iPhone 3G S FAQ

The fastest iPhone ever

This is what Apple’s ad on its Website reads. What that explains is iPhone 3G S has is now 2x faster in speed. Apple unveiled the iPhone 3G S at Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday. Digging out the rumors provide a clue that Apple is using a new chip to crank up the performance.  But then why to rely on the rumors, when Apple has unfurled its iPhone 3G S. There are no revelations about the chip level hardware specs. It seems Apple is looking to convince the buyers that it’s not an individual part of iPhone, but it’s Apple as a brand. With the 3G S announced, you might have a lot of questions running in your mind, see if you can get the answers here.

What’s so fast about iPhone 3G S?

• The first thing about iPhone 3G S is that the applications can be launched quickly.
• The web pages are rendered in a fraction of time.
• View the email attachments faster.
• Improved performance and updated 3D graphics offer you better gaming experience.

Overall, Apple claims everything you do on iPhone 3G S is up to two times faster and more responsive than  iPhone 3G.

What’s inside the iPhone 3G S?

This part is quite interesting to investigate the speed with an array of speculations surrounding the 3G S.
There has been no announcement about the seed-up formula by Apple, still some excerpts from the analysis published by Anandtech’s Anand Shimpi, editor in chief reveals

iPhone 3GS uses (again) a Samsung (system-on-a-chip) but this time…it’s got a Cortex A8 and PowerVR SGX; just like the (Palm) Pre,

A majority of smartphones today, including the previous versions of iPhone are based on some version of an application processor from ARM. The cortex A8 is a more recent and faster version of ARM design.

According to one of the founders iFixit’s Kyle Wiens, the Cortex A8 is very possible.

From a web page in T-Mobile Netherlands’  the features of the iPhone 3G S include 256 RAM” and 600 MHz-processor. It is important to notice that there are 600MHz ARM processors available based on older designs, so the new cortex A8 is not the only option.

If Anandtech reports are valid iPhone 3G S’s application processor would be the same as that of Palm Pre.  The Palm Pre chip integrates a Powervr SGX 2D/3D graphics accelerator based on a design from Imagination Technologies.

ARM claims that its Cortex A8 is the highest performance and most power efficient processor available from ARM. It can scale up the speed from 600 MHz to higher than 1GHz.

There’s still a question how much tweaking does Apple  perform on the basic arm
According to Marion Morales, vice president of IDC’s semiconductors research program, Apple uses Samgsung Chips but they are designing the processor and using Samsung as Foundry(factory).

What is the difference in new 3G S?

The predictions about OpenGL ES 2.0 3D graphics APIs in the new iPhone seems to come true. The assumptions were driven by the fact that it has come out with iPhone OS 3.0 SDK for several betas. The graphics processor in the iPhone 3G S is expected to be PowerVR SGX that supports hardware acceleration of both OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0. The 3G was

What that implies for the users is that OpenGL ES is the lightweight version of OpenGL. It is a powerful library of real-time 3D rendering APIs. Most of the other smartphones and handheld devices today support the older 1.1 specification. The 2.0 not widely used but it supports complex textures and shading operations. That allows the games written on it to look more vivid.

The problem arises here, OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0 are completely incompatible with each other. This would mean that the apps need to be written to support both to make them most compatible for iPhone 3G S.  This could be a can of worms for apps as the 2.0-only app won’t run on a 1.1-only device.

This could aggravate the problems Apple. Already the App Store was splintered when users were unable to use certain apps like the dialers in iPod Touch. On the other way round, it could be Apple’s strategy to create distinct categories of app for iPhone models. The apps compatible with 3G S will be written to take advantage of OpenGL ES 2.0.

This can also be interpreted as a fact that the app developers should target Open GL ES 1.1, they want to support all iPhone and iPod Touches.

The final question you might ask is what would be the game that could compel the stubborn 3G owners to spend a hundred or more bucks which they would never like to do. For all your questions to be answered you need to wait for the release of 3G.