New iPad Notes: Battery Charging at 100%, Safari Scaling Images

[MacRumors]

A couple of new findings as people spend more time with their new iPads. First, iLounge reports on findings by DisplayMate on the new iPads charging behavior. It turns out the iPad continues to charge for as long as an hour after it says its at 100%, suggesting the on-screen indicator isn't quite accurate and may still need more charging.

In an email exchange with iLounge, DisplayMate President Ray Soneira indicated that the third-generation iPad--when connected to power via the included Apple 10W Power Adapter--actually continued to draw 10W of power for up to one hour after reaching what is reported by iOS as a full 100% charge

iLounge found in their battery testing of the new iPad that sometimes the charge would drop initially quickly when they thought the iPad was fully charged.

Earlier in the week, Tom's Hardware noticed that Safari on the new iPad was automatically scaling large images down significantly.

Large images were automatically scaled down to near 1 megapixel resolutions. This means that if you are viewing large images through Safari, you aren't getting the full Retina experience. A workaround mentioned is to save the image to Photos which seems to preserve the original resolution.

These findings were confirmed by web developer Duncan Davidson who ran into the limit when trying to enhance his websites with Retina-sized images.

Article Link: New iPad Notes: Battery Charging at 100%, Safari Scaling Images

 

[Tiger8]

100% Charge

I noticed that on both my iPhones (3Gs and 4s), but not as long as 1 hour, the iPhone shows a 100% (still with a 'charging' indicator) on the battery so I keep it plugged in 10 - 15 more minutes, until it eventually keeps the 100% (but shows a 'plug' indicator).

 

[FFArchitect]

Very interesting. Web developers better add the image scaling consideration to the development checklist.

 

[Lordskelic]

What's the point of the retina display if the images are just going to be scaled down? Didn't apple think about this before they released the iPad 3rd Generation?

 

[kolax]

What's the reason for the large images being scaled down? iOS bug?

EDIT: For those who say it is for memory, cellular reasons or speed of the web browser, the iPad 3 is meant for high resolution images. If there's one available, and you are on WiFi, then why restrain it. It does have 1GB of memory..

This makes sense on other iOS devices, but the iPad 3's selling point is the retina display. Seems daft to downscale images below the 3 megapixel screen the iPad 3 has when a WiFi connection is available along with enough memory.

 

[palouf]

Images in Ios safari were already downgraded, is it the same issue Here

Hi all,

I remember having trouble reading an online comic because some strips were bigger than 2Mega Pixels, the image was unsharp, as if the number of pixels was reduced to 1/4th (was confirmed on the ios Safari specifications doc)

is'nt it the same kind of behaviour ?

update: https://developer.apple.com/library/safari/#documentation/appleapplications/reference/safariwebcontent/CreatingContentforSafarioniPhone/CreatingContentforSafarioniPhone.html

Know iOS Resource Limits

Your webpage performing well on the desktop is no guarantee that it will perform well on iOS. Keep in mind that iOS uses EDGE (lower bandwidth, higher latency), 3G (higher bandwidth, higher latency), and Wi-Fi (higher bandwidth, lower latency) to connect to the Internet. Therefore, you need to minimize the size of your webpage. Including unused or unnecessary images, CSS, and JavaScript in your webpages adversely affects your site’s performance on iOS.

Because of the memory available on iOS, there are limits on the number of resources it can process:

The maximum size for decoded GIF, PNG, and TIFF images is 3 megapixels for devices with less than 256 MB RAM and 5 megapixels for devices with greater or equal than 256 MB RAM.

That is, ensure that width * height ≤ 3 * 1024 * 1024 for devices with less than 256 MB RAM. Note that the decoded size is far larger than the encoded size of an image.

The maximum decoded image size for JPEG is 32 megapixels using subsampling.

JPEG images can be up to 32 megapixels due to subsampling, which allows JPEG images to decode to a size that has one sixteenth the number of pixels. JPEG images larger than 2 megapixels are subsampled—that is, decoded to a reduced size. JPEG subsampling allows the user to view images from the latest digital cameras.

 

[Cynicalone]

The battery is so damn big it is causing a lot of problems with charging. Overnight is really the best way to charge it. Because in use it really can't charge unless you don't use it. Or you crank the brightness way down.

Most games won't let it charge more than 1% per hour. Watching video will however let the battery charge slowly about 9% per hour. Surfing the internet let's it charge slowly 3 to 4% per hour. Reading in iBooks depends on brightness but I tend to get 2% per hour.

Nothing Apple can really do with a 10W charger and a battery that would easily power a 2011 MacBook Air.

I hope we see MagSafe in the iPad (4th Generation).

 

[JohnDoe98]

What's the reason for the large images being scaled down? iOS bug?

Maybe they forgot to update Safari

 

[nagromme]

This isn’t something new for the new iPad I don’t think.

I’ve long noticed that same down-scaling of big web photos on my iPad 2 and iPhone; I was never sure whether it was Safari or the web sites making the substitution, but now I’m thinking Safari.

If Photos can handle these sizes, then Safari should be able to as well. iOS 6?

(Re the battery meter: they always say to let the device fully drain occasionally, to keep the meter reading accurately. I never do because I just don’t care that much about a precise battery meter, only about the uptime delivered. But I wonder if that would reset the 100% mark correctly.)

