iPhone 4S's Siri Is a Bandwidth Guzzler 290
Frankie70 writes "'Siri's dirty little secret is that she's a bandwidth guzzler, the digital equivalent of a 10-miles-per-gallon Hummer H1.' A study by Arieso shows that users of the iPhone 4S demand three times as much data as iPhone 3G users and twice as much as iPhone 4 users, who were identified as the most demanding in a 2010 study. 'In all, Arieso says that the Siri-equipped iPhone 4S "appears to unleash data consumption behaviors that have no precedent."'"
Siri Is Not A Bandwidth Hog; 63KB/Query (Score:5, Informative)
This article is stupid and the Washington Post should be ashamed. ArsTechnica ran the numbers 2 months ago [arstechnica.com] and came up with an average of 63KB per query, and even less for queries that were just voice commands for the phone itself (as opposed to an internet lookup).
If Siri is a bandwidth hog, $deity help us all, because that means all that voice traffic and streaming video we do on our phones and tablets must be killing cellular networks and running their bodies through the wood chipper.
Re:Well, duh (Score:1, Informative)
The carriers have plenty of bandwith they use fiber-optics, they just want to make a profit of 5 trillion off an investment of 10 billion.
Re:Well, duh (Score:5, Informative)
iCloud and the updated 4S camera is indeed partially to blame if indeed data usage is as high as reported, however the article is flawed if this Ars article [arstechnica.com] is correct.
Re:Well, duh (Score:4, Informative)
New phone debuts with cloud capabilities. People buy new phone, use the shit out of it, and also begin utilizing cloud functions. Of course bandwidth use is going to go up.
Indeed, those who use iOS 5 to run standard backups of their phones to iCloud instead of to the local computer, plus asynchronously merge all contacts, calendars, notes, photos, and videos to iCloud are going to routinely suck up more bandwidth than those who've chosen to stick with the iPhone 3G. That's just common sense. Suppositions to be made about the user's behavior with the newer, faster, otherwise more capable machines are secondary, however potentially valid.
Well, duh. (Score:5, Informative)
Did you even read the article in question? It's just a re-hash of a press release, written by someone who doesn't seem to understand how any of these newfangled gadgets work.
Here, this is a quote from the article. See if you can read it without facepalming:
To continue with the author's car analogy, blaming your new phone for the fact that you download more with it is like blaming your car for a parking ticket. It's not the phone, it's the user.
Hell, if the author had bothered reading the study he linked to [arieso.com], he'd know the study was about data usage vs. phones. The summary page doesn't even mention Siri.
Happy with unlimited bandwith & amount 2€ (Score:3, Informative)
I am just happy to have 2 year contract for unlimited bandwith & amount for 2 euros a month price.
Network gives good HSPA what means I have almost everywhere where I go a 14.4Mbits / 5.76Mbits and under 80ms pings.
2 euros a month for that connection is "just there". But when watching my typical data consuming, what is heavy, I would say that 5-10GB for typical user is more than enough. Sometimes personally I go over 20GB a month but that really demands lots of usage so that battery is empty almost everyday two times. And when I use phone as the hotspot/tethering for my and friends laptop, it goes over 30-40GB easily if using just steam.
At least when most of the country where I live has other unlimited amount but bandwidth limited to 1-2Mbits (what is more than enough for mobile devices, if upload just would be same instead just 42KB/s) and price being 5 euros a month I would say that is good deal as well. Or unlimited bandwidth but prioritizated amount after 50GB a month for 8 euros. A 50GB is hard to come even with heavy use.
I understand well how ISP's are having problems in USA when their basic network capacity is not taken care in the first place. Heck, even the GSM voice quality is crap when compared to EU countries.
At one point, I really wish that it would be custom to have a data plan for every citizen for free and bandwidth would be at least 256kbits while amount unlimited.
It would not be enough for all, but for most people it would be. At least when thinking about VoIP, Emails and basic surfing.
