3G settings discovered in latest beta of iPhone firmware

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  • Reply 41 of 125
    merdheadmerdhead Posts: 587member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by aegisdesign View Post


    Thanks. I wasn't aware they'd shipped their engineers of to ST. However, that said, the N series were all in house efforts. ST did the manufacturing but the 3G chips were designed by Nokia staff.



    I know they used the Infineon chips lower down the range though as that's what puzzled me with Apple using them in the iPhone initially. The iPhone is like an iPod Touch with a Nokia S40 level phone slapped in there hardware-wise. There's much duplication of function.



    I don't think Apple had time to refine their hardware for the first revision. They would have combined the blocks they could find with the specifications they wanted to enable the software they wanted, which was the key thing. A very sensible strategy. Now that they've pushed that out the door, they can go after better hardware. I think we will see big improvements in Apple hardware going forward, with increasing custom design (thus PA Semi) and much more integration.



    I have to say that I found it strange that Nokia ditched their custom development. I would have though that custom chip design was a major competitive advantage and we can see that Apple is heading in that direction. But I think that Nokia makes alot of phone models and they figured they were better off with a marketplace competing to supply them with a variety of designs. Obviously the mobile phone market is big enough for this.



    I think Apple might be pursuing a hybrid strategy where they build parts in house that they can't get outside, probably in the area of application processors or possibly graphics hardware and reply on third parties for more specialist parts such as the RF stuff. Manufacturing advantage is being boiled down to a few public foundries (plus Intel of course) and doesn't really represent an advantage for anyone. Apple have prospered by having a tight integration with software, but they realise that it runs both ways: they can adapt their software to the best hardware or they can create custom hardware to enable better software.



    I think Apple has the right strategy. They can always get what Nokia is getting, but Apple also have (or will have) top flight engineers to give them an edge on their competitors. I think Nokia have gone the wrong way. Apple is benefiting from their sharp focus on a few product lines.
  • Reply 42 of 125
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by addabox View Post


    So if I'm following here, the contention of some posters is that Apple went out of their way to put a shitty, old tech chip in the iPhone for no reason whatsoever, since their claims about battery life and American 3G rollout are bogus.



    And this happened because all board level design decisions are made by Jobs, who likes to put out crappy products that he can market the hell out of to fools, just because he's such a dick and a charlatan. I would imagine his engineers came to him with the correct chip, but Jobs demanded they downgrade it.



    But that can't be it, because Apple doesn't have any competent engineers (they probably couldn't even figure out what was on the market, and just grabbed the first thing that came to hand), since random dudes on the internet can easily see how pointlessly stupid the iPhone design is.



    And these random dudes come by their expertise because they are phone owners.



    That about it?



    Well, I mean obviously that guy is a troll, (altho his post count is kinda high, are all his posts this bad) but you are oversimplifying it, I mean using old chips so you can make your next product more worthing of updating isn't unheard of, I think it was implied that apple is using planned obsoletence (sp?), which I don't doubt was a part of the decisions that they made (tho not wholly the reason either)
  • Reply 43 of 125
    merdheadmerdhead Posts: 587member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by addabox View Post


    So if I'm following here, the contention of some posters is that Apple went out of their way to put a shitty, old tech chip in the iPhone for no reason whatsoever, since their claims about battery life and American 3G rollout are bogus.



    And this happened because all board level design decisions are made by Jobs, who likes to put out crappy products that he can market the hell out of to fools, just because he's such a dick and a charlatan. I would imagine his engineers came to him with the correct chip, but Jobs demanded they downgrade it.



    But that can't be it, because Apple doesn't have any competent engineers (they probably couldn't even figure out what was on the market, and just grabbed the first thing that came to hand), since random dudes on the internet can easily see how pointlessly stupid the iPhone design is.



    And these random dudes come by their expertise because they are phone owners.



    That about it?



