I had that happen on my iPhone 5 just recently. Really sucks. A little while later, it worked.
I have an iPhone 5 right now that I took over from my daughter because it’s slowly dying. The back-facing camera is dead, but I can do selfies… sometimes. I was going to try an Android when I upgrade, but now I have to give it some thought. I hate to make a switch and end up opting into something that’s … crappy. I have only had iPhones, since I started buying smart phones, unless you count the 1 week fiasco that was my first ever smartphone a Windows 6* something phone, back when Windows was still so utterly craptastic. It was the fucking Ballmer OS. I had a iPod touch and I touched it all the time and it was good, so I turned in my Windows phone and got an iPhone and I was very very pleased.
But now I have grown disappointed with Apple. It’s like ever since Steve Jobs died shit has gone to hell. We have four iPhones (all 5) in the house and only one of them is not having some sort of mechanical failure. Mine was one of the first to go with a weak battery and a button, but then there was a recall and I got it replaced, and now the camera is going. My son’s button is going. With one of our 5, the battery swelled up lifting the screen from its seat, leaving a little trail of light leaking out of the edge. I had never seen that happen before, but to their credit Apple replaced the whole phone for the price of a battery.
Is this sort of failure rate something that happens to others? Am I just being jaded? I thought maybe the Androids would be a little more solidly built. Looking into it last night, I see that Google rotates through manufactures, which is something I hadn’t even considered. How do you know you’re getting a well-built phone?
My first iPhone was a 3 and after I upgraded to the next iPhone, I sold my 3 on Craig’s list and got like $200. It sold only minutes after I listed it, which tells me I could have asked for more, but it seemed like an exorbitantly good deal for a piece of equipment as old as it was. I still have the first generation iPod touch that convinced me to go with an iPhone and shamed my Windows smartphone. The battery doesn’t’ hold a charge for very long, but otherwise it’s in fabulous shape. I think manufactures are building their phones to fail within a few years, which pisses me off. I like to decide to upgrade based on cool new features, not failure of the old system.
I strongly prefer Android myself, but it just doesn’t have the apps I use every day. There’s no tweetbot, marvin, or Reeder.
Obviously there are Android twitter clients, ereaders, and RSS readers-- they just suck donkey balls in comparison to the ridiculously mature, thoughtfully designed, polished iOS apps. The iOS apps are simply a pleasure to use.
Oddly, Chrome is worse on Android too-- it has pull to refresh, but not the pull then slide to the left or right functionality of iOS Chrome. I love that!
Yeah it is. From geekbench, https://browser.primatelabs.com/android-benchmarks but they have not updated to reflect the Snapdragon 820 devices which only became available in the last 4 months, which is bad, because those significantly close the CPU perf gap. Which is good!
Multi core perf promises are a lie; the idea that if you have 4 or 8 slow CPUs you will have a similar experience to a device with 2 fast cores is not true. Most (and in fact nearly all, outside of rare things like video encoding) tasks you’d do on a smartphone day to day are overwhelmingly dominated by single core perf. So slapping a bunch of slow cores on a die is essentially a marketing exercise to fool consumers into thinking “wow, if it has eight CPUs it must be really fast!”
Think of it this way, when you go get a haircut, even if there are eight barbers available, no individual haircut gets done any faster. And if two barbers cutting the same person’s hair at once sounds… complicated and error prone, that’s an accurate characterization of how complex multi-threaded programming is.
Yeah, I get the nerd rage, but that’s ignoring the fact that to most people this probably doesn’t really matter. It’s fast and slick enough on most modern devices. The talk about “devastation”, “sucking balls” or “embarrasingly awful” is tremendously hyperbolic.
Qualcomm had a tremendously bad 18 months. It’s funny how Android is “diverse” but everything basically uses the same Qualcomm hardware anyway. It’s like wintel all over again!
But in the real world, your phone’s is performing many tasks simultaneously at any given time. And if you only have, say, two cores, then they are being forced to swap between those tasks.
Numerous system level processes make having multiple cores useful. And beyond that, Android absolutely supported multithreaded apps.
While many apps are only single threaded, you know what one isn’t? Chrome. Chrome absolutely will use multiple cores, and it’s probably the app you use most on a phone.
Nah, this is the “but I am running WinAmp and the browser, so I need dual CPUs!” school of thought. Modern CPUs are so fast that even what you, as a user, might consider multitasking is barely making even a single CPU break a sweat.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9518/the-mobile-cpu-corecount-debate
In the end, what matters is actual perf, and multi-core beyond two cores doesn’t result in any performance benefit to the average smartphone user outside of very specific scenarios (video encoding) that are particularly suited to the model.
That’s why Apple dominates every benchmark with “only” two cores in the iPhone. Two very, very fast cores.
If you could slap 8 super fast cores on a die, there’s no downside per se, but the problem is this number is too often used to mindlessly justify worse performance. “These 8 cores may be slow, but so many of them!”
I’m not sure why the OP says that Android phones suck in 2016 and then he doesn’t appear to actually have any phones from 2016 in his chart! Where is the Galaxy S7, HTC 10, Nexus 6P, or the One Plus 3?