Re:Siri Is Not A Bandwidth Hog; 63KB/Query (Score:5, Informative)
People who do no more than 10-15 searches a day aren't on the radar when it comes to worrying about bandwidth hogs. The real question is how much does each Siri search use compared to an old-style web search (I suspect the answer is "a lot more", probably more than 10 times as much) and whether for heavy users that approaches a significant percentage of overall use (I suspect the answer is "no, when you're listening to a couple of podcasts and watching a vid or two and surfing the web heavily, a few dozen Siri searches doesn't mean all that much).
But mentioning the light users is totally disingenuous--light users aren't where bandwidth concerns are met.
Re:Well, duh (Score:5, Informative)
Your dislike of flowery marketing words doesn't make them entirely meaningless.
Re:Exceeding monthly data caps is the new black (Score:5, Informative)
Or it'll be like with Internet connections, remember pay per minute on those? Oh, I sure do. Remember caps and additional money/MB too? Oh yes. Turns out in general people don't like it. Most of us were willing to pay a good price simply to not have to worry about what next month's Internet bill would be. If I end up in the hospital a month and use zero bytes of bandwidth, I'm still going to pay the same. And that's the way I like it. I'm pretty sure that as the market matures cell phone data plans will get more sane too. Actually, checking now the ideal plan if you're a heavy data user in Norway: Netcom Fastpris Data, 249 NOK = 43 USD per month, free data usage, speed reduced to 120 kbps after 5GB. Regular subscriptions on the largest carriers are capped at 400-600 NOK or 70-100 USD so you can't go over that in a single month even if you are online 24x7.
Just don't use your smartphone abroad. Ever. Or if you must then enable, get your shit done and disable is ASAP. Might not be such a big deal in the US but imagine you had an inter-state charge that could be several dollars per megabyte. That's what it's like in Europe now, the moment you cross the border all rules change. They're supposed to block you after 500 NOK (85 USD) but sometimes they don't and it's your problem. Every so often you get news stories about them charging people thousands of dollars for that shit, total ripoff. Know where the off button is and use it. You'll enjoy your vacation more too, plus it does wonders for your battery life. You don't get to chit-chat with your phone though...
Re:Siri Is Not A Bandwidth Hog; 63KB/Query (Score:5, Informative)
Siri is still kind of half-baked (Score:4, Informative)
It's certainly the future but I think calling it beta is charitable. When it works right it's great but when it fails it's about as bad as all other voice recognition systems that came before.
It works just frequently enough and well enough for you to want to rely on it and fails just often enough that you're wanting to chuck the phone out the window in frustration.
I think the worst bit is the inconsistent network connectivity. Since every bit of voice processing is done off the phone, you're dependent on a network connection and there's no telling when Siri won't be able to reach the server. So you can tell it to set an appointment and it will get that and ask you to confirm it and you say yes and it fails. Or you could be speaking to it in a loud voice and it will either wait 5 seconds after you're speaking to accept what you said for processing or it will cut you off mid-speech to process only part of your request.
I'm not denying this is the future but it will probably take another iphone version number before they get the glitches ironed out.
No they are not US based, anymore (Score:0, Informative)
Read up:
"When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president. But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?
Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.
Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.
Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest."
See the entire article here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html?_r=2
Re:Well, duh (Score:4, Informative)
This is what qualifies as "amazing" to you"? Sigh.
I'd go with "cool" that we're seeing this kind of thing built into OSes now, but there's nothing amazing about it. The technology is simple backup/restore functionality, moved into "the cloud".
Re:Well, duh (Score:4, Informative)
Except that it backs up in one device and magically restores in all the others. It's amazing because it's the first time the consumer market sees this kind of tightly integrated and properly built syncing.
Re:Siri (Score:4, Informative)
What makes the technology used for Siri novel is not the individual components, but the way in which they work together.
