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."'"
Well, duh (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
The real scandal here is that the carriers are pushing back, trying to keep bandwidth use down so they don't have to get off their asses invest more than they absolutely have to in network capacity.
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.
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Can't it be configured to only sync large files (music, photos and videos) over Wi-Fi?
Re:Well, duh (Score:5, Funny)
That would require an extra input field which would ruin the GUI's feng shui.
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Can't it be configured to only sync large files (music, photos and videos) over Wi-Fi?
It can be configured in a number of different ways. Whether or not it's configured to do so is entirely up to the end user.
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Re:Well, duh (Score:4, Insightful)
I bet a lot of people would be surprised to know that Siri uses bandwidth though. The fact that the phone doesn't do the work and what they said is transmitted to Apple doesn't seem to register with most people.
Re:Well, duh (Score:4, Interesting)
The fact that the phone doesn't do the work and what they said is transmitted to Apple doesn't seem to register with most people.
It also doesn't matter to most people.
Real Scandal (Score:5, Insightful)
No the real scandal is the carriers marketing these phones based on all these data intensive features and one or more of the following:
1) Not upgrading the infrastructure to support the offerings.
Inadequate density of towers in metros, lack of coverage or obsolete network support in other areas
2) Not being realistic about the actual cost of the services with typical use cases
They need to be clear that if you stream Netflix for an hour and half at the gym everyday in additon to other use it my run you a few grand in overages
3) Not being realistic about presentation of use cases.
Stop showing people they can stream music and video constantly in the ads unless, they can (for an affordable price)
4) Not being able to actually support the products and features they are selling even if they did upgrade infrastructure and selling it anyway.
Spectrum is limited, it might actually not be possible to put one of these handsets in every pocket.
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Or the apps themselves do. Like the XM app does.
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Yes you can increase tower density and directionality. That will give you smaller cells and less need for devices to share spectrum. There ARE limits though.
The handsets have to have omnidirectional transmitters for obvious reasons. They also have use use enough power to transmit back to what ever tower they are paired with. So if you start to make your cells to narrow you will still have conflicts on the handset sending to tower with adjacent cells.
It also might not be possible to put towers in histori
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In Scottsdale, they have towers in cactuses, street lights, etc. Outdoors is easy to solve.
They have cell sites for whole buildings, individual floors, etc. Inside large buildings is easy to solve.
They have femtocells that work on a residential scale-- but they are flawed in that they can't hand off to other cells, or in that they limit usage to a pre-determined list of phones. But, this too is easy to solve.
The problem is that the telcos want to maximize profit, and avoid becoming irrelevant or a dumb p
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It's worse than that - they're actually pushing costs off onto wifi providers. Any crowded place with unmetered wifi - Coffee shops, college networks, hotels, etc. are getting hammered by crap like this, and in some cases aren't budgeted for it. And it's not "just get another access point" - it's the amount of traffic - 802.11 and otherwise - in that spectrum. There's a point where there's just too much traffic, and adding additional equipment won't fix the problem. We can't turn every room into a Faraday C
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.
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Agreed on both points. Siri selects people based on willingness to use data. It is used for searching for things so what happens when you get results? You start browsing to them etc which means you'll be using more data. Kind of an obvious conclusion since with Siri you have a group of people that are selected to be data users, versus non-siri users where the population might or might not use data.
The cloud functions are pretty huge actually. I've been thinking of that since iCloud came out. I live in Canad
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: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)
Re:Well, duh (Score:5, Informative)
Your dislike of flowery marketing words doesn't make them entirely meaningless.
Re:Well, duh (Score:4, Insightful)
'cloud' junk is just the rebirth, or in this case the reanimation. of the dead and i thought buried dumb terminal architectural model.
I can see why they resurrected it though, millions of people use their phones and computers now to store personal information. if you can somehow get them to willingly hand that over you have the modern golden egg laying goose. you can mine that data for ad revenue. use it as leverage to get tax breaks from the governments of the area's you physically store it, in exchange for letting them have access of course.
it's only natural for the beast that is a corporation to try to get into the golden trough of revenue that this is. especially carriers. there is a reason they are clamping down on data usage and it has nothing to do with how much capacity they have. it has everything to do with the money they earn from you while you try to access your personal data off these cloud services.
if you don't want to be milked, just say no to any of these stupid 'cloud' services..
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.
The police can just confiscate the cloud (Score:5, Insightful)
take a photo of police doing naughty things? Best to have the photo "in the cloud" before they can confiscate camera.
The police can just confiscate the cloud. Megaupload anyone?
