iPad Air 2 Up to 55% Faster Than iPhone 6, Up to 68% Faster Than iPad Air

A short time ago, we highlighted a new benchmark appearing to show an iPad Air 2 device carrying an A8X chip with a triple-core 1.5 GHz processor and 2 GB of RAM.



While we mentioned that the enhanced specs have led to huge performance gains compared to the A8 chip found in the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, Primate Labs has now published a nice pair of charts showing just how dramatic this improvement really is, making the iPad Air 2 far and away the fastest iOS device ever.



The most striking improvement comes in the multi-score benchmarks, where the A8X with its three cores of processing power blows away the dual-core A8 found in the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. As a result, the iPad Air 2 registers over 55 percent faster than the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus in the multi-core benchmark. Comparing iPad to iPad, the A8X in the iPad Air 2 measures 68 percent faster than the A7 in last year's iPad Air according to the multi-core benchmark.





The iPad Air 2 also sets new high scores in the single-core benchmarks thanks to the 1.5 GHz cores in the A8X, with much of the nearly 13 percent gain over the A8 coming from the 100 MHz speed improvement compared the 1.4 GHz cores found in the iPhone and 6 Plus. The iPad Air 2 of course also compares favorably to the original iPad Air, with single core scores up 23 percent.

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Posted in 2014 at 08:50PM, October 21

The awesome smart payment card Coin is looking for 10,000 more beta testers

Coin, the popular smart payment card that can store data for multiple credit cards, gift cards and loyalty cards for convenient use, is looking for even more beta testers in order to further improve itself, The Next Web reports.

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Posted in 2014 at 08:50PM, August 22

An ode to turn-by-turn navigation: Making ‘lost’ a foreign concept

Last week, I drove for 11 hours in a vehicle during a single calendar day. I decided to take such an endeavor the evening before, and all told, it took around five minutes to scope out the plan. The morning of, I settled into the adequately posh driver’s seat of a trusty rental car, tossed my iPhone into a Kenu Airframe mount, tapped a few screens, and threw it in drive.

And I knew that absolutely everything was going to be just fine.

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Posted in 2014 at 08:50PM, August 20

U.K. carrier says Apple Maps is crushing Google Maps in 4G and 3G traffic

Despite the criticism and jokes it's had to face, Apple Maps may be a hit product, U.K.’s main carrier Everything Everywhere (EE) has revealed in a recent press release detailing how its 4G LTE network is being used.

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Posted in 2014 at 08:50PM, August 11

The PS4 may be too popular for its own good

It's hard to imagine Sony would have much to complain about given that the PlayStation 4 is continually toppling its competition from Nintendo and Microsoft month after month, but stock shortages, which were heavily reported around the console's launch, have apparently endured throughout 2014. Speaking with TrustedReviews , Sony admitted that the PS4 is just now beginning to close in on a full production run.

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Posted in 2014 at 08:50PM, June 19

Jony Ive Speaks on Future Products, Working With New Materials

Over the weekend, The New York Times released an in-depth profile of Apple CEO Tim Cook. For that piece, the publication interviewed Jony Ive, Apple's head of design, and now The New York Times has released a transcript of the full interview with Ive, which points towards Apple's design philosophies, how the company has changed under Cook, and the new products that Ive is working on.



In an anecdote about Steve Jobs and the creation of small, highly focused design teams as his legacy, Ive says that Cook has continued on with Jobs' push for innovation, nudging Ive and his team into new areas of exploration that includes all new materials.

I've worked for the last 15 or 20 years on the most challenging, creative parts of what we do. I would love to talk about future stuff -- they're materials we haven't worked in before. I've been working on this stuff for a few years now. Tim is fundamentally involved in pushing into these new areas and into these materials.

Ive's statement about working with new materials is incredibly vague, but rumors have suggested that Apple has been experimenting with a range of materials that have not yet seen wide usage in its devices, including sapphire crystal, which may make its way into the iWatch and the iPhone 6, Liquidmetal alloys, which the company may use for various iPhone parts, and possibly graphene, which is seen as the hot new manufacturing material.



Apple has experimented with sapphire as a cover for the home button and the camera lens on the iPhone 5s, and Liquidmetal has been used in the iPhone 3G's SIM tool removal device, but both materials are ripe for extended usage in Apple's future devices.



Along with hinting at future products, Ive also spoke on a recent management change that saw him taking over the software interface design team, saying that the changes made in that department are not as dramatic as one might imagine as the design teams have always worked together closely. According to Ive, titles are unimportant at Apple. "That's not the lens through which we see our peers," he says.



The rest of Ive's interview can be read over at The New York Times . The full piece on Tim Cook, which has details on product development and Apple's plans for the iWatch, is also well worth a read.

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Posted in 2014 at 08:50PM, June 16

What’s really stopping Microsoft from adding one of the Xbox One’s most wanted features?

Microsoft has done a lot to make the Xbox One a better deal for gamers over the last year but there's still one feature that many are clamoring for: Backwards compatibility with Xbox 360 games. SlashGear points out that many Xbox fans are still banging the drum and asking the company to announce full support for backwards compatibility at next week's big E3 gaming show.

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Posted in 2014 at 08:50PM, June 04

Yet another report hints Galaxy S5 could sell for less than Galaxy S4

Could Samsung really sell the Galaxy S5 for just $400 off contract? Bloomberg reported earlier this month that Samsung was considering bowing to carrier pressure to slash the price of the Galaxy S5 and sell it for less than it charged for the Galaxy S4 when it first launched last year. Unwired View draws our attention to a new report from ZDNet Korea claiming that Samsung will knock around $100 off the price of the Galaxy S5 compared to the initial price of the Galaxy S4, although Unwired View notes that this price cut could only be for Korean customers who last year paid somewhere in the $890 range off contract for the Galaxy S4 when it debuted. Samsung hasn't yet announced pricing for the Galaxy S5 so it's possible that the company is still trying to decide or is still in negotiations with carriers over what it will cost. Either way, we won't know for sure until Samsung gives us the official word.

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Posted in 2014 at 08:50PM, February 26

Can Microsoft’s billions buy Windows Phone success?

Microsoft's Windows Phone platform is more than three years old now and its global market share still sits in the low single digits. The platform is starting to gain momentum in some markets thanks to Nokia's low-end phones, but Microsoft wants to make sure that momentum doesn't hit a brick wall when it finally takes over Nokia's devices and services business. According to one insider, Microsoft will use its sizable cash reserves to give various vendor partners the push they need to keep building Windows Phones. And that "push" will apparently cost the company several billion dollars.



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Posted in 2014 at 08:50PM, January 15