Siri is the synergy of three distinct but related challenges in artificial intelligence: (1) How do we get a computer to correctly parse the syntax of natural human speech? (2) How do we get a computer to understand the meaning of a sentence in some specified human language? (3) How do we get a computer to provide a relevant response to a meaningful but potentially vague command? Siri arguably is the first attempt at doing all three of these things in near real-time for a very broad space of possible inputs. However, it should be stressed that by no means is it perfect at any of these tasks--indeed, far from it.
The point to be understood here is that Siri is not merely about voice transcription, nor is it about the transfer of voice input. That is just one part of the process. The next part is using the result of its transcription algorithm as input to a natural language processing engine that likely uses various other statistical methods to pick out certain words, analyze the grammatical structure of the input, and determine the sentence's most likely intent. This is what Wolfram|Alpha attempts to do. The final part is to have the computer search what resources are available to it and provide data or perform an action that (hopefully) is what the user wanted. None of these steps are trivial.
Many of the criticisms of Apple's involvement in Siri's development have been misplaced. I've heard people say how Apple weren't the innovators of the technology, or how Siri isn't anything special or new. And it's true--Apple didn't develop Nuance's speech recognition technology, nor did they invent Wolfram|Alpha's processing algorithms. But the innovation occurred when they decided they wanted to put these things together, put it on a smartphone, and try to make it do things intuitively and seamlessly. Whether it actually works as well as we might want it to is another question.
In so far as its availability on various iPhone models, I think it's rather obvious by now that Apple made a business decision to restrict Siri's availability to the iPhone 4S. It has nothing to do with hardware/software limitations. Apple knows it has a coveted feature and they're not afraid to say, "hey, if you want it, you're going to have to buy the newest iPhone," even though there's no technological reason that Siri can't run on older devices. It's a dick move for sure, but the history of computing--indeed, the history of capitalism--is littered with similarly annoying tactics. I'm sure some iPhone 4 users are hoping that after the iPhone 5 is announced and the shine fades on the iPhone 4S, that Apple will somehow find it in their hearts to put Siri on the iPhone 4. But I wouldn't hold my breath. These phones are Apple's bread and butter--they will do whatever it takes to make sure you want to buy a new one after each and every upgrade cycle. The only pressure they're feeling to make the hardware better is coming from the Android device manufacturers.
I think it's pretty clear by now that I'm neither an Apple fanboy, nor an Apple hater. I find such binary thinking to be simplistic, naive, and largely irrelevant in light of the fact that there are no completely honest actors in the technology sector, and there never will be.
Re:Well, duh (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, Blackberrys have been doing it for a while too.
Re:Well, duh (Score:5, Informative)
'cloud' junk is just the rebirth, or in this case the reanimation. of the dead and i thought buried dumb terminal architectural model.
Except that "smart" phones (I hate that phrase even more than "cloud" stuff) are decidedly not dumb terminals. There's more computing power in each one than a lot of the servers that the dumb terminals used to connect to.
if you don't want to be milked, just say no to any of these stupid 'cloud' services..
It's not a stupid service for my phone to upload (sometimes via Wifi, regardless at zero extra cost to me) to my "cloud" storage at Ubuntu One. I doubt Ubuntu / Canonical will be marketing to me by looking at my photos (or files), but if they do, I can just ignore it like I do all the other marketing I'm exposed to...
Really, there is a use for "cloud" services: for example, take a photo of police doing naughty things? Best to have the photo "in the cloud" before they can confiscate camera.
Camera memory card is getting full? Upload a few photos to the "cloud", delete them from camera, keep taking photos.
Re:Preloaded? (Score:4, Informative)
And how much does a server running ftpd cost per year to lease?
I run ftp (well, something similar) on a server and have a few scripts that allow me to sync everything on my smartphone to the "cloud". The server cost $450 to build (really bare-bones, a no-brand 6 core CPU, 16 GB of ram and a few terabytes of RAID1) and needs about $20 a month for 100mbps connection. Theoretically, it is not as reliable as the "icloud" but the current uptime is 369 days, and in that period I've experienced one network outage that lasted about 5 minutes and was announced by the provider three weeks in advance :)
As a bonus, I share the connection with the family, a few neighbors and whoever hooks up to the free spot I provide outside my place.
