Nope, but if by gesture typing you mean swiping around, then the best iOS 3rd party keyboard (GBoard) has it.
* Tei uses the ‘companies don’t drive the market, the market drive companies’ card*
I think Qualcomm just follow the flow like a dead fish.
Androids are a race to the bottom. Apple are the Illuminati and all the money they get they use to build a UFO to flight to their home planet.
In this environment we can’t really expect a CPU race. No if CPU improvements in the apple area don’t make the android users jealous.
Maybe a killer app would change all of this. But the smartphone market seems too mature for a killer app this late. One that absolutelly required more cpu from phones, or had a fat benefict from more cpu (maybe something to do with face recognition?).
You realize this puts you squarely outside of the masses? Many do not want this at all. They just want to call and text people, pull up something on a map, and be able to use facebook. The use of an actual keyboard is actually a declining skill and the use of keyboards as a whole is shrinking at an incredible rate. You should be more inclined to understand voice as the new method of mobile communication.
Presumably that’s phsyical keyboards on handsets. That doesn’t really say a whole lot about how people actually use the virtual keyboards on their devices, or the physical keyboards not on their devices.
My understanding is that Qualcomm dominates the android landscape because they had the first and best soft modem, which saves a ton of money over hardware modems which have to be customized for each carrier. They leveraged that advantage to sign favorable contracts with pretty much every phone manufacturer, and that’s where they stand today. That’s why intel was unable to penetrate the market a couple years ago, even with its immense bankroll and actually quite excellent hardware. Qualcomm just froze them out.
Very true, but it should also note that whole trend was started with Apple and the iPhone. It doesn’t matter though, as people get used to not having a physical keyboard, the use of things without a keyboard becomes more of a defining design principle as the platform goes on. I can’t think of much beyond texting/emailing that I would really need a keyboard for these days on my smartphone. And even with that, pressing the mic button and just voicing it in has gotten a hell of a lot better as time goes by.
It’s well-known that the only people who deeply care about mobile single-threaded performance are those whose core products are built on bloated, top-heavy JavaScript libraries.
I can’t stop laughing while looking at that picture.
This happened:
The desktop was a horrible place to develop software.
At the same time this happened:
The Internet.
Then the classic swing of software had a swing in the direction of “software place is the server and everybody access it from dumb terminals”.
This resulted in a lot of good and bad developers trained in the internet, with internet technologies.
Software developers are a more valuable resource than hardware. You want to give enough hardware to these minds. Not the other way around.
So yea, is to run our bloated single thread javascript threads. But trust us, its worth it.
But everything that is good for this lame use, will be good for native developers too.
Maybe we don’t know it, but what we really want is videocalls where we each frame are painted like Picasso. More hardware unlocks new uses that you don’t know you need.
We will be still with 640KB computers if we would not hype the hardware cycle.
I cant tell you why more CPU is necessary, because the cool things that will use it are not invented yet.
I mean, do I really have to make this argument in a gamers forum?
[quote=“wumpus, post:29, topic:129747”]
This is moronic. You are arguing that AMD / Samsung could have been competitive wth Intel / Apple on IPC, if they really wanted to, but decided no, fuck that, let’s just make MOAR CORES instead.[/quote]
Why is that moronic? It’s exactly how this works. A few years ago a team at ARM was told to design a CPU core to be shipped in 2017. They were told to target X transistors and a Y watt power usage, based on what the big cheeses assumed the market would want today. If that team had been told to make cores twice as large, of course they would have come up with a different design with a higher IPC.
Why doesn’t Intel just make larger cores for even more single-thread performance? Because they’re well past the point of diminishing returns on a micro-architectural changes. Commodity ARM cores definitely haven’t hit that point yet.
I’m not saying that the silicon budget is destiny. Obviously even a good team might come up with a bad design (e.g. Pentium 4). But that’s not the case here. The A73 is a fine core for its size. There’s no reason to believe that they couldn’t have successfully designed a larger one too. As hard as it is for you to believe this, they just chose not to design a larger, faster and more expensive core.
Anyways, as @Thraeg himself noted, and I agree, this is not an “Android vs. iOS” topic, and I don’t want it to degenerate to that. They are broadly similar and both have pros and cons.
This is an Android vs. Qualcomm topic. Give us hardware choice, and give it to us now, you assholes.
And that’s a massive monoculture / monopoly problem, considering the scale of the mobile market (every man woman and child on the planet) and Android’s huge percentage of that.
I mean when people buy Apple, they know they are getting a “one love, one company, one design” product. What people don’t seem to realize is that when they buy Android they are also getting that on the hardware SoC level, whether they like it or not. WinTel, meet AndComm.
The only difference is, Intel was actually good at their job, e.g. they made amazing CPUs, consistent big generational speed improvements consistent with Moore’s Law, with only a minor Pentium 4 blip to mar their entire historical record.
Correct, Intel is where the mobile world will be in 2027. I absolutely understand there is a point of saturation, but Apple has proven, time and time again over the last 8 years, that we’re nowhere near there yet. Don’t make me drag out the Apple performance graph per iPhone generation again.
Who knows, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the A11 in the iPhone 8 will be a shitty 10-15% improvement in performance like the latest Snapdragon 835.
… but I doubt it.
Well I’m all for increased performance! Bring it on! With that said, I’m very happy with what I’ve got now. I’m at the point where battery life is far more important than having a speedy phone. If I have have both then great. If not then I’ll go with the CPU that lets me have a phone that lasts all day long.
