News tagged ‘Hardware’

DevTeam posted a new interesting screenshot. They successfully downgraded modem firmware. This is not an unlock (yet), but it is a good illustration of the first progress made with regard to hacking the 3G baseband. They accomplished this by being able to execute their own code on the baseband that allows to circumvent security checks and flash the baseband with older, disallowed firmware. Please note this has been accomplished using software only, the iPhone 3G has not been disassembled or hardware modified in any way.

There is not much defference between Safari 1.1.4 and 2.0. But Under the hood, MobileSafari 2.0's performance is hugely improved over 1.1.4. Everything related to web surfing feels faster, web pages consistently load faster on 2.0, both via Wi-Fi and EDGE. This has nothing to do with the new iPhone 3G hardware — this is about dramatic performance improvements on original iPhones upgraded to the 2.0 OS.

Using MobileSafari simply feels faster, especially with web applications. Feel is by nature subjective, but JavaScript benchmarks back this up.

In August last year, Craig Hockenberry posted a few simple benchmarks to compare the iPhone's processing power and JavaScript interpreter against Safari 3 running on a Mac with a 1.83 GHz Core Duo. At that time, the current version of the iPhone OS was 1.0.1. Here are the results of those same benchmarks on original iPhones running the 1.1.4 and new 2.0 OS versions, with Hockenberry’s 1.0.1 results included for comparison:

The last column shows how many times faster the 2.0 version of MobileSafari was versus 1.0.1 and 1.1.4. The same results, charted (smaller bars are faster) can be viewed above.

The results are obvious. WebKit JavaScript performance has improved steadily and significantly in just one year, with a huge jump between 1.1.4 and the new 2.0.0. In side-by-side page loading tests between two original iPhones running 1.1.4 and 2.0.0, the new version consistently finished at least a few seconds faster.

For all the hubbub regarding the new App Store, most “iPhone software” runs in the web browser. But improvements in WebKit performance often help native iPhone app performance, too — a slew of my favorite native iPhone apps have built-in WebKit browsers (e.g., NetNewsWire, Twitterrific, Instapaper, and Cocktails). When WebKit performance improves, any app that uses WebKit improves, and WebKit improved a lot between iPhone 1.1.4 and 2.0.0.

via daringfireball.net

Apple recently filed a new patent application (us20080122796ki). On more than 370 pages lots of new potential features and enhancements for IPhone’s hardware and software are described.

The most interesting Hardware part is a GPS receiver and a camera for video conferencing.

On a software level, Apple describes addition of a text messaging (chat), in-line multimedia content (Quicktime and Flash) in the Safari browser. Further welcome additions described in the publication would include a dedicated blogging client, Java software downloads, MMS picture and video messaging, support for voice-activated commands, audio capture, video conferencing and more.

“[0142]Examples of other applications 136 that may be stored in memory 102 include other word processing applications, JAVA-enabled applications, encryption, digital rights management, voice recognition, and voice replication. ”

It sounds like Apple wants Java to be on the IPhone