Re:The police can just confiscate the cloud (Score:5, Funny)
They can't do that to iCloud because Apple protects it with teams of iNinjas.
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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, Interesting)
Re:Well, duh (Score:4)
I like how you casually used "cloud capabilities" as if that means something.
But I think that in this case (or some cases), it does mean something. Voice recognition isn't really as do-able on the device, it requires "machine learning" (as I understand it), that is, matching against a huge sample of other voice data. Also large processing cost best sent off to a server in "the cloud" to save on battery charge.
Also, "the cloud" is pretty damned handy when uploading photos from phones to a) make space on memory card, b) get a back up of the incriminating photos of police ... being naughty, before they can confiscate the device and delete the pictures (an example that might be rare but of major impact).
I would agree that the "cloud" phrase is grossly abused by marketroids, but it does have some use in some circumstances.
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And I like how you use "scare quotes" on a phrase he used as if negated his valid observation.
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:Well, duh (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, Blackberrys have been doing it for a while too.
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:4, Insightful)
Non sequitur. Market share is not an indication of technological capability
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I will grand that it *nice* useful and more importantly usable for lots of people but lets be really honest about what it is. Its nothing a few shell scripts + ftpd + ftp + cron have not been able to do for 30+ years. If you find iCloud *exciting* its because you don't really understand the technology.
Preloaded? (Score:3)
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.
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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".
Again, who wrote "a few scripts"? Do you expect everybody who wants to use back to have to learn how to write a shell script?
about $20 a month
In what country? In my country, Internet connections at that price come with a stipulation in the acceptable use policy that "servers" shall not be used on them.
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No I don't expect everyone to write some scripts. Like it said in my original post "and more importantly usable for lots of people", ftp + cron + shell scripts was not something Joe Average was going to use. I am not saying iCloud is not a GREAT thing for lots of users. I am simply saying is nothing to get excited about for us geeks anyway.
Here is your requisite car analogy. The first mass market automobile, was something to get really excited about! The first automatic transmission exciting but less
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Again, who wrote "a few scripts"? Do you expect everybody who wants to use back to have to learn how to write a shell script?
Look - nobody's arguing that everyone who owns a mobile is going to set up their own backup service using ftp/cron/etc. The only argument that was made is that the technology is nothing special. What Apple has done is set all of that up automatically for the user - but as mentioned above, it's no great technological achievement. From a marketing perspective, great - Apple has done it again. From a technological perspective, it's something that has been around for half the age of computers.
Re:Well, duh (Score:5, Interesting)
As a developer I find the APIs around iCloud are what make it interesting, and more than just storage. The file coordination APIs let an app on one device say "I'm about to show the user this file", and iCloud will tell another device that's currently editing the file "hey, the user wants to see that file on another device, please save it now" and send the diffs to iCloud, which sends the diffs to the device so the user gets the current version of the document without having to manually save it. I'm not aware of any other cloud type storage system that does this.
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my tape drive does the same thing - oh, and I get my music and videos back, too.
Your tape drive sucks at syncing content across multiple devices.
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Re:Well, duh (Score:4, Insightful)
Which would be a complete and accurate statement if I was unreeling a fiber behind my phone everywhere I go.
In the real world, backhaul is not always the limiting factor; in many metro areas, the RF segment is at capacity during peak hours, and the only fix is more spectrum or more cells. (Which just makes fixed caps look silly -- there's no reason but greed to charge users in overserved rural areas for using the available bandwidth, and even where bandwidth is tight, flat caps don't discriminate between harmless off-peak use and problematic peak use.)
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I'd argue though that its already to 'hard' for many consumers. Most of them really don't understand what is data intensive and what is just going to push a pull a few hundred KB.
Even technical people might not know. Siri is a perfect example. These devices are getting pretty fast and storage is not exactly 'limited' any more. If you did not know any better you might assume that Siri does is speech recognition locally and just sends search terms to the backed service in plain old boring ASCII. You'd be
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Which is why I really *love* the "data usage" feature of android 4. I get to know exactly what has been using my bandwidth as well as set limits at which I should be warned or the internet turned off. Also, it's possible to prevent apps from using background data. Given that I have a cap of 100MB/mo + 0.1$/MB once I'm over that, this is *really* useful(I'm in a 3rd world country if you find the cap appalling, now you know why). This way, I get to use my connection for things like googling stuff + wikipedia
Re:Well, duh (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't understand why people state that Siri requires huge demands on network capacity. Cellular networks are built to handle voice data in real time.
