In the next week, we’re going to see what Apple has on offer from WWDC. Everyone is expecting some news about the new iPhone models because, with the exception of a minor memory storage upgrade, the iPhone will have been on sale for 1 year without any changes and Apple likes to upgrade their devices every 9 months – 1 year. So it’s not a bad speculation. What are we likely to see in terms of hardware? Faster wireless is for one thing. It’s a little early for solar-panel displays but we could reasonably see the camera gaining a hardware ‘button’ and a small camera mounted on the front of the device for video conferencing.
We’re also going to see the new iPhone operating system. The big news there is obviously the Application Store. Why do I want it? So I can play a couple of casual games while I’m not in a good network region. So I can read my RSS feeds while mobile without the clunkiness of the online readers. So I can twitter by only sending my data and receiving others twitter data rather than having to receive the text and graphics from pockettweets. It would be nice to be able to receive MMS messages and also to be able to forward the odd SMS but, to be honest, there are a lot more easy wins in this respect. Double-tap to zoom in a mail message for the idiots who keep sending me 800-pixel wide images as their email signature?
waffle writes some speculation about the 3G iPhone
“Loading freeze-dried sites from bookmarklets using the current iPhone software takes almost as long as loading the site itself, which suggests an efficiency problem in the browser and rendering software, not the network hardware.”
Except that the bookmarklets on your home screen are just bookmarks – they’re not freeze dried copies of the web sites themselves. The renderer in MobileSafari over EDGE is quick enough to outpace the slower renderers on faster 3G networks so I think we can reasonably expect that if the EDGE limits are removed, we shall get much faster data and therefore faster rendering.
Lots to think about and only a week to go.
Except that, yeah, I meant bookmarklets, not the home screen icons, not plain bookmarks. I forgot the site I used, but there are several. It pickles every external resource to data: URIs.
I agree with your speculation. I never said that Safari was worse than other renderers, I said that it was the bottleneck in the iPhone.
That’s a third party product then so hardly something you can criticise the iPhone for.
What’s the product?
The tool is indeed a third party product. But the end product is not a third party product; it’s a link which when loaded recreates the exact same structure of resources only it doesn’t need to go over the network, and it still puts some real strain on Safari, which suggests either that loading that much from a data: URI is cumbersome or that the rendering (which is the only common part) is slow.
The tool turned out to be http://wikipedia.comoki.com/ – you can tap Save in the upper right to get the bookmarkable version.
With that hack, passing the entire content of the page through the URI….bleagh…
Yes. Sure. Still runs in Safari. Still not third-party software or home screen icons.
Right. Conceded. I still think it’s probably ‘working as intended’
Of course. Parsing a text string several KB long as a URL is way out of reasonable scope, even for data: URIs.