Unfortunately my wife feels that she needs an iPhone rather than an Android phone. A few years ago we bought the 16GB iPhone 5c and it cost about $750 unlocked. When I think that these days you could get any Android flagship phone for that price (or less) it makes me very sad to think of the money we wasted on a middling phone like the 5c.
So why would I care about performance differences then?
The primate labs Android entry definitely needs to be updated, for sure. But to be clear, Snapdragon 820 devices have only been available to purchase by consumers for four months. So if you have any android device other than one you literally purchased in the last 4 months, which also happens to be snapdragon 820 based, it’s gonna underperform a lot relative to the same amount of money spent on an iPhone.
I’m happy they are closing the perf gap finally, as of the last 4 months. I’ll probably buy the new Nexus based on Snapdragon 821 myself when it’s available in a few months. I have my mom all set up on Nexus devices (currently Nexus 5 and Nexus 9) and I need to refresh her phone.
This is silly.
At any given time, no matter what you are doing, you’re phone is going to be running multiple threads, which is going to mean you will get a benefit from multiple cores, unless you are trivially loading the processor, in which case it doesn’t matter anyway.
But even from the anandtech article you just posted, it supports exactly what i said:
When I started out this piece the goals I set out to reach was to either confirm or debunk on how useful homogeneous 8-core designs would be in the real world. The fact that Chrome and to a lesser extent Samsung’s stock browser were able to consistently load up to 6-8 concurrent processes while loading a page suddenly gives a lot of credence to these 8-core designs that we would have otherwise not thought of being able to fully use their designed CPU configurations. In terms of pure computational load, web-page rendering remains as one of the heaviest tasks on a smartphone so it’s very encouraging to see that today’s web rendering engines are able to make good use of parallelization to spread the load between the available CPU cores.
The idea that Android doesn’t make heavy use of multiple cores is simply incorrect.
I’ll back this up. My job involves digging through a lot of Android operating system code, too. It’s almost pathologically asynchronous/multi-threaded. Not to mention that Android multitasking allows apps to run arbitrary code when fully backgrounded, unlike iOS (the last time I checked; things could have changed), so for a random set of apps, more cores means less trouble with scheduling background work in between important bits in the foreground, which translates directly to more responsiveness.
Oh, it makes some desultory use of them, but like most PC apps, there is barely any benefit in performance beyond two cores, except in very specific niche activities. If this magical “spread 6 cores on it and it’ll go way fast, dudes” religion had any basis in fact, 4/8 core Android devices would be creaming the 2-core iPhone in benchmarks all over the place.
What is happening, in fact, is quite the opposite of that – a mere two core device, the iPhone 6s, crushes Android in every single benchmark there is.
I am very glad the snapdragon 820 finally catches the Android world up to something approximating iOS performance, though. 2015 was truly dire on the android perf front.
Luckily, Android hasn’t been crappy in years and years. It does things differently than iOS (though not as much so as 6 years ago, as both OSes have copied each other left and right since then), and individual apps are different between the two, sometimes to the detriment of one or the other, but it’s in no way crappy. The single biggest disadvantage I’m aware of still being around is that a lot of big, complicated games still tend to be iOS exclusive, at least at first. On the flipside, Android still has some app categories and behaviors of its own that are more or less unique.
Well, first, anyone is allowed to build an Android phone or tablet, and aside from a few shady Chinese manufacturers dumping stock at Big Lots, most of them pay the nominal license fee to get full access to the suite of Google apps that make Android particularly awesome. So, in that instance, it’s more of a wide hardware ecosystem than iOS. HTC, Samsung, LG, etc. tend to consistently produce good top-end phones, a few specialized niche devices, and then a raft of fair-to-bad low-end devices whose prices should make it clear you’re getting less.
Particularly because of the “everyone uses Snapdragon processors” issue wumpus complains about here, major performance differences between contemporary flagships are rare.
That said, some manufacturers do have their own special features (Samsung tends to be very feature heavy with lots of gimmicks, in particular), while the Nexus phones that companies produce specifically for Android promise the advantage of pure, clean Android unmuddled by anyone else’s cruft and receiving updates as fast as possible.
This, and Hangouts being worse on Android, confuse me utterly. wtf, Google??
Man, it astonishes me that this is true for people. The browser paradigm blows on phones, and the more that I use Discourse (the first “web app” that’s not just a site wrappered up in an app that Ive heavily used), the more I am convinced of that. You lose access to so many useful OS features and bells and whistles when you’re locked in a browser window, it seems, and the interaction is much less useful/rich, IMO. I hate when I have to open something in my browser on my phone.
It’s better than needing to have an app for every single different thing in my opinion.
What does pull and slide do on Chrome on iOS, by the way?
You pull straight down to refresh, same as on Android.
Difference is that after pulling down, you can then slide your finger to the left or right. Left opens a new tab and right closes the current tab. Saves a ton of time.
It accidentally causes you to close pages when you refresh. So annoying!
Another iOS thing inexplicably missing from Android: tap the top bar to jump to top. If you are scrolled way down in anything, you get to the top by… wait for it… manually scrolling alllll the way back up :(
My main beef has been performance, which is more the CPU and hardware than anything else. Android itself has been pretty nice as of Android 5 though, they’ve made great strides in usability.
I believe this is because apple actually patented that mechanism, which makes adding it to Android problematic at best for Google.
However, you can install the Xposed framework, and there is a module for it if you like.