A typical few-second snippet of voice data at full rate (uncompressed) would only take a few tens of kilobytes to transmit at voice-grade compression. And it needn't even be in real time. 4G and even 3G networks are built to handle high multiples of those rates for multiple users simultaneously.
If Siri is consuming massive amounts of network bandwidth, it could only be due to extremely inefficient implementation or extremely high rates of use. So either Apple has made a really crappy technical implementation of sending data or, more likely, delivered a service that's incredibly irresistable to users.
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So new peak, off peak, caps with reduced bandwidth for off peak and excess charges for peak, with rotating peak and off-peak dependent upon regionalised demands and social function priorities, adjusted fro particular cell capacities.
All complex on purpose to keep advertised charged cheap and actually billing expensive but, hey you agreed to it. "We Love You Siri". You can expect a whole range of bandwidth sucking, excess usage charge generating apps to appear.
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Even for a bot, you're not very bright.
Re:Well, duh (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the real problem with Apple users is how clueless they are about technology. Cell phone towers are easily overloaded so you really shouldn't use them for things like backups. Wait until you get home or go to your public library or starbucks or something.
myopic and misplaced. that's like bitching that the problem with ford owners is that they don't understand the engineering behind road design. this is not a failing of the user; this is a failing of the cell phone providers to scale up their architecture appropriately for new technology. they absolutely had to know that every new generation of phone is bringing new ways to use data, and that they're selling them more now than ever, and that people are becoming permanently "connected" more and more by the hour. instead of spending their record-breaking profits on new laws and huge bonuses they could have been expanding their network capabilities and increasing service levels and satisfaction. but hey, screwing customers and litigating show up prettier on this quarter's reports.
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The problem is that no present company can schedule such a "scaling up of their architecture". In two years (and after at least two more reincarnations of iDevices, tablets and smartphones) the needs for bandwidth might increase 100x. In another two years (when all your home appliances, kids' and pets' collars etc. all require even more bandwidth) the demand might still increase 100x. I'm not optimistic the problem will ever be resolved.
All I see for the future is people carrying personal electromagnetic ra
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All I see for the future is people carrying personal electromagnetic radiation meters routing their daily lives (ironically with the help of GPS-driven apps) to avoid heavily e/m polluted areas.
I have a pair of implanted EM radiation meters in my head, and I can tell you man, you wouldn't believe just how heavily polluted this whole fucking planet is with EM! Half the time every day, you can barely find any spot that wouldn't be constantly bombarded. I had to arrange myself a shelter in a basement to get away from this horror.
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Cloud capabilities = connecting to any one of hundreds of servers redundantly deployed across the internet, and moving your storage from the local device to the network so that it's available from every device.
Re:Well, duh (Score:5, Insightful)
"I think the real problem with Apple users is how clueless they are about technology."
iCloud backups occur only over wifi, only if the phone is plugged in.
Should have Googled that one first hey?
Re:Well, duh (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the real problem with Apple users is how clueless they are about technology.
A small subset of users of any mobile phone are technologically literate, and the rest are just people who want to use their phones. I think the real problem with Apple haters is they are clueless about their own bias.
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:Siri Is Not A Bandwidth Hog; 63KB/Query (Score:5, Interesting)
I think a pretty reasonable hypothesis would be that the early adopters are much more likely to be heavy users than the folks using 2-3-4 year old phones. IE it's not the phone (or features) it's the individual.
Re:Siri Is Not A Bandwidth Hog; 63KB/Query (Score:5, Informative)
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The 4S is selling in volumes that are hard to think are just early adopters.
My guess is that Siri makes using web services much easier for normal people, and improved usability leads to increased usage. That's a great thing, not inefficiency.
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.
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Re:Siri Is Not A Bandwidth Hog; 63KB/Query (Score:4, Insightful)
That's considerably smaller than the average size of a web page today. I wonder how big an average Wolfram Alpha page is... Siri might be an overall bandwidth saver.
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.
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"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)"
If a Siri query averages 63 KB, and a web page averages 965 KB... I wouldn't be so sure.
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Speaking of tech ignorant... iPhones run on Sprint and Verizon as well.
rebuttals to the study and WaPo article (Score:5, Insightful)
The WaPo article is nothing more than sensationalist journalism, designed to foment controversy for the sake of attention and readership.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/11/how-data-heavy-is-siri-on-an-iphone-4s-ars-investigates.ars [arstechnica.com]
http://gigaom.com/2012/01/27/siri-is-not-a-bandwidth-hog-and-users-are-not-the-problem/ [gigaom.com]
http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/27/2753694/siri-isnt-ruining-your-cellphone-service [theverge.com]
And from my own personal experience as someone who has used an iPhone since the very first model, I have not found that Siri has noticeably increased my data usage. Other types of data access are far more intensive, such as streaming video and music, as well as sharing images/video taken with the iPhone's camera.
