A lot has happened since Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich.
Half of the smart phones out there use Gingerbread, Android 2.3-2.37. It works but it is clumsy.
With 4.1, Jelly Bean , we got a much smoother and more responsive interface and a much more flexible system of placing icons on the home screen.
With 4.11 and 4.2, maps got a lot better and would allow you to download local maps, so you can navigate even if you don’t have reception (as long as you calculate your route while you have reception).
Google Now got a lot better from 4.1 – on. It answers complicated spoken questions. It knows my work routine and tells me the expected traffic delays and calculated ETA when I go to work and come home. It notices when I leave the home or office wi-fi signal and generates a traffic message.
4.2 has “folders” on your home screens so you can put all your social apps in one and messaging apps in another and tools (wi-fi analyzer, calculator, speed test) in another.
4.3, just released, has a smoother, “more buttery”, response to touch. It has an improved bluetooth and an “always-on” wi-fi can be selected to know where you are at all times (you can turn this off, of course). It has better battery life and the ability to limit what apps children can download. It will be the last Jelly Bean. Key Lime Pie will come out at year end.
In a word the industry has really had some shakeups. Many of the early Gingerbread phones can’t be updated to Jelly Bean due to technical issues (like not enough RAM)and they are still on an old 2-year upgrade cycle. They can’t keep up with the little updates because they want to keep a fancy “shell” on top of plain Android and it takes time to re-write the shell. For this reason the pure Android phones, the Nexus phones, get the upgrades first, for me, I waited less than a week.

It took a few days but I finally got the download of Android 4.3. I got tired of waiting and used a trick (posted on line) to get the download server to send me the OTA (Over The Air) upgrade (via wi-fi).

I’ll keep you posted.

The screen is more responsive and hand gestures move the screen more reliably and smoothly, like butter, even an improvement over the first “butter” update (4.1?).
Location has changed a bit. I’ll keep you posted.

Android 4.3 was announced a few minutes ago (7/24/13). It will go out to nexus devices today. There is a new Nexus 7 tablet announced minutes ago.

Game of Thrones doesn’t start its next season until spring. For now I’m getting by with Continuum. Its my  second favorite. Dome is a bust. Suis  Its my third favorite. Grimm starts on Oct 25th. It’s fourth if it doesn’t get too sappy. I don’t have Netflix, to watch House of Cards. Maybe I can get by with Royal Pains if it  doesn’t get too sappy.  I have not developed an interest in Defiance.

I suppose you’re wondering why I even bother to mention a small upgrade to Android. Well, it’s just like when Microsoft introduces a service pack to an operating system. Windows 95 became much better with service pack 1 and file names could be longer and with spaces and wasn’t so dependent on 16-bit structure. The same happened with W98 and W2000 and XP. Well, you get the idea….

Jelly Bean (Android 4.1) was a big improvement over Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0).

I’ve been using 4.22 for a long time and the notifications and integration with  Maps are really neat. I get told in the morning and afternoon how the road conditions and traffic are for the expected commute (the one Google knows I make every day). You could get Douglas to talk about this easily, too. Note 2 users and Galaxy S4 users are operating with a similar version level.

Reports are that there is about a 10% speed improvement with 4.3 on the Nexus 4 (which is already plenty fast). And there is an option to leave the wireless system scanning at all times so the phone always knows where it is, using WI-FI location, even if you want to set the phone to only use your data plan to send/receive data. This takes advantage of the software in some apps that gather your location. This constant-scanning is turned off by default, but you can set it on if you want to use that feature for some game or social app. Another feature of 4.3 is an upgrade to Blu-tooth to 4.0. The Nexus 4 will be (is) the first to get this upgrade, which uses less power (better battery life) and has connectivity improvements, I think.

So, what’s going on? My guess is that the phone manufacturers are complaining that they need 6 months to get out each upgrade and that Android is too far ahead of them. Many have only offered one upgrade to their customers since 4.0 and they don’t want to work on 5.0 (Key Lime Pie) until the next big phone upgrade.

I talked about this before, they have been on a two-year upgrade cycle and would LOVE to have the next big thing match their marketing schedule. But Android has a team working on the present system and the next and someone to tell them to speed up or slow down to match various “political” developments.

LTE on the NEXUS 4 works fine and now T-Mobile has LTE. The NEXUS 4 originally worked (with only minor fiddling) with LTE in the original version 4.11 around Christmas last year. With version 4.22 a different radio (think of it as a radio driver) no longer worked with LTE. So the hackers installed either radio 33 or 27 and did a little fiddling and it works fine on the T-Mobile LTE network, which is now even in Portland. Some people claim a download speed locally of 30 Mbits (faster than most WI-FI !).

I’ll know next Wednesday (July 25th) what is really in the 4.3 over-the-air upgrade. In this case the “OTA” upgrade will come by WI-FI. Although I still hope (against hope) for LTE coverage with the upgrade, there is nothing (nota, zip) that suggests it will be there. But I have a “hunch” that it will be easy to make a minor change (hack) to implement it. That’s my HOPE, anyway…. In either case, I’ll wait and see how fast it becomes available before I give up the latest operating system (4.3) for this faster form of data coverage (LTE).

