Tuesday, June 5, 2007

Faking the iOrgasms

I guess you've all seen the iPhone commercials by now. The focus on the cool UI is strong, but it makes me wonder how slick it really is. I don't doubt that the animations will be smooth, but I have my doubts about that photo browser, or more specifically, the speed with which it manages to load a dozen photos from disk. As far as I know, the iPhone uses flash memory, not a hard drive. Flash memory is slow. Noticably slow. As in: you can't load ten photos from it in the time it takes to display a flashy fade effect.

But I guess I shouldn't complain. This is what advertising is about. But it makes me wonder how much else is faked.

5 comments:

jrc said...

"Faked" is a bit strong of an accusation... Flash memory is slow for writes, but fast for reads. It's also probable that the iPhone uses a combination of DRAM and Flash memory. And I'd guess that the photos are shrunk to screen size when syncing, so you're looking at only a few hundred K/s, which is very realistic.

puterman said...

I guess we'll just have to wait and see...

Anonymous said...

I agree. Puterman the Poser is hardly one to make accusations of forgery.

Anonymous said...

jrc, defender of the throne?

puterman said...

John makes a good argument, but I'm still sceptical. It's not just loading the pictures into RAM, you also need to start the app and get the graphics into the video card's memory. But well, we'll see. I'm more worried about what sort of mistakes they'll make because of lack of phone development experience, because I do have some faith in Apple's abilities to make user interfaces.