Exceeding monthly data caps is the new black (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Exceeding monthly data caps is the new black (Score:4, Interesting)
Someone needs to develop an app that automatically runs a phone's data usage up to within 100 megs of the monthly cap on the last night of the billing cycle. If you're paying for 2, 4, 5, 10 gigs of data per month and it doesn't roll over, you may as well run it right up to the limit every month.
Sure, it's childish but these ridiculously low caps on 4G data plans is stupid. I'd rather be childish than stupid.
Re:Exceeding monthly data caps is the new black (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
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I live in Argentina and I complain almost constantly about my 3G connection. I pay 119 pesos a month (that's 27 dollars) for unlimited bandwidth. I usually download at around 2mbps until I hit the 3GB limit, after that I download at ~1mbps as much as I want (but most of the time the speed is closer to 750kbps). Coverage is pretty good (most of the country, even out on the road), and certainly anywhere in the city. If out of town and there's no 3G, it falls over to GPRS at no additional cost, that ain't fast
Voice command vs. Hyperlink (Score:2, Insightful)
If it takes 64KB to communicate link navigation request using voice input, and ~1KB to do the same with a hyperlink, then yeah, that will have a pretty big impact on data usage. Of course, if you're shelling out up to $400 just for a phone, you probably don't care about the data cost.
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it is just stupid to take such a contract only because you get new phone "by $49-99"
Yes, but the stupidity is not in offering that contract, it's in accepting it. People want the latest and the greatest, so they're happy to sign on for 3 years if they get the latest and the greatest for a tiny fraction of the actual cost. Sure, they're paying twice what they would monthly to the cell company than they could get from somebody else, but they don't see that part of the bargain, nor the fact that the extra $40/mo they're paying for the cell phone over a contract on a "discount" carrier (most o
Smartphones that don't work on discount carriers (Score:2)
the fact that the extra $40/mo they're paying for the cell phone over a contract on a "discount" carrier (most of whom are owned by the same companies they're buying from in the first place)
The "discount" carrier is also likely to be unable or unwilling to activate its parent company's phones or "unlocked" phones. Good luck getting an iPhone to work on the U.S. networks of Boost or Virgin, even though their parent company Sprint offers an iPhone. It was only recently that Virgin Mobile USA got Android phones.
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The "discount" carrier is also likely to be unable or unwilling to activate its parent company's phones or "unlocked" phones. Good luck getting an iPhone to work on the U.S. networks of Boost or Virgin, even though their parent company Sprint offers an iPhone. It was only recently that Virgin Mobile USA got Android phones.
You'd be wrong. :) If I buy a phone through Koodo, they'll unlock it through their website, as long as my account is in good standing (no money owing, and no late payments on my bill over the last 3 months. They're more expensive than going through a company like gsmliberty.net, but they will do it.
And they will indeed activate their parent company's phones. They'll also activate phones from other carriers. In fact, their website actively encourages you to unlock your phone and bring it to them, and provide
Siri (Score:2)
...is hot... http://www.imore.com/2012/01/27/siri-guest-stars-big-bang-theory/
Carriers *want* you to guzzle (Score:5, Insightful)
If oil companies' made cars, would they be fuel efficient? Hell, no. The more gas sold, the more oil profits.
It is the same with phone companies. The want you to call and use a lot of data traffic. What they don't want, are flat rates, where they get stuck with the bill. They want to charge every second to the customer. And every bit of unused bandwidth is lost profit for them.
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"They want to charge every second to the customer. And every bit of unused bandwidth is lost profit for them."
Are you nuts? They don't want to charge every second. Every bit of unused paid for bandwidth is PURE profit for them. Cell companies want to sell you data packages that you're either going to exceed or never come close to using all of. In the former case they get to charge you insane overage rates, in the latter you're always buying bandwidth you're not using.
The thing they're really afraid of i
Can You Program Siri? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
You might be able to create a contact group "People who can blow you", give it an alias "the list" and then have Siri add contacts to it.
More of a hack but still entertaining.
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.
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.
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It's certainly the future [......]
It's certainly not the future, it's just a silly gimmick.
Better tell Google to stop wasting their time on Majel, then. The Iris developers too, and all their users.
Gimmicks are features that attract users to something but are of little relevance or use, like racing stripes or fake intakes on a car. Siri is definitely very useful (though totally dependent on a network). And what better indicator of relevance, than several competitors trying to copy your feature even as they claim it's useless?
