Technology Android

[masta247]

^I guess TRIM in 4.3 might be responsible for increased performance.


On an unrelated side note, ARM is kinda in a shitty situation:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7126/the-arm-diaries-part-2-understanding-the-cortex-a12/4

They are jumping ship from the A15/A7 idea and just came up with a new, A12 core. The bummer is, that it's just an updated A9 core (40% faster) and devices running those chips are supposed to hit the market by the end of 2014/early 2015. A9 was a 2009 core though and nobody uses that anymore, as they're just way too slow already.
The change comes a little late, considering how Qualcomm's Krait 300 is better than that now. A very interesting situation though. The new A57 cores which were supposed to replace A15 next year will be mostly reserved for servers, as A15 seems like a missed idea for mobiles because of high power drain already.
I guess ARM kinda went wrong way, hoping to take a part of the PC market by coming up with A15, and not having a balanced successor to the A9. Qualcomm didn't help by having just the perfect core like that - Krait, which was also ahead of its time and offered bigger performance jump than anyone expected. It was so big that it's already as good as ARM wants to be in 2 years from now.
Since Qualcomm basically build their own cores taking what they need from ARM's designs, and ARM are getting so slow now, I guess I was right saying the mobile performance race is going to slow down soon. That is unless Intel becomes a serious contender. There's that perfect opportunity for them now that ARM is out of innovations for a while.

 

[dilla]

There was a rumor that Apple was planning to shift away from Intel and go to ARM. I think this between 1-2 years ago. Not much materialized after that, so I'm guessing that rumor was just that.

This TRIM thing seems really neat. I always wondered what was going to become of those remnant files on flash memory. Have they completely remedied the problem or is it just a really good temporary fix?

While I wouldn't really listen to music from the speakers too much, if I were to be doing a video call, which I do do frequently on Hangouts or even Skype sometimes, I want it to sound a bit better than it does on my phone.

Alhough, if I'm home alone, it could be like my little boombox as I'm walking around doing shit.

The 7.2 doesn't come with that flip out stand thingy, does it? That would be so awesome. I would need to buy one of those as well because using it on my lap can be a bitch sometimes, and for video calls, I would hate to be holding it for over an hour.

 

[Pittsey]

So.....

I still hangout with the same friends from when I was 5 years old. They all have iphones. I was getting abuse for my android phone at a BBQ, yesterday. Dicks.

 

[masta247]

There was a rumor that Apple was planning to shift away from Intel and go to ARM. I think this between 1-2 years ago. Not much materialized after that, so I'm guessing that rumor was just that.

This TRIM thing seems really neat. I always wondered what was going to become of those remnant files on flash memory. Have they completely remedied the problem or is it just a really good temporary fix?

There was a time when ARM looked very promising for laptops. Right now with Haswells there's no point to switch. They're performance/power use ratio is about as good as in ARM chips, while they can perform much better. Intel does promising things with their Atoms too.

If it comes to TRIM it's as good as it gets on PCs. You always lose a little bit of performance with SSDs the more you load them and to completely remedy that you have to hard format the whole drive, but TRIM is good enough to keep the performance really good for years in most cases. It remedies 90% of the problem, I'd say. In theory it should be enough to keep devices snappy as new until you get them replaced. Without it, the write speed on my N7 went down from 10mb/s to ~0.5mb/s over time - I have the 8GB version which is the worst one as far as this problem goes. At that point I sometimes can feel slowdowns related to this. With TRIM (if it was Windows) the speed would go back to ~7-8mb/s after a while and it would feel like new.
I'm not sure how it'll work on Android though. I just installed the 4.3 update and will see how it works. I'll leave it charged overnight and run a test tomorrow. According to Anandtech Trim kicks in when the device is left idle with over 70% charge. It takes hours in that state though, and it works in the background and stops when you unlock the tablet, so there's no other way to check than comparing benchmark scores.

The 7.2 doesn't come with that flip out stand thingy, does it? That would be so awesome. I would need to buy one of those as well because using it on my lap can be a bitch sometimes, and for video calls, I would hate to be holding it for over an hour.

It doesn't, but you'll find out that the way you use the Nexus 7 is more similar to the way you use your phone. For example, I've never held it on my lap. When I talk on Skype for hours I just place on my table against something (like a bottle of coke, or about anything that I have next to me) and because the N7 is light and the back is kinda rubberized you can adjust the position as much as you want and it'll keep standing like that, and you can talk.

So.....

I still hangout with the same friends from when I was 5 years old. They all have iphones. I was getting abuse for my android phone at a BBQ, yesterday. Dicks.

So the thing about older people getting disconnected from modern technology is true then, huh

 

[dilla]

So.....

I still hangout with the same friends from when I was 5 years old. They all have iphones. I was getting abuse for my android phone at a BBQ, yesterday. Dicks.

See, I never see those kinds of people. I know people and have seen strangers say they prefer their Apple products, but I have never seen them give others shit for having another phone. Maybe being around those tards has made you a little anti-Apple as opposed to you truly not liking Apple products. Those people boast about something rather trivial and their reasons for getting the phone might make them seem like sheep.