    It seems that most people seem to want to explain everything with some sort of conspiracy. The simple answer that people seem to not be able to arrive at is that Apple has little time and they compromised on the things they thought people would care least about or were the hardest to fix.
  • Reply 44 of 125
    sapporobabysapporobaby Posts: 1,079member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by aegisdesign View Post


    Just a side point, but Nokia design their own chips. They rarely use off the shelf components.



    They used to design their own chips, but they now contract it out. PM me and I can give you a bit more info.
  • Reply 45 of 125
    sapporobabysapporobaby Posts: 1,079member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Somynona View Post


    It is a compromise. You can bet your bottom dollar Steve Jobs didn't want to have to do this. I don't want to have to worry about the underlying technology when using a mobile.



    You may remember that Jobs said they'd have 3G phones out by the end of this year. It appears they've thought that they can't wait until the end of the year, for whatever reason, so they've compromised on ease-of-use, and used a chip that's not as efficient as they'd like but included a preference option to turn it off and on.



    Having to turn a capability on and off manually because it's not fit for purpose is certainly not a "feature." It's the definition of compromise.



    So by your reasoning, the fact that I had this FEATURE in my phones for years was a compromise on the part of SE and Nokia? Yeah, that makes sense. NOT !!!!!!!!!!
  • Reply 46 of 125
    sapporobabysapporobaby Posts: 1,079member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by oberpongo View Post


    For all those of you who have and use a 3G phone with a 3G switch and live in a 3G coverage area please do the following experiment:

    Use the phone as 3G only a couple of weeks and then as a 2G only a couple of weeks. You will see 2-3x more standby and talk time as 2G only.

    This is true for my SonyEricsson Phones as well as for Nokia phones and will be ture for iPhone.

    Since i am very satisfied with the Speed of the EDGE Network i will probably leave my next Iphone v2 on 2G mode and will be happy to only have to charge it once a week instead of every second day my current iphone hangs in the charging cradle.



    And the problem with charging a phone is what exactly? If you are satisfied with the speed of an EDGE network, it would seem that the iPhone v1.0 is the phone of choice for you. Why would you bother with a considerably more advanced phone when 3 year old technology will do?
  • Reply 47 of 125
    sapporobabysapporobaby Posts: 1,079member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by icedtea1996 View Post


    hey addabox, or mr i chew on everything mr jobs hands me: they might well have opted to have a shittier chip in the phones for the same reasons they have opted to have 1 out of 3 displays manufactured for the macbook be of inferior quality, or ship loads of mac pros with the bluetooth cables set up wrong (and hope no one notices), or have everyones macbook plastic surface crumble after just over a year -- its cause they have to SAVE MONEY and keep the SHAREHOLDERS HAPPY. "oh the shittier chips would just cost 10 bucks less, what would they save" - with 5 million units sold they save 50million dollars. get a life, fanboy.



    A bit harsh there dude. Yes there are some here that hang on to every word Steve-o says but for the most part we are all in the dark regarding what Apple or anyone else is doing, that is of course a privileged few actually go to the weekly meetings and have first hand knowledge. While some here actually believe that Steve Jobs is their friend and designing products just for them, I prefer to see it as it is. Steve Jobs is only loyal to Mrs. Job, his kids, and the shareholders. If he could sell air and have us buy it, he would. Another point, I do not think everything Apple does is built around a conspiracy theory but I do know that certain markets are more gullible to what is fed to them than others.
  • Reply 48 of 125
    esxxiesxxi Posts: 75member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by icedtea1996 View Post


    hey addabox, or mr i chew on everything mr jobs hands me: they might well have opted to have a shittier chip in the phones for the same reasons they have opted to have 1 out of 3 displays manufactured for the macbook be of inferior quality, or ship loads of mac pros with the bluetooth cables set up wrong (and hope no one notices), or have everyones macbook plastic surface crumble after just over a year -- its cause they have to SAVE MONEY and keep the SHAREHOLDERS HAPPY. "oh the shittier chips would just cost 10 bucks less, what would they save" - with 5 million units sold they save 50million dollars. get a life, fanboy.



