First of all a 3G chipset in a Nokia / SE, etc phone can generally have the same standby time on 2G as on 3G but take a look at the talk times between the 2. Anytime the 3G radio is active the power draw is higher than on 2G.
Now Steve Jobs never said he was waiting for a 3G chipset which had the same in use power draw as a 2G chipset. That's just simply not possible right now. More data per second = more power draw per second.
What Steve was waiting for was a single chip 3G / 2G solution. Last year you'd need to have a 2G and 3G chip. That adds to the BOM cost, increases the amount of PCB space your using and lowers battery life more than having a single chip. Now they have a single chip solution and its probably also on a lower micron than chips a year ago.
The power draw for 3G hence will still be more than 2G but it'll be less than the draw that a 3G chipset last year would have needed. If they add a slightly bigger battery they might well be able to hit the same useage times on 3G as the present iPhone gets on 2G. Still if you've no 3G around you or don't browse much you could turn off 3G and get even longer usage time than the original iPhone.
Surely this would fit with the rumours that its a little thicker. Hopefully to include a larger battery so 3G doesn't seem like its taking a huge hit on useage time.
Obviously it is a big deal as it warranted being mentioned. In the Nokia and SE marketing, the ability to toggle on and off 3G is viewed as a major event. Too bad it has been a feature for years.
The point of the article, and the discussion going on in this thread, as I see it is not primarily about the new "feature" in itself being a "big deal", but rather the fact that this is yet another proof of the impending release of the 3G iPhone, which makes the 3G on/off switch a perfectly valid topic for discussion on a site like this.
The feature is new to the iPhone, but I see no one claiming it to be a new invention or something unique when compared to other phones.
I'm sure Apple tried 3G chips in the first version and had a good idea of what the battery life would be like with the chips available at the time. Something that we will never know for sure. The wireless chips Apple use in V.1 aren't ancient at all, they were new at the time, just did not include 3G.
That isn't true. iPhone v1 uses the Infineon PMB8876, which dates back to 2004. Ancient in mobile phone tech terms. It's also a poor choice for the iPhone in that it duplicates features that are elsewhere in the phone. But, as many people who looked at the iPhone design back then who know about board design pointed out, most of the chips used are off the shelf general purpose chips and not highly integrated SOCs.
Quote:
Originally Posted by TenoBell
The 3G chip available now certainly is not the same as was available last year. We're still pretty light on details to know the full story at this point.
Their 3G chip, the PMB8878 was released mid 2007, just as the iPhone was being launched. It's pretty much confirmed that that is the next chip in the iPhone since the GOLD3 details have been found in the iPhone firmware already so the iPhone v2 chip will be a chip available a year ago.
There's another reason that Apple probably waited. Take a look at the Nokia N95 for instance. The first released versions only had 3G on 2100Mhz. That's great for pretty much the whole world but useless for North America. So Nokia had to release a North American version of the N95 with 3G bands which are useful for North America. But in doing so, that model loses the 2100Mhz band and now cannot use 3G in the rest of the world.
I'm pretty sure Apple don't have to have to make 1 model of iPhone for America and another for the rest of the world. They want to be able to make just a single model which will work with all the 3G systems where they plan to sell the phone.
So I expect the 3G iPhone to support at least 2 but probably more 3G bands. This is something which Nokia and SE don't do yet, only a few Windows Mobile devices are multichannel 3G.
Their 3G chip, the PMB8878 was released mid 2007, just as the iPhone was being launched. It's pretty much confirmed that that is the next chip in the iPhone since the GOLD3 details have been found in the iPhone firmware already so the iPhone v2 chip will be a chip available a year ago.
You do realise that there is a time to market between announcing a chip and having it available for sale?
Take the OMAP3 processor. Nokia at present use the OMAP2 in their higher end phones. The OMAP3 was announced in Feb 2006 yet we still haven't seen any phones with this chipset in it. The chip has been ready to be used for a long time yet we still cannot get a phone with it.
Simple point is that it takes a long time to develop a phone. You pick what your going to include when you start to design it. That could be a year to say a year and a half before the phone is available. So when Apple started working on the iPhone 2, the SGOLD3 had just been announced.