Android 4.3 (still Jelly Bean) is becoming available. It will be introduced formally in a week or so. The Nexus 7 (tablet) will probably be released that day too.

There has been no word about Nexus 4 (phone) going back to LTE. But there are already methods to converting the phone for LTE use for T-Mobile members wanting to take advantage of the new LTE (4G data) network being introduced all over the USA this year. It is operational in Portland and Honolulu, for example.

I’ll keep you posted.

Intel’s Upcoming Processors

My latest home processor upgrade was a while ago, a Q6600 quad-core 2.4 GHz processor with 65 nm technology. I’ve been running it overclocked at 3.0 GHz for years with no difficulties, aided by a better CPU fan.

If you look at the chart above, you’ll see it’s a few generations old. Kentfield was down-sized to Yorkfield at 45nm. Then came the Nahalem and Westmere processors and the (still-popular) Sandy Bridge and its down-sized brother the Ivy Bridge at 22nm.

HASWELL – 4^th  GENERATION CORE PROCESSORS

The just-released and soon-to-be-released Haswell processors are the current rage. They are the ones that have a new, lower-powered design and the multi-fin transistors that deliver faster response and are scalable to have different speed/power characteristics by playing with the number of fins. This is big news and represents a major improvement over the last big improvement, the high-K metal gate transistors of the 45nm Nehalem-era.

For the few of you that complain that I’ve told you all of this before, yes, I know. But it takes several times going over it in different manners to bring it home, so, bear with me. (At least it does for ME!)

The Haswells are an attempt to have a line of processors that scale well from server-grade, down through enthusiast-grade, through desktop-grade and into the ultra-light laptop grade.

NEW ULTRA-LIGHTS

This last category is very interesting to a lot of people who are tired of carrying their “luggable” laptop around, but don’t feel they have enough “horsepower” in a tablet computer or want a “real” keyboard for more than just texting to friends.

These are currently represented by touchscreen and non-touchscreen laptops running Windows 8 (the regular version). My opinion is that the most desirable machines to come out will have a keyboard and a touchscreen and will be able to run all the traditional Windows software, including Photoshop. You would expect them to have an HDMI port or an advanced wireless interface to your big screen TV. They would have USB3 connectors so you could connect to an external hard drive or blu-ray player with blazing speed, when at home. The biggest deals are that the graphics will be quite good for an integrated-graphics system and the battery life should be in the 6 or 8 hour range, and still fit in an extremely-lightweight frame. An additional feature is the use of a solid state drive (SSD). So you keep the operating system and relevant documents on the SSD and other things are in cloud storage or on your external hard drive at home, or, of course, a USB3 64 GB thumb drive.

The mobile processors, made for the ultra-books, use a soldered-on connecting grid, meaning the processor is not upgradeable on the ultra-book – hardly a concern for most of us.

DESKTOPS

There are a variety of fast, low-powered processors. For over-clocking, you might want to consider the “K” series (“K” at the end of the name) which give overclocking ease. Asrock mother boards claim to have a capability of overclocking a wider range of the Haswell processors, but I haven’t checked them out, yet. You have the usual choice between i7 and i5 processors, which is the difference between, respectively, hyper-threading or not. You have the choice of speeds and the size of L2 cache. The top-of-the-line being the fastest speed quad core, K series, with the biggest cache. All of them use the 4600 (“IRIS”) graphics processor, but at varying speeds.  Should be good enough graphics for all but the gamers.

BAY TRAIL PROCESSORS FOR TABLETS AT CHRISTMAS

This is a big change, and is rumored to be related to work at Intel at Hillsboro. The System(s) on a chip (SOC) to come out at Christmas are for the Windows 8“RT” machines like the Microsoft Surface RT ($499). The “bid” deal is that the processor will run either Windows 8 RT or Android (4.1). This is direct competition to the ARM machines and, for “hackers” like me, the opportunity to have both operating systems on the same tablet. It’s a gamble, but I think it will work and, maybe even, work really well. Probably, by then RT will have a service pack and come into its own, as many of the Microsoft operating systems do after the first service pack.

The difference, here, is horsepower. These will have less compute power but be more flexible than ultra-lights, with either Android or Windows apps, and have long battery life and a price range in the $500 range, compared to, maybe, twice that much in the ultra-lights. Unless you catch the Black Friday Special, either processor grade will be expensive for ultra-lights or tablets. Look for the ability to accept a micro-SD card to add 32 GB flash memory or, by then, 64 GB cards.

OVERVIEW

Here, the world will vote with its pocketbook as to which direction the market will go. It’s a bit like trying to predict politics or the news; you take your best guess and wait for some unpredicted event to alter the direction of it. I suspect that low cost (Android) and low-cost SOCs (ARM or, now, Intel) will prevail. But a machine that can also run traditional Windows software is a big plus. So, I will look closely at an Intel tablet-with-keyboard machine that has a micro-SD slot. I don’t need to crunch video-making for You Tube on a portable, and my phone or tablet worked fine for talking to Facebook or WordPress while in Kauai.