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ipod touch 4G good testing substitute for iPhone 4?

Discussion in 'iOS and tvOS' started by gunga, Jun 1, 2012.

  1. gunga

    gunga

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    Jan 2, 2012
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    I'm looking to get a testing device and I don't really need the features of the phone so I was wondering if an iPod Touch 4G would give me a similar test environment to an iPhone 4?
     
  2. Jessy

    Jessy

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    Jun 7, 2007
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    7,325
    2010 and 2011 iPod touches offer the same horrible specs as the iPhone 4, yes.

    Edit: I forgot about the RAM, sorry. 512 MB for iPhone, half that for iPod touch.
     
    Last edited: Jun 3, 2012
  3. gunga

    gunga

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    Thanks. I'll get one then.
     
  4. rextr09

    rextr09

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    Dec 22, 2011
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    Can you name some android phones that give similar performance to ipod touch 4th? For example, is it roughly equal to a galaxy S1? or galaxy ace? or gio?
     
  5. gunga

    gunga

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    I know there's no substitute for real testing but this site is useful for comparing specs
     
  6. rextr09

    rextr09

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    Thanks, but it does not match to real world, since they have different architectures and screen resolutions.
     
  7. DavidByers

    DavidByers

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    Dec 31, 2010
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    I think the iPod touch would be better than the iPhone 4 for testing, as it has less memory. I ran into a problem that I missed in Love Me Not where it would crash on an iPod touch but work fine on my iPhone 4.
     
  8. gunga

    gunga

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    Cool, seems it'll work well. Didn't want another phone as i have an iphone 2g, and i have access to a iphone 3gs, 4s and an ipad2 (family members devices) so an Ipod touch 4G fills the gap nicely for me on the iOS side. On the Android side i have a HTC Desire HD and a Novo7 Elf tablet.
     
  9. markofjohnson

    markofjohnson

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    Oct 12, 2010
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    68
    We just had a case in Hit Tennis 3 where we attained 60fps on an test iPhone 4 using retina, but we suffered frame drops to below 30fps on another iPhone 4. The user experience difference was noticeable and a problem. Why the difference? The test iPhone 4 had a deactiv sim card and had not been running other apps. The other iPhone 4 is someone's main device with an active sim card, and was being used normally. We noticed that location services were running, and we could see hardware resource starvation in the unity profiler every couple of seconds, which showed up as big blobs in rendering time. So what was the problem? Our best guess is that various background processes were competing for resources, esp the app that was still getting frequent location updates in the background. (The user of the phone uses location based reminders.) Our game doesn't use all CPU resources, and the slow down showed up as rendering time, so why would background processes interfere with the game? I think that the problem is the shared memory bus. GPU rendering needs to read from main memory, which is in competition with the background processes active on the CPU. We were able to solve the problem by reducing memory usage by increased compression of texture sizes. This optimization improved performance on all devices.

    So my point? An iPod touch 4G is a great device to test on... retina pixels but not the fastest hardware. But... a 'test' device is not the same as a live device. In the real world, your game has to share the hardware with background processes, and it does make a difference. Try activating push email and location services with a 'greedy' app that gets frequent location updates when its backgrounded. Maybe try a background audio streaming app running.