Wait, wait, wait. Are you saying Apple has an exclusive super secret chip maker that Motorola, Nokia, SE, Samsung are not privy to? The same 3G chips on the market that the big guys use are the same chips offered to Apple. There may have been some revisions but for the most part they are the same chips. Aegis his the nail on the head. Apple talked their way out of 3G in the iPhone so that they could sell a "new one" a year later. Apple clearly knows its market.
Just a side point, but Nokia design their own chips. They rarely use off the shelf components.
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.
"The latest discovery suggests that [battery life] may fall short of rivaling the "up to 6 hours" of Internet use advertised alongside the existing models."
This is what I dislike about you people who report this stuff.
You make this supposition up, clearly out of the blue. Where did you see evidence that this 'may fall short' of existing models? Have you seen the specs of the new device?
Anything else you want just make up?
Knock off the BS ... you sound like the asshats at Infinite Loop.
Good catch. AI usually doesn't start rumors from their news page. They usually just report the news. If you hadn't said anything I wouldn't have noticed it.
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.
I agree. I doubt i'll turn on my 3G for anything other than internet when wifi is inaccessible.
What I really wonder about is if the WiFi music store will be WiFi/3G music store on the new phones.
There's another reason that Apple probably waited. Take a look at the Nokia N95 for instance. The first released versions only had 3G on 2100Mhz. That's great for pretty much the whole world but useless for North America. So Nokia had to release a North American version of the N95 with 3G bands which are useful for North America. But in doing so, that model loses the 2100Mhz band and now cannot use 3G in the rest of the world.
I'm pretty sure Apple don't have to have to make 1 model of iPhone for America and another for the rest of the world. They want to be able to make just a single model which will work with all the 3G systems where they plan to sell the phone.
So I expect the 3G iPhone to support at least 2 but probably more 3G bands. This is something which Nokia and SE don't do yet, only a few Windows Mobile devices are multichannel 3G.
Several Nokia phones support 850 and 2100 in 3G, I've owned one since last year. Apple will definitely support 850 and 2100, since they cover most of the world. After that it gets murky. They could do 1500 for Japan too (some carrier(s) use 2100 in Japan though), or 1900 which AT&T also uses for 3G. There's about 6 or 7 official 3G frequencies with more being added, namely 700Mhz in the US and 900Mhz in Europe and elsewhere. T-Mobile uses a whacky 2100/1700 which you could safely assume will not be supported.
My guess: they will support 850/2100 since it gives you the most bang for the buck while minimising space usage and design complexity. If they add another one I'd say it's 1900 to maximise coverage in the US.
It is not a compromise. Real phone manufactures have had this FEATURE for years but now suddenly because it is Apple doing it now it's a big deal. Reason being, there was a time (still is in the US) when 3G networks were no everywhere and there was no need for the phone to drain power searching for a 3G network where none existed.
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 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.
"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.
Quote:
Originally Posted by FastLaneJB
Take the OMAP3 processor. Nokia at present use the OMAP2 in their higher end phones. The OMAP3 was announced in Feb 2006 yet we still haven't seen any phones with this chipset in it. The chip has been ready to be used for a long time yet we still cannot get a phone with it.
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.
Quote:
Originally Posted by FastLaneJB
Simple point is that it takes a long time to develop a phone. You pick what your going to include when you start to design it. That could be a year to say a year and a half before the phone is available. So when Apple started working on the iPhone 2, the SGOLD3 had just been announced.
The SGOLD3 had been announced 18 months before release and presumably Apple knew about it already if they were talking to Infineon beforehand on the SGOLD2. If you look at the board design on the iPhone, they've two boards, one of which is a 'comms board' and the other is what you'd perhaps call the 'logic board'. It's pretty clear they've designed it in such a way that the comms board is a module that can be switched out for a different board. I would bet good money that they did an SGOLD3 board a year ago at least but for whatever reason they decided against it until some other savings could be made in space or power. They jettisoned features to get inside their power budget most probably.
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.
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.
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?
Yeah that's about it, although not so much "random dudes" as probably "random kids."
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.
