware.


Dave

This comments reiterates one of the statements Palm made when the device was introduced back in January. This is the most stupid one of all.

Steve Jobs quoted Wayne Gretzky many times:

iPhone OS runs smoothly on the current hardware, and the hardware is going to get faster. Apple has a scalable OS, great SDK and a huge developer following. The iPhone OS is the greatest iPhone advantage. No one will beat it any time soon.

Note that none of the Palm reviews says that the Pre is noticeably faster. With a 150% faster processor, twice the RAM and "a lean, device optimized OS" it should feel MUCH faster. Apparently, it dosn't, not to mention the games/ Open GL stuff. I tried the pre briefly, browsing the images seems a little bit sluggish compared to the iPhone. Browsing the web looked about the same, I expected it to be faster.

Good job Palm... the Pre at least appears to be in the same class as the iphone, unlike the other alleged "iphone killers". That being said, I'll be upgrading to the new iPhone the day of its release.

Video chatting and movie rentals right from my pocket? Are you serious?

Game over!

The developer has the option to use predictive text any time the app displays the keyboard. However, it only makes sense in fields for entering free-form text (comments, notes, instructions). It doesn't make sense to use it in a URL, name, address, etc.

Hmmmm, can't really see the point where I said S60 was so good. Can you please point me to exactly where I said that? In fact, the post you quoted simply states that both browsers are based on the WebKit engine.


I used WinMo once, about 4 years ago. Really, I'm talking about S60.


That's not true! The iPhone OS has plenty of slow downs and stalls, either because the hardware isn't powerful enough to run it, or it's been coded inefficiently. To name but a few that I experience regularly: swiping to unlock - I can have done the swiping motion, but it's another few seconds before the device catches up and actually moves the toggle. Pressing the sleep button, can take anywhere from a fraction of a second to 5 seconds for the device to actually shut off. Pressing the view tabs button in Safari, again can take anywhere from a fraction of a second to 5 seconds to display open tabs. Opening settings, mail, safari, can all take a few seconds too. Typing in Safari can be painfully slow - so much so that the device completely misses out animating certain key presses.

Needless to say, the OS running smoothly on the hardware is not really one of the iPhone's current strong points! Hopefully Apple have picked up the pace with the rumoured 3rd gen device and the faster processor and more RAM - heck the phone needs it!

Nice quote from wikipedia. If you actually knew what you were talking about instead of copying and pasting text from web sites, you would understand that the MAC address is only valid on your local subnet. As soon as the packet moves to the other side of your router, your MAC address is replaced with the routers MAC address, and so on. By the time the packets get to AI's servers, they are on the sixth or more MAC address.

And even if the MAC address survived end to end, they can easily be spoofed or changed.

MAC addresses are a poor security method - anywhere.

The only real security for trolls such as yourself are vigilant admins that delete your account as soon as you rear your butt ugly head.

It shouldn't be long now...

Now that's funny

Pot, kettle....

What is the difference between AT$T having problems in certain locations and Verizon in others. My verizon phone was useless in the mountains outside of Alanta but that doesn't make them worst than other vendors, just had coverage in that area.

That doesn't even touch upon the corruption with respect to installing cell towers. Especially with local communities. Sometimes a company simply has to wait for more ethical people to be elected.

My personal exoerience is that AT&T is a far better deal in my local area than Verizon was. I've had great results with them in Las Vegas and other places I've traveled. At home around Rochester NY they do have better call quality than the competition.

Dave

For the first time in regards to his posts here I googled. He did literally copy that from Wikipedia. That is rich!

As for the originating MAC address, I maybe wrong as its been a long time since I dealt with it, but I thought that the header preamble maintained the original MAC address, even after jumping networks.

I don't think the pre will die for a long time. this battery argument is so ridiculous. Apple has total mind control over apple fans it is so sad. The battery life is my choice with the pre. I have a pre and an iphone 3g. The pre WITH multitasking gets about the same battery life as the 3g give or take 30 minutes. The reason the iphone doesn't multitask is because the phone doesn't have the power to do it. With the pre I can have 6-10 apps open and still scroll through contacts or type an email lag free. On my iphone if I play music in the backround safari crashes. I scroll through contacts and it lags when nothing elde is going on. On the pre I am typing this msg while 3 other browsers are open and when I go back to them the page is still there it doesn't have to reload, I have 2 you tube videos also buffering in the backround and still with all 6 of these apps open I can type this msg with no lag. Also the browser has never crashed even with 12 apps open. This is amazing because my battery still lasts a day. The iphone is good the pre is a little better for me because the multitask is needed. I know the pre will be around for a long time especially in february 2010 when its on sprint, At&t, and verizon. The pre will blow up with users.

Nope.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4#Header

If you think about it, there is really no benefit from the space overhead in passing the original MAC address along - it's only useful if you can directly address the device - i.e. you are on the same subnet.

Once you cross the subnet boundary (i.e. at a router) the MAC address is useless...