    Yes because not selling what they promised (first example), support calls and emails (second example) and replacing parts (third example) don't cost Apple anything at all! Silly points are very silly.
  • Reply 49 of 125
    nofeernofeer Posts: 2,427member
    i won't get 3g for years since in my little town, we didn't get evdo till everyone was bored and didn't have anything else to do.....last last last. so i won't need the switch, since you have said on other threads that if 3g not available it drops to 2 g.... is there something to gain for me to switch off 3g anyway??? does the phone seeking 3g take more power to a dedicated 3g off ??



    i'm not getting it for 3g (ok laugh at me) but since my area won't have it it doesn't matter, what i want are the new bells and whistles AND the 3rd party apps that hope hope hope has some

    FREAKIN' VOICE DIALING PPPLLLEEEASE!!!!!!



    its the 3rd party apps that really make iphone 2 rock
  • Reply 50 of 125
    sapporobabysapporobaby Posts: 1,079member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by NOFEER View Post


    i won't get 3g for years since in my little town, we didn't get evdo till everyone was bored and didn't have anything else to do.....last last last. so i won't need the switch, since you have said on other threads that if 3g not available it drops to 2 g.... is there something to gain for me to switch off 3g anyway??? does the phone seeking 3g take more power to a dedicated 3g off ??



    i'm not getting it for 3g (ok laugh at me) but since my area won't have it it doesn't matter, what i want are the new bells and whistles AND the 3rd party apps that hope hope hope has some

    FREAKIN' VOICE DIALING PPPLLLEEEASE!!!!!!



    its the 3rd party apps that really make iphone 2 rock



    Agreed. I jailbroke my iPhone and have some pretty good apps on it. You might want to get a 3G phone if you travel out of your area often.
  • Reply 51 of 125
    webfrassewebfrasse Posts: 147member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Somynona View Post


    Hey mlarkin, just go away... this is a rumour site not The Guardian newspaper.



    As to the switch for turning off 3G, that's a bummer, it appears they've compromised because an efficient enough chip wasn't forthcoming. Still, it's presumably better than having no 3G option at all, and it's still the mobile phone I've been waiting for for 10 or so years!



    I didn't buy version 1. Been waiting for the update. I've hated mobile phone design for the whole time they've existed... after June that won't be the case any more



    All this hype about 3G...



    I have a 3G phone (Samsung Black Jack II) and my wife have an iPhone. We both have AT&T as a provider and we live in the heart of Silicon Valley. Guess who's phone is usable when you want to browse something on the web...right. The iPhone is faster every time in practical usage. The only time I've seen some speed advantage on my 3G phone is when I need to download install a program (cab files). That has happened 3 times in the last year. The browser is useless, the screen is to small, the UI and navigation sucks. To add to that...you think I have 3G covarge all the time...think again. The network sucks too...but then again that's typical US. They are still worse on the cell networks coverage and reliability than what I had when I got my first GSM phone in Sweden back in the mid 90's!



    Also, 90% of our usage of the phones is spent in email and for that you don't need 3G



    /Mikael
  • Reply 52 of 125
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by esXXI View Post


    Yes because not selling what they promised (first example), support calls and emails (second example) and replacing parts (third example) don't cost Apple anything at all! Silly points are very silly.



    obviously it doesnt, because those were all examples that happened to me as well (which explains a little bit my frustration with blind fanboys). no one got a new macbook just because they realized that they have one of the shittier displays, costs for apple: 0. its yours truly that pays for support calls NOT apple, silly. so 0 again there and a little profit for apple. and have you heard of anyone getting their enclosure replaced because theyve used it so heavily that its got cracks because of the inferiority quality? yea sure, maybe if you get a couple thousand people together and file a lawsuit, but until then, still NO COSTS there for apple. but im sure theyd be happy to replace anything you dont like for a moderately priced fee.



    do your homework silly fanboy #2 before you play smartass.
  • Reply 53 of 125
    adjeiadjei Posts: 738member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by addabox View Post


    So if I'm following here, the contention of some posters is that Apple went out of their way to put a shitty, old tech chip in the iPhone for no reason whatsoever, since their claims about battery life and American 3G rollout are bogus.