Comments
Wait, wait, wait. Are you saying Apple has an exclusive super secret chip maker that Motorola, Nokia, SE, Samsung are not privy to? .
How did you get that out of what I said?
At the same time no wireless chips are not all the same.
Now Steve Jobs never said he was waiting for a 3G chipset which had the same in use power draw as a 2G chipset. That's just simply not possible right now. More data per second = more power draw per second.
What Steve was waiting for was a single chip 3G / 2G solution. Last year you'd need to have a 2G and 3G chip. That adds to the BOM cost, increases the amount of PCB space your using and lowers battery life more than having a single chip. Now they have a single chip solution and its probably also on a lower micron than chips a year ago.
The power draw for 3G hence will still be more than 2G but it'll be less than the draw that a 3G chipset last year would have needed. If they add a slightly bigger battery they might well be able to hit the same useage times on 3G as the present iPhone gets on 2G. Still if you've no 3G around you or don't browse much you could turn off 3G and get even longer usage time than the original iPhone.
Surely this would fit with the rumours that its a little thicker. Hopefully to include a larger battery so 3G doesn't seem like its taking a huge hit on useage time.
Obviously it is a big deal as it warranted being mentioned. In the Nokia and SE marketing, the ability to toggle on and off 3G is viewed as a major event. Too bad it has been a feature for years.
The point of the article, and the discussion going on in this thread, as I see it is not primarily about the new "feature" in itself being a "big deal", but rather the fact that this is yet another proof of the impending release of the 3G iPhone, which makes the 3G on/off switch a perfectly valid topic for discussion on a site like this.
The feature is new to the iPhone, but I see no one claiming it to be a new invention or something unique when compared to other phones.
I'm sure Apple tried 3G chips in the first version and had a good idea of what the battery life would be like with the chips available at the time. Something that we will never know for sure. The wireless chips Apple use in V.1 aren't ancient at all, they were new at the time, just did not include 3G.
That isn't true. iPhone v1 uses the Infineon PMB8876, which dates back to 2004. Ancient in mobile phone tech terms. It's also a poor choice for the iPhone in that it duplicates features that are elsewhere in the phone. But, as many people who looked at the iPhone design back then who know about board design pointed out, most of the chips used are off the shelf general purpose chips and not highly integrated SOCs.
The 3G chip available now certainly is not the same as was available last year. We're still pretty light on details to know the full story at this point.
Their 3G chip, the PMB8878 was released mid 2007, just as the iPhone was being launched. It's pretty much confirmed that that is the next chip in the iPhone since the GOLD3 details have been found in the iPhone firmware already so the iPhone v2 chip will be a chip available a year ago.
I'm pretty sure Apple don't have to have to make 1 model of iPhone for America and another for the rest of the world. They want to be able to make just a single model which will work with all the 3G systems where they plan to sell the phone.
So I expect the 3G iPhone to support at least 2 but probably more 3G bands. This is something which Nokia and SE don't do yet, only a few Windows Mobile devices are multichannel 3G.
Their 3G chip, the PMB8878 was released mid 2007, just as the iPhone was being launched. It's pretty much confirmed that that is the next chip in the iPhone since the GOLD3 details have been found in the iPhone firmware already so the iPhone v2 chip will be a chip available a year ago.
You do realise that there is a time to market between announcing a chip and having it available for sale?
Take the OMAP3 processor. Nokia at present use the OMAP2 in their higher end phones. The OMAP3 was announced in Feb 2006 yet we still haven't seen any phones with this chipset in it. The chip has been ready to be used for a long time yet we still cannot get a phone with it.
Simple point is that it takes a long time to develop a phone. You pick what your going to include when you start to design it. That could be a year to say a year and a half before the phone is available. So when Apple started working on the iPhone 2, the SGOLD3 had just been announced.
Wait, wait, wait. Are you saying Apple has an exclusive super secret chip maker that Motorola, Nokia, SE, Samsung are not privy to? The same 3G chips on the market that the big guys use are the same chips offered to Apple. There may have been some revisions but for the most part they are the same chips. Aegis his the nail on the head. Apple talked their way out of 3G in the iPhone so that they could sell a "new one" a year later. Apple clearly knows its market.