I was wrong about the media controls controls in other apps – it didn’t work when I tested it, but after further testing I’m willing to blame that on the bulky case mandated by work than on the OS itself. But I’ll point out that 1) those controls are still up to 3 swipes away rather than always 1, and 2) it’s a bespoke solution for the specific use case of playing audio, and does nothing for the general case of wanting to take an action directly from a notification without fully going into the app (preemptively dismissing an upcoming alarm, adding a recent call to a to-do list, etc.)
And yes, @Ephraim, I’m aware that I’m permitted to position four whole apps where I want them. I’d just rather have it for more than that. MRU is great for what it is, but I like the muscle-memory of being able to hit the home button and then tap a specific spot without needing to take time to look at which app is where in the MRU list.
And I do in fact use Gboard on both platforms, and the iOS version is a pale shadow of the Android version, missing a ton of customization features, like the number row and the symbols overloaded onto every key as a long-press option. Not to mention that at random intervals the keyboard randomly reverts to the stock Apple one, and I waste time trying to gesture-type a few words before realizing what happened and change it back. As I mentioned, I did care enough to look for one that did what I wanted, but came up empty. Not sure how much of that is that it’s a new feature or if there are certain customizations that just aren’t permitted for keyboard apps, but I suspect the latter given that Gboard has nothing close to feature parity across its versions.
But again, focusing on whether you share the specific niggles that have annoyed me is missing the point. I don’t hate iOS – it’s a perfectly capable OS for the most part, and there are a few things I think it does better than Android (fast security updates, quick camera in Hangouts rather than having to hand back and forth with the full camera app, and yes, processor speed). I’m sure I’d be mostly satisfied with it if there weren’t a better option available. The things I mentioned are irritating nitpicks rather than awful dealbreakers. My point is that the processor performance delta is ALSO just an irritating nitpick in real-world usage. The actual time savings is small enough that almost ANY point of friction or annoyance that you happen to encounter wipes out the time saved by the faster processor, so it’s perfectly rational to weight those friction points just as heavily as the processor speed in the decision.
Basically, we should have stopped making faster computers in 2005. That was “good enough”.
And for the record, I wouldn’t be complaining if the difference was like a measly 25% instead of 100%, 200% or even more. There was a time from 2008 to 2013 that Qualcomm’s crap was competitive with Apple. But 2014 and onward, there’s just this vast, gaping performance abyss that keeps yawning ever wider.
BTW this is usually good news – the idea that a smartphone you bought 3 years ago is 3x slower than the one you bought today means we’re back in the glory days of massively increasing yearly performance you may remember from, oh, 1984 - 2010 or so on the PC side.
This is systemic, it’s been going on for almost 5 years now, and it’s almost exclusively Qualcomm. Show me where you can buy the alternative to Qualcomm hardware on Android?
A computer from 2005 is very much “good enough” for the majority of computer users. Obviously there are those (like gamers) who demand more. I guess what everybody here is trying to tell you is that current Android performance is good enough for the vast majority of smartphone users. I have a BLU R1 HD that I paid a whopping $50 for unlocked and performance wise it does everything I want it to do even though it’s woefully outdated even compared to current Android phones.
What am I supposed to be wanting that would compel me to spend a preposterous amount of money on a new iPhone or iPad? One thing I’ve learned over the last few years is that the kind of gaming that is actually enjoyable on tablets and smartphones is the kind of gaming that does not require a tremendous amount of processing power.
If for some reason I want a device I can use in bed to play more involved games, I will be taking that $700 and I will be buying a Windows laptop so that I can actually run my catalog. I just do not see a scenario where it would make sense for me to buy an iPad or iPhone.
Right, because there’s no middle ground between “fuck processor performance” and “oh god I want to fuck my phone’s processor performance”.
I’ll tell you what – I’ll make you a deal. If Qualcomm’s board of directors calls me up tomorrow and makes me the CEO, I’ll totally put them to work on faster single-core performance. But in the meantime, the next time I buy a phone it will be one among dozens of criteria, and nowhere near the most important of them.
This thread has a few good points mixed in with the hyperbole, and this is a reasonable summary in my opinion.
Once in awhile Wumpus is right, like when my kids are doing something worth a snapshot… but I already have Google maps open and music playing and a bunch of chrome tabs, and my phone decides to stop at the toilet for a crap before giving me the option of taking a picture.
Three quarters of the time it’s fine however.
The reason to believe that they’re very near that limit is that they’re now making cores that are almost as large as those in Skylake, and getting scalar integer performance similar to a Skylake Core M.
Apple do have the benefit of designing a mobile/tablet CPU. while Intel is using a single design to cover a much larger range of power usage and frequency. So they’re not going to be perfectly optimized for this use case. But even so, if there’s still a huge amount of slack for Apple to pick up, there should have been for Intel too. If you believe that the A11 will give a 40% single core performance boost, I think you also have to believe that Apple has some magic tech.
And I bet every single one of those will be Qualcomm hardware. Therein lies the problem with your dozens of criteria. I hope you like crap!
Look at history to be your guide for future performance speculation. That is why I groan when I see early Qualcomm perf articles on the web, because I know it is going to suck. And that is why I still get excited – like the heady days of Intel in 2002 – when I see early iOS hardware perf articles on the web.
I am very, very eager to see A11 perf results later this year. If they are near the limit, that is when we will find out. My money is on “no”.