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"Last year's phone"

"Last year's phone"

Posted May 16, 2012 5:46 UTC (Wed) by pj (subscriber, #4506)
In reply to: "Last year's phone" by rfunk
Parent article: Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich

The issue is actually internal flash, not RAM. IIRC, both the Nexus One and the HTC One X have 1GB of RAM. The Nexus has a 1GHz processor vs the OneX's 1.5GHz, but the big issue is that the Nexus only has 256MB internal flash (196 usable) where the OneX has 16G (12 usable).

So I don't buy the RAM argument. And I doubt that the Nexus One is actually *limited* to only 26MB of flash - a rework shop could potentially probably slap at least a 4GB chip in there, if the obvious easy answer of figuring out how to use the microSD card as 'internal' flash turns out to not be so easy. Owait, someone's done that; see http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1366897


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"Last year's phone"

Posted May 16, 2012 7:37 UTC (Wed) by job (guest, #670) [Link]

No, the Neuxs One has 512 MB RAM and 512 MB internal flash. (One X has 1 GB RAM and 32 GB flash.) I don't know which is more limiting for ICS.

"Last year's phone"

Posted May 16, 2012 11:12 UTC (Wed) by Fowl (subscriber, #65667) [Link]

It's about flash. 512MB leaves less than 100MB for user data, which once you put on the "essentials" ie. top 5 or 6 apps that are actual used is cutting it quite fine. Use of the SD card solves this.

ICS works acceptably even on hardware like the HD2, released 2009, which originally came with Windows *Mobile*.

"Last year's phone"

Posted May 16, 2012 12:15 UTC (Wed) by Richard_J_Neill (subscriber, #23093) [Link]

It is rather shocking just how much flash Android uses.
Does anyone here remember GPE (the "Gnome palmtop environment")?
This fitted linux, busybox, X, Gtk, and some basic apps into 11 MB of flash.

Yes, android is prettier, but we make a terrible performance tradeoff. Even a basic "flashlight" app is hundreds of kB, and something like a train-timetable app is ~ 4 MB.

Then again, why code for efficiency? CPU and Flash are now really cheap, and battery life is dominated by the backlight anyway.

Android App Bloat??

Posted May 16, 2012 23:38 UTC (Wed) by ldo (subscriber, #40946) [Link]

Richard_J_Neill

Even a basic "flashlight" app is hundreds of kB...

I don’t understand how you come up with that figure. Here is an app of mine that does something reasonably interesting, and includes built-in help, in a package that is just 59kB in size. And the built APK for this sample app is just half of that.

Dalvik is a very compact byte code—half the size of Sun JVM bytecode. And all the additional XML resources for your app are stored in a compressed binary form. So I don’t see where the bloat should come from...

Android App Bloat??

Posted May 17, 2012 16:57 UTC (Thu) by zlynx (subscriber, #2285) [Link]

Don't some of the package formats for Android preinstalled software include the byte-code AND the compiled code?

Android App Bloat??

Posted May 17, 2012 22:30 UTC (Thu) by ldo (subscriber, #40946) [Link]

I don’t understand what you mean. The byte-code is the compiled code.

Android App Bloat??

Posted May 17, 2012 23:49 UTC (Thu) by zlynx (subscriber, #2285) [Link]

Android version 2.2 (I think) introduced an optional JIT compiler which compiles the byte-code into machine-code.

I thought that the ODEX (Optimized DEX) format can contain a cached copy of the JIT-compiled machine code. I also believe that the ODEX format is commonly used for all applications which are included in a ROM, because each ROM is hardware specific anyway.

Android App Bloat??

Posted May 18, 2012 1:09 UTC (Fri) by ldo (subscriber, #40946) [Link]

None of which is relevant to ordinary apps like you or I might write.

"Last year's phone"

Posted May 17, 2012 12:46 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]

Well, "hundred*s*" is a bit exaggerated... LED Light has 119 KB.

"Last year's phone"

Posted May 31, 2012 15:49 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]

> battery life is dominated by the backlight anyway.

What? How can that be? Are you using your phone with the display on constantly, while still using nearly zero CPU?

Have you actually tested this, or is it just an intuitive assumption? If the former, what kind of screen does your device have? If the latter, your intuition is incorrect.

Unless I'm using the power-guzzing Google navigation, 'cell standby' is always at the top of my battery usage list, followed by 'phone idle', followed by 'Wi-Fi' if I've had it enabled, usually followed by 'Android system', with perhaps a few other entries, and 'display' dead last - and that's if I've had it on for the hour or so that it takes to even show up in the list (I think there's a threshold of 1 or 2 percent).

If I do nothing after unplugging the phone but tap the screen every now and then to keep it on, 'display' will go up to 20%, with 'Android' system in the 60s, so if that were more efficient it would have a substantial impact on battery life (although in the real world case 'cell standby', 'phone idle', and 'Wi-Fi' tend to come to around 90% of the total battery use).

"Last year's phone"

Posted Jun 1, 2012 9:17 UTC (Fri) by rschroev (subscriber, #4164) [Link]

Interesting.

Mine says:
Display 45%
Cell standby 18%
Dolphin Browser HD 9%
Phone idle 7%
Wi-Fi 6%
Android OS 5%
Android System 5%
...

The screen is most certainly not on most of the time. Also I didn't realize Dolphin uses that much power; from the stats you'd think I do nothing but surfing the web all the time, which is not true at all.

The phone is a Samsung Galaxy S (GT-I9000) running Cyanogenmod 7.1 (but I seem to remember that the start where more or less the same when the phone still had the stock software).

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