Just a side point, but Nokia design their own chips. They rarely use off the shelf components.
I bet most people won't have to worry check out at&t's coverage map for 3G it's pretty bad
It looks pretty awesome to me. Most of my whole map is covered in Blue.
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.
"The latest discovery suggests that [battery life] may fall short of rivaling the "up to 6 hours" of Internet use advertised alongside the existing models."
This is what I dislike about you people who report this stuff.
You make this supposition up, clearly out of the blue. Where did you see evidence that this 'may fall short' of existing models? Have you seen the specs of the new device?
Anything else you want just make up?
Knock off the BS ... you sound like the asshats at Infinite Loop.
Good catch. AI usually doesn't start rumors from their news page. They usually just report the news. If you hadn't said anything I wouldn't have noticed it.
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.
I agree. I doubt i'll turn on my 3G for anything other than internet when wifi is inaccessible.
What I really wonder about is if the WiFi music store will be WiFi/3G music store on the new phones.
Just a side point, but Nokia design their own chips. They rarely use off the shelf components.
Nope, not anymore they don't: http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.j...leID=201311325
There's another reason that Apple probably waited. Take a look at the Nokia N95 for instance. The first released versions only had 3G on 2100Mhz. That's great for pretty much the whole world but useless for North America. So Nokia had to release a North American version of the N95 with 3G bands which are useful for North America. But in doing so, that model loses the 2100Mhz band and now cannot use 3G in the rest of the world.
I'm pretty sure Apple don't have to have to make 1 model of iPhone for America and another for the rest of the world. They want to be able to make just a single model which will work with all the 3G systems where they plan to sell the phone.
So I expect the 3G iPhone to support at least 2 but probably more 3G bands. This is something which Nokia and SE don't do yet, only a few Windows Mobile devices are multichannel 3G.
Several Nokia phones support 850 and 2100 in 3G, I've owned one since last year. Apple will definitely support 850 and 2100, since they cover most of the world. After that it gets murky. They could do 1500 for Japan too (some carrier(s) use 2100 in Japan though), or 1900 which AT&T also uses for 3G. There's about 6 or 7 official 3G frequencies with more being added, namely 700Mhz in the US and 900Mhz in Europe and elsewhere. T-Mobile uses a whacky 2100/1700 which you could safely assume will not be supported.
My guess: they will support 850/2100 since it gives you the most bang for the buck while minimising space usage and design complexity. If they add another one I'd say it's 1900 to maximise coverage in the US.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMTS#Spectrum_allocation
It is not a compromise. Real phone manufactures have had this FEATURE for years but now suddenly because it is Apple doing it now it's a big deal. Reason being, there was a time (still is in the US) when 3G networks were no everywhere and there was no need for the phone to drain power searching for a 3G network where none existed.
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.
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?
You do realise that there is a time to market between announcing a chip and having it available for sale?
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.
Take the OMAP3 processor. Nokia at present use the OMAP2 in their higher end phones. The OMAP3 was announced in Feb 2006 yet we still haven't seen any phones with this chipset in it. The chip has been ready to be used for a long time yet we still cannot get a phone with it.
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.
Simple point is that it takes a long time to develop a phone. You pick what your going to include when you start to design it. That could be a year to say a year and a half before the phone is available. So when Apple started working on the iPhone 2, the SGOLD3 had just been announced.
The SGOLD3 had been announced 18 months before release and presumably Apple knew about it already if they were talking to Infineon beforehand on the SGOLD2. If you look at the board design on the iPhone, they've two boards, one of which is a 'comms board' and the other is what you'd perhaps call the 'logic board'. It's pretty clear they've designed it in such a way that the comms board is a module that can be switched out for a different board. I would bet good money that they did an SGOLD3 board a year ago at least but for whatever reason they decided against it until some other savings could be made in space or power. They jettisoned features to get inside their power budget most probably.
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.
Nope, not anymore they don't: http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.j...leID=201311325
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.
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?
Yeah that's about it, although not so much "random dudes" as probably "random kids."
Yeah that's about it, although not so much "random dudes" as probably "random kids."
Yep. With the same random reasoning.