If the article is true... (Score:2)
then that's probably the reason why we have Siri only on the 4S (yet).
Siri (Score:2)
What i find most fascinating abut siri is that it is advertised as a feature of the iphone 4 but in reality has nothing to do with it. transferring voice data has been around for a long time on mobile phones.
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:Siri (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually you've entirely missed what's at the core of Siri, and you're also wrongly giving Wolfram Alpha the credit for figuring out the intent of what you're asking Siri to do!
The core technology of Siri is the artificial intelligence component which was originally developed by SRI (S.R.I = "Siri") under a US army DARPA contract. The SRI project was called "Cognitive Agent that Learns and Organizes" (CALO), and was then taken by the startup company Siri who extended it into what it is today. Siri was then aquired by Apple.
The DARPA/SRI/Siri AI component is where the intelligence of Siri comes from - how it figures out what you mean (maintaining the conversation context and asking for clarification if needed) and how to do it. In some cases it might do what you ask by interfacing with applications (calendar, e-mail, etc) on your iPhone, in other cases it may do a web search or go to Wolfram Alpha to find or calculate information you've asked for, and in other cases it goes out to specialized web service to do "real world" stuff like ordering taxis or making restaurant reservations that you've asked for.
Wolfram Alpha has nothing to do with the smarts of Siri - it's merely one service that Siri uses once it's done the hard part of figuring out what you want and determining that Alpha is the appropriate way to do what you want. It's no different to Siri sometime using web search to get info for you if it figures out that's what it needs to do.
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No. It does not have any specific implementation on the iphone of the core functionality of the total system beyond the function of a terminal.
The access to siri, hosted somewhere else, is limited to *customers* who bought an iphone 4.
I can easily prove that it is not a feature of the phone: Disconnect from the net and try to use it. If it would be a feature of the phone, then the phone should implement it. And please: the fundamental functionality of voice recognitions does *not* depend on internet access.
CPU and energy limit (Score:2)
the fundamental functionality of voice recognitions does *not* depend on internet access
It does depend on access to a processor powerful enough to run the voice recognition and enough energy to do so. Handheld devices have far less capable processors and far less available energy than servers in a datacenter.
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Thats exactly right. So if you tell somebody to look at a commercial featuring siri on the iphone4 he would be mistaken to believe that this processing happens on his iphone.
And to be clear: i dont think that voice recognition on mobile devices is impossible. Local voice recognition (but no extended interpretation) on mobile devices *has* been implemented before, on devices less powerful than the iphone.
For what it's worth... (Score:2)
The H1 actually gets fairly good mileage for its size because its diesel... the H2 is the 10 MPG beast. You know, just splitting hairs ;-)
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Because the H1 was actually a HumVee, and the H2 was a converted pick-up truck. Guess that doesn't really matter though, when all any HumVee owner cares about is ostentatious status displays.
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.
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"You can back up your iPhone and even install iOS updates wirelessly"
Via wifi only.
Correlation != Causation (Score:3)
People who most heavily use a phone are the most likely to upgrade.
People who less heavily use a phone care less and don't upgrade as much.
The iPhone 4s has the heavy users who've migrated.
Leaving the iPhone 4 with still fairly heavy users who're stuck in a contract and so it's not quite worth upgrading.
Leaving the iPhone 3Gs users who are the ones who could've upgraded if they cared but their phone works and they don't do much with it anyway so why bother.
So clearly it's the new feature, Siri, on the iPhone 4s and not that heavier users are simply the ones who upgrade.
In other news, the s on the logo uses 20% more bandwidth! Scientists investigating bandwidth savings if only Apple would consider other lower bandwidth letters!
Although, sadly, as most blogs have discovered: Sensational headlines, even if untrue, do get attention. And scientists, even more sadly, are learning that attention, even in place of good science or basic statistical understanding, gets research funding.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Slashdot: Where smug assholes set up straw men, smugly beat them down, and then whine that Apple users are too smug.
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Actually, if you read the link, it's not a matter of cost, it's a matter of there's no way in hell any company in America could make 10,000 devices a day. The infrastructure and workforce is not there.
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ID10Ts screaming about Siri's 'carbon footprint'
D10Ts have a massive carbon footprint - and they're only fairly small dozers.
Re:Hi! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, we'd never want any articles about the world's most valuable tech company on a tech forum, amiright?
Re: (Score:3)
Of course not if it isn't free or bashing FB or MS it isn't welcome.
Re:Hi! (Score:4, Insightful)