    And this happened because all board level design decisions are made by Jobs, who likes to put out crappy products that he can market the hell out of to fools, just because he's such a dick and a charlatan. I would imagine his engineers came to him with the correct chip, but Jobs demanded they downgrade it.



    But that can't be it, because Apple doesn't have any competent engineers (they probably couldn't even figure out what was on the market, and just grabbed the first thing that came to hand), since random dudes on the internet can easily see how pointlessly stupid the iPhone design is.



    And these random dudes come by their expertise because they are phone owners.



    That about it?



    Well put, a bunch of random nobodies on an internet forum know more than the world class engineers and workers who are working at a corporation like Apple.
  • Reply 54 of 125
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by aegisdesign View Post


    Yes. The 8878 was shipping then, not just announced.



    It was announced in Feb 2006. http://www.infineon.com/cms/en/corpo...06/170186.html



    "Samples of the S-GOLD3H are available today. The reference design platform MP-EH is expected to be available in mid 2006 with the prospect for manufacturers of mid-range multimedia phones to ramp-up in summer 2007."



    Clearly Infineon were expecting shipping phones with it in in summer 2007 - around the time of the iPhone launch.



    Right but the iPhone according to rumours had been worked on for roughly 3 years. So this chipset wasn't around at the time they started working on. I suspect they wanted to release the iPhone earlier than when they did but even if they didn't it would have been a risk to base their design on a chip which would hopefully be ship in the summer 2007. Clearly until that ships to your factories in large enough quantities you cannot then begin making your phone in large quantities either.



    Simply put, the chipset wasn't ready in time.



    [QUOTE=aegisdesign;1250119]No. TI didn't get the OMAP3 chips out till just the start of this year and to be frank, Nokia already have the most advanced phones out there so it's not as though they desperately need the OMAP3 yet. On the other hand, 3G is important.



    No the chips started sampling last year and were ready for shipments early this year.



    Nokia phones are more advanced in some areas but in others they aren't. The iPhone has a faster CPU / GPU than any Nokia. It's got a 3.5inch large multitouch touchscreen. You can get an iPhone with 16GB of inbuilt flash RAM. The Apple iPhone hardware accelerates H264 where as a Nokia only hardware accelerates H263 (H264 is done by the CPU, hence the short movie playback times you get on a present Nokia if you use high quality video).



    It's not just that the iPhone uses a faster clocked ARM11 core to a Nokia. If you look at this you'll see how much faster the iPhone's processor is. Clearly it has a FPU unit which Nokia haven't included (Well TI as they make the CPU).



    iPhone FPU benchmark vs other phones



    Also it seems to me like Nokia are going backwards. The new N96 removes the 3D accelerator from their phones (Probably a good idea because it's wasting juice as their OS / UI doesn't make use of it) and also it downgrades the CPU from an ARM11 core of the OMAP2 to a ARM9 core in an ST chip.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by aegisdesign View Post


    The two board design is bulky and power hungry. I would suspect that Apple have spent the last year cost reducing the two board solution into more integrated SOCs and one board. That's what everyone else has been doing so that they can run more complex OSs on single chip cheap phones. That's what Symbian and Nokia spent most of 2004/5 doing, getting the OS capable of running on a single CPU that handles both the general CPU duties and the radio stack instead of two chips. IME it's taken them 3 years to get that working well and now they're being pushed by Apple on the UI front, which is great news for everybody.



    Yes that is a great feature in Symbian running as a true realtime OS so it can run the cell phone features off the main CPU. It cuts down on their BOM costs and power draw.