Anything involving IP addresses is the Network layer, which gets encapsulated by the Datalink Layer, which does contain a MAC address source. I was wrong in that it is not in the preamble, though it isn the header. This is very important for routers as IP addresses can easily change and sometimes be in conflict if DHCP is not setup, and sometimes if it is, which can be a real bitch to troubleshoot. But I am still not sure if that is the source MAC from the previous hop or the from the original node.



PS: Have we forgotten our OSI model?

Well admin can contact his isp . And complain about his abusive language. No?

yeah... Jobs has a habit of quoting random, stupid crap..thinking it's smart.

You have the PRE ? The PRE is out already ?

Yup, I was just coming back to correct my post - I confused the ethernet header with the IPV4 header - d'oh!

But still, the hardware source and destination addresses get updated each time the packet moves across a router.

i.e Computer on Network A sends a packet that crosses router 1 to network B which crosses router 2 to Network C which has our destination host.

Computer A creates a packet and in the Ethernet header it inserts it's MAC address as the source, and the router that is it's default gateway as the destination.

Then Router 1 looks up the destination IP address in it's routing table, figures out which interface is connected to the network that can get the packet on it's way (network B in my example) and re-crafts the ethernet header with the source address being equivalent to the MAC address of the routers interface on Network B and the destination interface the MAC address of router 2.

Router 2 does the same thing all over, it gets the packet, pulls out the IPV4 destination address, does a lookup to find which interface has the network or device with the destination IP and then it re-writes the ethernet header. This time, the router can talk directly to the destination host, so instead of the MAC address of another router, it uses the devices MAC address. So it rewrites (for the last time) the ethernet header with the source address as the MAC address for the interface on network C, and the destination MAC address for the host.

You can't confuse (like I did) the HARDWARE (layer 2) address for devices vs. the LOGICAL (layer 3) address. Ethernet itself is layer 2, IP is layer 3.


Apparently I had, but after I typed it and submitted it, it didn't sound right so I ended up going to the same place you did

Whew, haven't thought about this stuff in this detail for some time. Moving into managment and away from day to day sysadmin work sucks \

Yes..

lol... didn't you see the long lines yesterday?

I have two CCIEs, albeit expired certs, but I also have a computer science degree with a focus on networking. I wouldn’t have thought that with so many years and so much effort put forward I would have forgotten such simple standards, but I apparently have. I felt old when Tetris turned 25yo yesterday, this just makes it worse. Not to mention I’m at a hotel where the average age is about half of mine. Seriously depressing!


There was a Sprint store in Honolulu that apparently had 50 people waiting outside for a Pre. I’m sure that there will be some out of the way AT&T store that has less than 50 people for the iPhone release. This is impressive, considering that Mark Elliot of Sprint stated that they didn’t even want lines to form. I’m sure he was devastated that some small ones did.

The pre has been out for a day or two i guess. but he sounds like he's had it for some time. whether he has or hasn't had it awhile, it still sounds like there's some bias corollary to the "mind control" apple fans are under.

Reading this forum is like being in a middle school cafeteria...

That being said, I do have to add my two cents. Yes, the Palm Pre can multitask, but what everyone seems to forget is that its applications are written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, not Objective-C like the iPhone. iPhone apps have native access to all sorts of APIs and services like Core Animation, OpenGL, etc. Does the Pre? Nope. I'm not saying that the Pre doesn't give developers access to any type of API (via JavaScript maybe), but what I am saying is that it's a bit like comparing apples (no pun intended) to oranges (wow, Palm's logo does look like an orange lol).

Also - why do we need multitasking so badly? Since the iPhone is a window-less OS, you'd need to hit the home button and select the application running in the background to use it anyway. I really can't think of one app I use that I would want to run in the background. For IM, which is the argument most people make, I use BeejiveIM. Even if I'm not using it, the BeejiveIM servers collect my IMs and present them to me when I use it the next time as if it were actually running the entire time.

Lastly, someone was making the assertion that Apple was too lazy to slim down the OS for the current hardware. Are you kidding me?! It's not like Apple ever rushes out any product, and who are you to make that assumption. Apple took its sweet time developing the iPhone, and made decisions strategically, not hastily. Developers love the iPhone SDK because it offers them thousands of APIs, frameworks, etc, and isn't a 'kiddie' OS designed for second-rate hardware. iPhone OS is a real OS, unlike webOS which is basically a system-wide browser. If Palm ever allows third party apps written natively, you can bet the Pre and its oh-so-holy multitasking won't be able to handle running more than one at a time.

This is not good news for the Palm…

•

http://gizmodo.com/5282279/palm-pre-...een-distortion

The over all point being that 90% of people don't know anything about or would care to learn how to manage the system resources on their phones.

For the convenience of the majority of the consumer market Apple does not allow this option because most people won't understand that they have too many apps open at the same time, they will only understand that their phone is having problems.

The battery issues with multitasking have been shown in reviews of the Pre. The Pre has been getting lack luster reviews on battery life and some reviewers have pointed out that multitasking clearly slows down the phones processes and can cause stalls or crashing.


Of course mail runs in the background, how else would you receive an email when mail is closed.

He seemed to have it for weeks.

Hopefully it ends up being a small isolated problem. As often these types of things end ip being.