Deathly Slow Phones – UI, Sideloading
OK, so I haven’t really posted about my job this term at all but I figured I’d write up some tech/gadgetry review like Nathan does. It’s been neat how my job deals with research upon an a tech issue that has ACTUALLY been a frustration to me, and the tech trend of mobile convergence which I have been waiting for since highschool. One of my ongoing responsibilities is to play with fancy shmancy phones — and benchmark them.
Like that HTC Touch Diamond?
Or the Nokia N78?
I don’t think they’re even available in North America yet. But I’ve had a chance to toy around with these =D
They’re sweet lil phones and I’ve gotten so used to these and other slick high-end phones in our collection that I’ve come to see these as standard. Cellphones have come a long way since my free with contract candybar Nokia and the then-significant upgrade to Motorola e815.
Yet even at the high-end, most cellphones have a long way to go in my opinion. As a power-user of whatever tech I come across (digging through every last menu and submenu option to optimize and get familiarized with my tools): speed is very important to me.
The vast majority of cellphones are to me annoying to use for anything beyond simply calling. They are slow in a) response and b) sideloading transfer speeds.
A) Because I whiz by familiar menus I’d like the phone to at least keep up with the speed of my fingers. What’s most annoying is when I hit softkeys and they don’t respond for nearly a second after. Navigating through a few menus and to load a program is a pain with this slowness. It’s the case with the Sony Ericsson k850i and the HTC Diamond. Then sometimes when whizzing by in usage and the system can’t keep up it trips over itself and kinda hangs, even when no softkeys are involved, like on the Nokia N78. The Diamond has a nice GUI (TouchFlo 3D) in its effort toward a better user experience. It’s spiffy but it’s slow… and that for me completely undermines it. I’d rather a menu with a simplified look that responds faster. Though in all this I must say that the iPhone satisfies quite well. I haven’t played with it too much but it’s a pleasure to use UI and response-wise.
B) Sideloading. So it’s been a good number of years since most devices have transitioned to USB 2.0. Most cellphones now support USB 2.0. But it’s absolutely ridiculous to transfer files with cellphones by USB. USB 2.0 is 60MBps (480MBps) by spec but implementations vary (if you didn’t know). Here’s some benchmarking I did recently
To do these: a single file of 677MB size was used to benchmark the write speed (on an IBM Thinkpad T60). Through a separate comparative benchmark the SanDisk 8GB MicroSDHC and SanDisk 6GB MicroSDHC were proven to be the same speed. The fastest available M2 cards were used to test the Sony Ericsson phones, which would not accept microSD.
Keep in mind that the media cards used are among the fastest available nowadays and that transfers of multiple files (many mp3s, videos, photos etc) take much longer than transfer of a single file in equivalent size.
From the benchmark results it’s clear that the majority of devices are excruciatingly slow and below the happy theoretically touted USB 2.0 60MBps spec. We see RIM sitting solid at the top in speed rankings (though still less than ideal). Next is Apple’s iPod (not iPhone) and Microsoft’s Zune. As portable music players which are frequently sync’d it is definitely important to have good USB sideloading performance. Poor overall, but at least ranking high-ish amongst the benchmarked. The rest of the devices, being real cellphones, do worse still. Sitting at the bottom, Sony Ericsson has a pitiful 0.63MBps, meaning a 1GB transfer would take over an hour.
Sure I don’t make 1GB transfers all too much. But a 1-50MB transfer to refresh with a few new mp3s or to grab a few photos is a frequent activity. Or at least it would be a frequent activity if it weren’t so slow. I don’t wanna frequently wait >5min for the tiniest little change to complete.
June 30th, 2008 at 7:56 pm
Interesting write-up. In some sense, I see how smartphones seemed to be quite plagued with speed issues. I was originally a long time PalmOS user, and am therefore quite used to things being fairly quick and snappy. Yet, it seems that things are moving backwards speed-wise.
As a current Symbian UIQ3 user, I really feel the slowness, and it is quite frustrating sometimes. It is not that I find the menu structure too slow, it’s merely the software design of the devices these days. With Symbian 9 functioning more like a computer (all programs must be loaded from solid-state ROM into RAM before running), the hit of speed in this regard is very noticeable, and is painful on devices constrained with limited RAM.
With respect to solid-state flash read/write speed, I’ve typically found that the best solution is to use an external card reader, where possible. Granted, with the numerous devices coming out with integrated flash memory, I can see where this fails to be a viable solution.
Convergence is definitely the future, but the current offerings are a bit weak… It seems however that Google’s Android and Apple’s iPhone are causing some positive market pressure. I don’t know what’s happening in the Windows Mobile world, but in the Symbian world, Nokia has bought out Symbian and is partnering with key Symbian licensees such as Motorola, Sony Ericsson and NTT Docomo to create a new unified front-end to Symbian, effectively doing away with the UIQ, S60, etc segregation.
Now it will be up to the hardware manufacturers to match up with viable hardware platforms.
July 2nd, 2008 at 3:41 am
MMmm trusay. I especially hate my Dell Axim x50v. I know in it’s time it was by far the best bang for you buck. And that ‘bang’ was pretty considerable then. But with Windows Mobile it was dreadfully slow. The Palms I’ve played with were snappy indeed. Despite the much limited functionality, if I could go back, I’d've bought a Palm. The slowness of something undermines everything, for me.
What do you think about the second portion of my post, on the sideloading speeds? 3G adoption is increasing and with the wave of 4G in the next 5 years the entire mobile world will change. The yet-to-be-conceived innovations and shifts in application/service ecosystems available, the increased storage capacities, the growth of ultra high quality media will make viable a consumer usage model is still more data intensive. All this will demand sideloading performance to be far far improved upon. The way things are now it seems pretty pitiful.
July 3rd, 2008 at 11:12 am
Good posting, how did you manage to get a hold of all these phones to do the benchmarking?
Something that has always been troublesome to me is that phones are focusing too much on features as selling points, but don’t mention the quality of the features. The specific feature you bring up is interesting. I have for now a very long time been wanting cell phones that could transfer files as if they were a media player. I always wondered why this never happened, whether it was an internal architecture issue, or if it was just pure negligence to appease to the user.
RIM seems to break the mold, in that they care about the user experience and want the most out of every feature. I am curious how they managed to get their speeds that fast. Usually Apple/Microsoft are at the tip of the technology curve when it comes to speeds, in specific downloading speeds.
Bily since you were doing these tests did you have any analysis or insight as to why the Blackberries are so good?
July 8th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=203101718
Take a look at this article that was posted on some Blackberry forums some months ago. It explains the entire sideloading comparison from a more technical perspective.
The article was written by Semiconductor Insights, a 3rd party to all the devices which were tested.
August 4th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
Hey cool benchmarks guy. Here’s one to add on, I tried to follow the same method as you with 677MB in a single file and I have the same 8GB SanDisk microSDHC.
LG Viewty
August 4th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
sorry… I overlooked that you already had the Viewty, just separated from the other 2 LG’s..
May 16th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
I found your blog on google and read a few of your other posts. I just added you to my Google News Reader. Keep up the good work. Look forward to reading more from you in the future.