    Don't get me wrong, I'm not against Nokia. Just I think people bash the iPhone for a few missing features but miss the bigger picture in that the underlying hardware and OS is actually pretty good. Nokia's are very flexable and if they can ever get their interface close to Apple's then I cannot see Apple doing so well in the phone market. However Nokia seem to be like Microsoft in that they want to keep backwards compatibility and a similar UI which people know. This I feel is preventing them from moving forwards on the UI front. S60 has looked the same pretty much since it launched, it's in dire need of bringing up to date. Also some of the options are well hidden when they shouldn't be, it's not always logically located. So it needs a rethink of their settings and menu layout as well in some areas.



    I hope Apple keep doing well in the phone market just to keep the big players on their feet. I think before Apple came along they were just cruising happily along. They didn't need to put quite as much R&D in as they probably are putting in now. I'll look forward to seeing what Nokia puts out in a year or two, the Nokia Tube just isn't competition to the iPhone but a knee jerk reaction to get something out quick. Apple won't sit still either of course.
  • Reply 55 of 125
    constable odoconstable odo Posts: 1,041member
    The world's best kept secret that Apple was going to produce a 3G iPhone is finally revealed. Wow! Biggest scoop of the year.



    I doubt if there's some old tech chip in the 3G iPhone. I would think that if you shut down the chip completely it will save battery power. What's wrong with that. I really think there is too much speculation at this time. Why not wait until the device is introduced and put in use? The 3G iPhone won't be perfect but it will probably be much better than most other 3G smartphones on the market.
  • Reply 56 of 125
    tednditedndi Posts: 1,921member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by addabox View Post


    So if I'm following here, the contention of some posters is that Apple went out of their way to put a shitty, old tech chip in the iPhone for no reason whatsoever, since their claims about battery life and American 3G rollout are bogus.



    And this happened because all board level design decisions are made by Jobs, who likes to put out crappy products that he can market the hell out of to fools, just because he's such a dick and a charlatan. I would imagine his engineers came to him with the correct chip, but Jobs demanded they downgrade it.



    But that can't be it, because Apple doesn't have any competent engineers (they probably couldn't even figure out what was on the market, and just grabbed the first thing that came to hand), since random dudes on the internet can easily see how pointlessly stupid the iPhone design is.



    And these random dudes come by their expertise because they are phone owners.



    That about it?



    Thats about it in a nutshell.
  • Reply 57 of 125
    casper3casper3 Posts: 14member
    What does this data roaming mean?

    Does it mean that I can switch it off, so I can only connect to the Internet by WLAN, not EDGE/3G?

    That'd be so cool for us without an ulimited data plan. Is this it then?
  • Reply 58 of 125
    amoryaamorya Posts: 1,103member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by palegolas View Post


    Anyone with a 3G phone knows they run out of battery faster than a 2G phone just by talking.



    That's wrong, because on every 3G phone I've had, there has been a choice of whether to use 3G for both voice and data or just for data. I chose just data, and then it only activates the 3G transmitter when data was needed.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by webfrasse View Post


    ATo add to that...you think I have 3G covarge all the time...think again. The network sucks too...but then again that's typical US. They are still worse on the cell networks coverage and reliability than what I had when I got my first GSM phone in Sweden back in the mid 90's!



    I guess most of the complainers about no 3G are from countries with good 3G networks. The UK has 70% coverage.
  • Reply 59 of 125
    adamcadamc Posts: 583member
    For all the iPhone bashers, I don't know whether you realise your phones are never not connected to the web and it must be activated so your telcos can start charging you for data usage and download so cut the crap that your 3G phones last longer. If it is connected all the time, well, good for you, your telcos must be very happy with you because you are paying for data usage for nothing.
  • Reply 60 of 125
    probablyprobably Posts: 139member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by AdamC View Post


    For all the iPhone bashers, I don'ht know whether you realise your phones are never not connected to the web and it must be activated so your telcos can start charging you for data usage and download so cut the crap that your 3G phones last longer. If it is connected all the time, well, good for you, your telcos must be very happy wit you because you are paying for data usage for nothing.



    What are you talking about? Are there 3G data plans that aren't unlimited?
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