Case improvements for iPhone 4 and iPad

Putting your iPad, iPhone or Galaxy Tab into a protective case seems to be a have to do. Other than the antenna problems of the iPhone 4, I am sometimes wondering why I spend this extra money.  But I do and  I can cite than I've not broken or badly scratched the viewing part of any of these devices as yet, so I should take that as positive value for the investment.

One of the shortcoming of many of the 1st generation of these cases is that they block, or at least make access difficult, the ports and buttons. I have learned to do as much testing with plugs and connections early after buying a case.

It is good to see generation 2 of these cases starting to come out. These upgrades are starting to do a better job of allowing access to the connections. A leader in this area is the company Speck, they have a new iPhone 4 case and a iPad case that at least allows access to the Apple connector. Have a look at the photo of their new iPhone 4 case below. I was not able to find a good picture of the functioning of the case on the Speck web site, however the web site CoolBeta does a good job of showing it off for them.

The case might work as a stand by itself as well, although no report on this function. I hope that companies like Speck continue to innovate in these areas, these accouterments could really add value to the devices. This should make me feel better about the amount of money I spend on these accessories!

 

Update, the Speck web site does have a picture of the operation of the CandyShell Flip, but only for their pink version. Guess my 'guy eyes' just did not jump to the pink one, rather the black on.... :-)

 

 

Here is another example of a 'added value' case for the iPhone, one that adds a hard keyboard. Again CoolBeta does a good job of showing a picture that tells the story. This add on is from ThinkGeek . Adding hardware peripherals to phones and tablets is going to be another area where cases will augment the core device.

 

 

Craig Hockenberry benchmarks original iPhone vs. the iPad

I realize that the form factor is considerable different between the iPhone and the iPad. However guessing that a not too power reduced A4 chip will most likely be in the next iPhone this year the performance increase in two and a half years is as Hockenberry says 'Holy crap!'. I would like to see how this compares with the Moore's law performance increase in desktop computing over a similar period.

More here:

Benchmarking in your lap by Craig Hockenberry

Native performance: Original iPhone vs. iPad

Test	iPad/3.2	iPhone/2.0	Faster by
100,000 iterations	0.000035 secs.	0.015 secs.	428x
10,000 divisions	0.000010	0.004	400x
10,000 sin(x) calls	0.000012	0.105	8,750x
10,000 string allocations	0.004321	0.085	20x
10,000 function calls	0.000338	0.004	12x

The most remarkable change is when you compare the original iPhone to the iPad. Using the numbers from my original tests and the results above reveals an improvement of several orders of magnitude in just over 2½ years. I believe the technical term for this is “Holy crap!”

Note: I don’t remember if the original tests were optimized builds, or if it was even possible to get gcc to do them with a jailbreak toolchain. Even if they weren’t optimized like the current tests, the performance increases are still stunning.

All-in-all, a remarkable achievement by Apple’s engineers, especially when you consider that the battery life of these devices has gone up, rather than down.