I hope that answers your question.
Re:Well, duh (Score:2, Informative)
Phones are dumb terminals. Dumb not being descriptive of their processing power, but their usefullness without a network.
Yes they are doing that with your photos or any other information you store, its the only way they can afford the server upkeep.
And that photo is less secure in the cloud, most storage places already have deals or policys to hand over without question things the police deem illegal. At least if it was on your phone you could get them for illegal search and seizure.
Re:Well, duh (Score:5, Informative)
The interesting thing, though, is that Siri itself is NOT a bandwidth hog. Ars and others have tested it and it actually doesn't use much bandwidth at all. But it makes the phone SO much more useful that people are sucking down three times as much information if they have Siri to help them find it.
Correlation is not causality (Score:4, Informative)
The silly notion that Siri is a data hog has been all over the internet, although if you think about it, it is obviously ridiculous. All Siri sends upstream some highly compressed voice, which doesn't take much bandwidth, and all it gets back is text and some simple commands to Apple's apps, which also doesn't take much bandwidth. Ars Technica measured the amount of data Siri sends back and forth, and it's just as modest as you'd expect. [arstechnica.com]
So why are owners of the iPhone 4s using more data? Apples latest version of iOS, which was released about the same time as the 4s, dispenses with the requirement to tether the iPhone to a computer running iTunes, for the first time making it possible to use an iPhone as a stand-alone device. You can back up your iPhone and even install iOS updates wirelessly. In addition, Apple's Match service will stream your entire music library to your iPhone wirelessly via Apple's iCloud. Owners of earlier iPhone models are already set up to do these things via a wired connection to iTunes, and many of them doubtless have continued to do it this way even if they've upgraded to iOS version 5. But new owners of the iPhone 4s (of which there are a great number, based on Apple's quarterly report) are probably mostly using their iPhones as stand-alone devices, which is now the default. And of course, this involves more data usage, of which the biggest contributor is likely music streaming.
So Siri has almost nothing to do with the increased data usage of iPhone 4s owners--it just happens to correlates with people who are using their iPhones untethered.
Re:Well, duh (Score:4, Informative)
The difference is that the blackberry model requires you to run your own BES server, which in turn must be linked to one of a small number of supported proprietary groupware setups... This requires a lot of expensive software, an expensive server plus power and hosting etc, and then you need sufficient knowledge to configure and maintain it, or to pay someone else to do so (usually quite poorly)...
All in all a rather expensive proposition, and therefore not even in consideration for the average end user.
iCloud on the other hand is available to all iPhone users at an affordable cost.
Re:Well, duh (Score:5, Informative)
From the Ars link:
If you use Siri 2-3 times per day at an average of 63KB per instance, you might expect to use 126KB to 189KB per day, or 3.7 to 5.5MB per month. For 4-6 times a day, that might come out to 252KB to 378KB per day, or 7.4 to 11MB per month. If you use it 10-15 times per day, you might end up using 630KB to 945KB per day, or 18.5 to 27.7MB per month.
Yeah, Siri is not really a bandwidth hog at all. 63KB is about the same amount of data needed to get you one image on one web page. Browse something as innocuous as a few news articles? Congrats, you've used more data than Siri will during an average day.
Sprint has come out and said that the average iPhone owner burns through 50% less bandwidth than the average 3G / 4G user on another platform. [barrons.com]
Sprint's CEO was cited elsewhere saying that Android apps tend to be "more chatty" with the network, and the iPhone does a better job of offloading data to WiFi whenever possible. And the App store does its part too. If you try to download a large app over the cell network, it will throw up a little alert window and ask you to try to download it over WiFi instead. (Before you complain, that's a mandate from the carriers, Apple has been trying to raise the limit)