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Speed of the Iphone 4 disappointing?

D

dizmonk

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Nov 26, 2010
1,159
764
I have a question. I'm one of these Verizon people likely to switch over. I went to my local Apple store to test drive the Iphone 4 and was surprised that it seemed slower than I expected. I currently have a Droid Eris and my main complaint with that phone is that it can be REALLY slow.

For those of you who have it... do you feel it is slow? In general is the Iphone 4 slower or faster than most Droid phones???

This has me rethinking if I want to wait for Iphone 5....
 
dizmonk said:
I have a question. I'm one of these Verizon people likely to switch over. I went to my local Apple store to test drive the Iphone 4 and was surprised that it seemed slower than I expected. I currently have a Droid Eris and my main complaint with that phone is that it can be REALLY slow.

For those of you who have it... do you feel it is slow? In general is the Iphone 4 slower or faster than most Droid phones???

This has me rethinking if I want to wait for Iphone 5....
Click to expand...

In my personal opinion, the store models seem slower than my actual phone. They usually have more applications open, different settings checked and its just not personalized as much to what you get use to. Another thing slowing it down could be having a lot of application "frozen" in the background. It will make it sluggish.

I was looking at an iPad model yesterday, it had over 100 apps in the background, it was extremely slow. My iPhone 4 is extremely fast, have never had a problem with it.
 
I also have the Droid Eris and I've grown to hate its terribly slow response time. I played with an iPhone 4 at Best Buy and I was very impressed with how responsive the OS is when navigating and opening apps. I also have an iPad and that's very responsive as well.
 
It could be a few different things. In general, ip4 is pretty fast, and is either on par or faster than friends droids depending. I would wait untill ip5 though if it were me, but to get on to verizon for the unlimited data now may be a toss up.
 
I think the problem is that most Android phones have quick animations. However you can jailbreak your iPhone, and install a tweak called FakeClockUp that will double (or more if you want) the speed of your animations. This makes the phone feel lightning fast. I'll never go back.
 
Honestly, I'd agree that the display models probably have a ton of apps open and that probably does slow/lag them.

I don't think iOS4 does a good job managing memory on its own and I disagree with Apple that you don't need to worry about what apps you have open. I've found I get a much happier experience with my phone if I manually manage what apps stay open and which ones I quit rather than letting everything run and letting iOS4 quit an app if it needs memory.

If I leave it alone and just let iOS4 do the memory managing, I find the phone can get laggy (it's not terribly laggy, just enough to be noticeable).

So, take that as you will, it is a fault of the iphone despite what Steve claims (pair that with a not so good way of manually managing apps yourself cause Steve claims you don't need to it's slightly annoying but honestly, I haven't found it enough for me to really notice, I still love my phone and really don't even complain about that, just some one's comment on here had me thinking, "Yeah, it doesn't manage a lot of apps at once well". Maybe they'll fix either the os memory management or improve the interface for managing apps on your own in iOS5. That would be great).
 
dizmonk said:
I have a question. I'm one of these Verizon people likely to switch over. I went to my local Apple store to test drive the Iphone 4 and was surprised that it seemed slower than I expected. I currently have a Droid Eris and my main complaint with that phone is that it can be REALLY slow.

For those of you who have it... do you feel it is slow? In general is the Iphone 4 slower or faster than most Droid phones???

This has me rethinking if I want to wait for Iphone 5....
Click to expand...
I agree with some of the earlier posters. Take one for a spin, test it out and return if you don't like it. Simple as that. ;)
 
Here's my other question... With the droid phones you can get an app killer which can automatically close open apps at various intervals. It helps a little with battery life and speed.

Is there a similar app for the Iphone (I assume there is.) And do you need it?
 
dizmonk said:
Here's my other question... With the droid phones you can get an app killer which can automatically close open apps at various intervals. It helps a little with battery life and speed.

Is there a similar app for the Iphone (I assume there is.) And do you need it?
Click to expand...

No... Apple's philosophy on multitasking doesn't let apps run fully in the background therefore no app is ever "running" in the background.
 
dizmonk said:
Here's my other question... With the droid phones you can get an app killer which can automatically close open apps at various intervals. It helps a little with battery life and speed.

Is there a similar app for the Iphone (I assume there is.) And do you need it?
Click to expand...
The firmware includes that functionality, in a way. With iOS, there aren't that many applications that you can get from the official App Store that will remain running when you minimise them, even if the application remains resident in memory.

And if Apple have approved an application to run when minimised, you can bet that it meets battery consumption requirements. I've had quite a few applications minimised and never had a battery consumption problem.

I think you'll find that Apple does pretty well with battery life altogether, honestly. It's not going to be a problem unless you jailbreak it and install a bunch of stuff without really thinking about what's going to be running all the time.

dizmonk said:
In general is the Iphone 4 slower or faster than most Droid phones?
Click to expand...
You might be able to find some particular test or another at which a high powered Android device might seem faster.

When you have a moment, though, you might want to look up some Youtube video of reviews by reputable personnel who are currently comparing the iPhone 4 to devices like the Galaxy and the new dual core devices built on the Tegra 2 (the LG Optimus 2X will be easy to find because it's about to hit retail stores).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSuRwn1RBPM

That is the phonearena.com browser comparison.

It seems to me that the iPhone 4 compares well to the very latest generation dual core devices and super-GHz devices, and I have to say that in day to day use with my iPhone 4, I do not in any situation notice any time that I'm lacking the power to do what I want (relative to its being a phone, after all).