 

[S O F I]

I was going to buy this new N7 but I white girl wasted my N4 Friday night so now I had to shell out money for an HTC One.

 

[dilla]

You mother fucks don't know how to take care of your electronics. Especially your phones. I've been dealing with this cracked screen on my phone since day three of owning it. You guys can't keep your phones safe for shit. Or stick with them after they've been fucked.

 

[Casey]

I had to use manual trim commands on my first gen N7 to fix some lag that showed up. It worked. nice to see it built into 4.3.

I just sold my N7. Happy, cos I got £125 for it, which is A) more than i expected, and B) just shy of $200 with the exchange rate. So upgrading to the new model in the US will cost me next to nothing.

 

[masta247]

I was going to buy this new N7 but I white girl wasted my N4 Friday night so now I had to shell out money for an HTC One.

I wouldn't buy the HTC One. Not worth the price imho, if you're not getting it with contract. Is your N4 totally destroyed? I guess you don't want to go for the S4, so if you can, wait for the Moto X maybe? Half that price, stock Android, as good (not counting the CPU).
The HTC One's got not much about it other than design, but it's going to look like shit in a few months too because the aluminum is easy to scratch and bezels already look big ass. In other words it's bigger and heavier N4 in an aluminum shell, with shitty UI and inferior camera, and twice the price for just a little performance gain. You're about as likely to white girl waste it as well

edit: ah, I see you bought it already? Ok, enjoy it

 

[S O F I]

I lost the N4. I could've got S4 but I don't like it. I'll put vanilla Android on it here shortly because HTC Sense sucks.

 

[dilla]

A buddy of mine jumped on the deal for a 16GB N7 for $150 from Staples. His sister bought it for him and is sending it with his mom when she comes to visit next week. So I'll get some good hands-on time with it. Another friend of mine bought it In April, or so. He didn't even know there was an update for him in 4.3. Guess he doesn't use it much. But I told him to update so he'll let me know how much it improved for him.

 

[Pittsey]

Fuck the Chromecast.

I just picked up a Now TV box for a tenner, to have a play with, and then give to my parents. Only costs £10, is basically a Roku Lt - http://compare.ebay.co.uk/like/1908...ff11=ICEP3.0.0&ff12=67&ff13=80&ff14=65&ff19=0 - It can be sideloaded with Plex too. http://www.plexapp.com/

A cheap entry media centre.


Although I'm still after a Chromecast to play with. It's just been rooted. Amazon won't send to the UK.

SOFI, ARon - I'm looking at you guys.

 

[dilla]

Offer some mouth hugs and then they might listen.

 

[masta247]

So now Anandtech confirms that 4.3 brings TRIM to all Nexus devices:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7185/android-43-update-brings-trim-to-all-nexus-devices

If your phone/tablet performs better after the 4.3 update, it's because of this. Full performance increase should be seen after a week or so (granted you charge your phone overnight and this implementation of TRIM works properly).

Personally I ran some benchmarks and found my tablet's performance to be better, but the improvement wasn't great on paper. However storage chip's performance was this tablet's weakest link from the start (especially on my 8GB version).
Writes aren't so painfully slow now though, but it's likely to get even better once I remove some junk and let TRIM run a couple more times. Random write benchmarks slow down the storage memory significantly so I'll wait a few days before re-running them.

 

[dilla]

Now, the article says "Nexus devices" but there's nothing limiting it from being incorporated in a custom ROM, like CM, and being used on the S3, is there?

 

[dilla]

http://androidcommunity.com/samsung-rumored-to-have-two-hi-res-android-tablets-on-the-way-20130729/

 

[masta247]

Now, the article says "Nexus devices" but there's nothing limiting it from being incorporated in a custom ROM, like CM, and being used on the S3, is there?

Theoretically nothing. I suppose most OEMs will have it in their 4.3 updates too. Hopefully.

http://androidcommunity.com/samsung-rumored-to-have-two-hi-res-android-tablets-on-the-way-20130729/

They're big , high end tablets, yeah. To me the 10 inch one is essentially a Nexus 10 with 2 more CPU cores but Snapdragon 800 isn't going to be a huge improvement over 2 huge A15 cores.
I guess they'd have to totally redesign the tablet to warrant a Nexus 10.2 update but then again it's hard to update a tablet like that properly, as it had extraordinary specs to start with.

 

[Pittsey]

A decent 10 inch tablet for sub £200?

 

[masta247]

A decent 10 inch tablet for sub £200?

It's hard now. The cheapest decent one is the Nexus 10. Otherwise you're looking at last year's models of Acer Iconia Tabs or Asus Transformers, which are average and aging now and are incomparably inferior to the 300 pound Nexus 10. There's also the Galaxy Tab2 10.1, but same story.

 

[Pittsey]

Is it worth picking up the Nexus 10? Is there a new one on the horizon?

The Nexus 10.2 could come with a 1.7 GHz A15 processor, but our guess is that it will come with the latest dual core Exynos 5 Octa CPU. Other features also include high-res 2,560 x 1,600 display and 2GB of RAM.