 

[rmwebs]

Very interesting. Web developers better add the image scaling consideration to the development checklist.

Why should they? iOS shouldn't be doing it, period. If developers start adding this, they also need to add hundreds of other proprietary tags too.

---

As for the battery, the issue is USB. We're using a 5v crummy old usb cable to charge a laptop battery here. Apple should have supplied a new power connector as theres no way that they didnt know that charging was going to be significantly slower.

I plugged my iPad in yesterday and noted its charge at 20%. Exactly 6 hours later, it was at 60%. Thats not right.

 

[brdeveloper]

What's the point of the retina display if the images are just going to be scaled down? Didn't apple think about this before they released the iPad 3rd Generation?

Probably Safari scales images on the server side (like an Apple proxy, as Opera does with its Opera Mini "turbo mode"). This may be one more agreement between Apple and carriers to keep low bandwidth usage.

 

[baleensavage]

Large images were automatically scaled down to near 1 megapixel resolutions. This means that if you are viewing large images through Safari, you aren't getting the full Retina experience. A workaround mentioned is to save the image to Photos which seems to preserve the original resolution.

This is interesting. It was one of my initial questions with the iPad retina screen, how they would deal with Web sites which are for the most part 72dpi. So basically, any Web browsing is done in non-retina resolutions. This is disappointing. As a Web designer, it might be nice to have retina-optimized images on a Web site that will display the full resolution. I can understand them not wanting to shrink widescreen pages down to actual pixels because links and text would be too small to click, but they certainly could put some programming in there to display images at the highest resolution available. Of course this is also something that could likely be fixed by a Safari for iPad update.

 

[rmwebs]

Probably Safari scales images on the server side (like an Apple proxy, as Opera does with its Opera Mini "turbo mode"). This may be one more agreement between Apple and carriers to keep low bandwidth usage.

No. Wifi content does not go through a proxy. This is built into the Safari app.

 

[slicecom]

The Safari scaling issue is infuriating when looking for wallpapers. You simply can't look for them in your iPad because they're compressed to hell and scaled down to 1024x1024, you have to look for them on a computer, then transfer them to your iPad. I hope they fix this.

 

[bbplayer5]

Probably Safari scales images on the server side (like an Apple proxy, as Opera does with its Opera Mini "turbo mode"). This may be one more agreement between Apple and carriers to keep low bandwidth usage.

Um... what about wifi versions?!

 

[bpfesq]

Are there any 3rd party browsers that don't scale the images down?

 

[brdeveloper]

No. Wifi content does not go through a proxy. This is built into the Safari app.

Are WiFi images also downscaled? The MR post doesn't clarify this point.

 

[nwcs]

The battery thing isn't a surprise to me. I've seen notes like this about other LiOn batteries. It's a common knowledge thing for Nikon rechargeable batteries; you leave them in for at least 30 minutes after it appears charged. Also helps to remove it only when the battery is cool.

 

[Northgrove]

This isn’t something new for the new iPad I don’t think.

I’ve long noticed that same down-scaling of big web photos on my iPad 2 and iPhone; I was never sure whether it was Safari or the web sites making the substitution, but now I’m thinking Safari.

Same here. Pretty sure it's Safari in order to conserve RAM. I often come across cases where I'm not able to zoom into photos much on my iPad 2 even if the photos are high resolution.

 

[tlevier]

The Safari / Low Resolution image thing is probably explained by optimizing web pages to load faster. Low bandwidth is a bonus for carriers, but Apple wouldn't be considering them when building a wi-fi only iPad & iPod Touch. By re-sizing every image on every page, they can say their web browser is faster than the competition, which in all fairness, does make it more convenient. But what they never did, and they need to do, is to give you a tap capability to see a full sized / full resolution image.

 

[iMaconApple]

I'm sure it will be enhanced soon for the new iPad retina display..I paid top $$$ I want it to do what it's suppose to do.. Apple needs to fix this..like apple said on the key notes there's math on this retina display.. Time to do your homework apple and fix this..

 

[Menopause]

For those who complained about wallpapers, I got mine from twitter @RetinaiPadWalls (some really awesome ones btw), they cleverly upload them to cloud app for full 2048 x 2048 resolution so you can download them from Safari on iPad effortlessly. Check it out.

As for the battery I haven't seen the issue yet. Mine says done charging at 100%. Maybe an unlucky few?

 

[hushypushy]

Are WiFi images also downscaled? The MR post doesn't clarify this point.

yes.

Example: Downloading a 1920x1200 wallpaper at Speedhunters.com loads up a 960x600 photo in Safari

 

[tonyeck]

I noticed the image scaling bug when looking at my "original" images from Flickr and saw 5D mark II images being scaled to approx 1108px wide... Until I saved them to camera roll...

I was like "wut"?

 

[Riemann Zeta]

Wirelessly posted

Expecting a mobile device (even one with 1GB of RAM) to be able to render 10-80 MPixel images is a little nuts. Even if we ignore the download bandwidth, the GPU itself doesn't have the memory or the bus throughput needed to render such a large image to framebuffer.

As for the battery, I think the meter is wildly inaccurate for iOS 5.1 on the iPad 3. Apple will need to calibrate it better in the 5.1.1 update that is soon to follow.