And I am a pretty heavy user.

I only have experience with the GSM iPhone 4 on AT&T, of course.
 
No need for an app killer its built in.

double click the home button to see the apps running and just hold down one of the apps and you can click on the X to close any apps running.
 
Nicksd84 said:
No... Apple's philosophy on multitasking doesn't let apps run fully in the background therefore no app is ever "running" in the background.
Click to expand...

Generally, speaking, that's absolutely correct.

But there are design parameters if people want to meet them. Obviously, the iPod application runs in the background on the iPhone 4, for example. :)

App Store seems to be able to continue a download and installation in the background. And, technically, Mail, Messages, and Phone are "running in the background."

:)

I can't think of a third party application except those available on Cydia...and then we can talk about how fast your battery drains!

There are many Cydia applications with a very good reputation, though. The advanced call managers like iBlacklist and MCleaner run in the background without doing much to the battery life.
 
I have an iphone 4 and for everything I do with it I can tell you that its not slow. Its perfectly fast for me. :)
 
Nicksd84 said:
No... Apple's philosophy on multitasking doesn't let apps run fully in the background therefore no app is ever "running" in the background.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure what you mean, but I downloaded an app for my iPad called AudioMemos that "runs" in the background. It lets me record audio while doing other tasks. I open the app, start recording, switch to my note-taking app, take notes, switch to my book-reader app, back to the notes, back to AudioMemos... and it records the lecture the entire time. Also it changes the iPad's notification bar to red and lets me know that it's recording.

And I'm not jailbroken, by the way, if that matters at all.

So I'm just saying, I guess depending on the app, multitasking works better than you may think.
 
DDustiNN said:
I'm not sure what you mean, but I downloaded an app for my iPad called AudioMemos that "runs" in the background. It lets me record audio while doing other tasks. I open the app, start recording, switch to my note-taking app, take notes, switch to my book-reader app, back to the notes, back to AudioMemos... and it records the lecture the entire time. Also it changes the iPad's notification bar to red and lets me know that it's recording.

And I'm not jailbroken, by the way, if that matters at all.

So I'm just saying, I guess depending on the app, multitasking works better than you may think.
Click to expand...

That app isn't running fully in the background, just the recording function. Its a nebulous distinction, but if the whole app were running it would consume more resources.
 
George Knighton said:
The firmware includes that functionality, in a way. With iOS, there aren't that many applications that you can get from the official App Store that will remain running when you minimise them, even if the application remains resident in memory.

And if Apple have approved an application to run when minimised, you can bet that it meets battery consumption requirements. I've had quite a few applications minimised and never had a battery consumption problem.

I think you'll find that Apple does pretty well with battery life altogether, honestly. It's not going to be a problem unless you jailbreak it and install a bunch of stuff without really thinking about what's going to be running all the time.


You might be able to find some particular test or another at which a high powered Android device might seem faster.

When you have a moment, though, you might want to look up some Youtube video of reviews by reputable personnel who are currently comparing the iPhone 4 to devices like the Galaxy and the new dual core devices built on the Tegra 2 (the LG Optimus 2X will be easy to find because it's about to hit retail stores).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSuRwn1RBPM

That is the phonearena.com browser comparison.

It seems to me that the iPhone 4 compares well to the very latest generation dual core devices and super-GHz devices, and I have to say that in day to day use with my iPhone 4, I do not in any situation notice any time that I'm lacking the power to do what I want (relative to its being a phone, after all).

And I am a pretty heavy user.

I only have experience with the GSM iPhone 4 on AT&T, of course.
Click to expand...

Why would you specify that last part before the VZ version even exists yet?
 
yourmother said:
No need for an app killer its built in.

double click the home button to see the apps running and just hold down one of the apps and you can click on the X to close any apps running.
Click to expand...

That isn't a list of the running apps. That is a list of the most recently used apps.

A running app must be in the list, and removing it will kill it. But an app in the list isn't guaranteed to be running.
 
Think of an iPhone as a mini computer. Computers, no matter how good their management of RAM is, will always get slowed down overtime. Heck my iMac core i7 with 8GB of RAM can slow down if I have too many things running (like Parallels with Win 7).

As for the iPhone being "slow" in the store. Like I said, these iphone have probably been running all day with multiple things being open (Mail, iPod, Phone, Text) are always running in the background because they are official Apple apps.

Just go over to an Android phone in the store. They are slow as heck also.

It just depends on the last time the phone was rebooted.

I reboot my iPhone 4 at least 2-3 times a day. But I also reboot my Android Samsung Vibrant 2-3 times a day also.
 
I just went to the at&t store the other day, just to try it out, i looked under the multitasking and every app on the device was running (which was over 100) and it was running pretty good with all of them, but when i closed them all the device ran ALOT better and for "some odd reason" the battery didn't drain nearly as fast :rolleyes: The bad thing is in the store you aren't able to download apps but i was able to run a speed test and the first download speed was 1.7mbps and the second was 3.2 mbps so even the data speeds were really fast.
 
With my IP4, when it gets down around 20 or 30 meg remaining RAM, it gets slower than molasses flowing uphill. Killing a bunch of the "suspended" apps almost immediately makes it better.
 
Apple... said:
543.jpg

I agree with some of the earlier posters. Take one for a spin, test it out and return if you don't like it. Simple as that. ;)
Click to expand...

Simple and effective.
 
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