iPhone [A]4

Notes

Below is an email that I sent out at work after we were reminded of the new features of the iPhone 4. You know, video calls, front facing camera, double resolution, multi-tasking. I thought it was worth posting here.

In addition to these [features], something which I think is significant and largely overlooked: the A4 processor.

While Apple haven’t released exact specs on the particular chip they’re using in the iPhone 4 (they never do, it’s up to those who dutifully disassemble and jailbreak them), they have revealed that it is an A4, the same kind used in the iPad. The iPad has a 1GHz A4, but I’d be very surprised if we were to find a 1Ghz one used in the iPhone, mostly for battery and heat reasons. I do however expect that it will be more beefy than the 256Mhz ARM which is in the 3GS (I’d hope for a bit more RAM too, especially considering the introduction of multitasking).

What does all that mean? Well page loads should be faster (page rendering is not a cheap thing on such a small device), apps have more grunt to play with, and if we get that extra RAM, then Safari can cache more pages, and we have a bit more in the way of resources to play with before the iPhone can’t do anything. It means that both sites and apps can be even richer, that things like the Smokescreen (http://smokescreen.us/) javascript flash runtime will be faster, that we have something that little bit closer to a computer in the palm of our hand.

I expect Gruber to post something similar to this in the not too distant future, but you heard it here first.