Second iOS 5 impressions, beta 2

iOS 5 beta 2 has just been released.

This articles just comments a few differences, updates and so on from beta 1, so you should read that article also: http://girlyngeek.blogspot.com/2011/06/first-ios-5-impressions-beta-1.html

First of all, there is a prettier animated welcome screen, similar to the Mac OS X welcome intro, you see "Welcome" written in all iOS supported language moving along the screen.

When you restore from a backup, the setup assistant does not appear as it did on beta 1 (this is the expected behaviour).

iTunes sync per wifi is now working, or almost.

If you just happen to be intelligent enough to use your desktop wired to prevent famous wireless issues (read: disconnections, interferences, one tenth of cable speed) it will simply not work.

Indeed you may have experienced the same when using any other kind of wifi autodetection (like some third party apps with desktop counterparts use) or even with Apple TV syncing.

This is because all of that is done on Bonjour, a software service that allows auto discovery of devices, but sometimes does not work between wifi and wired networks.

So simplifying the question:

Do you have both iTunes computer and your iDevice running on the same exact wifi network? It will work flawlessly.

Do you have iTunes computer on a wire to the wifi router/access-point your iDevice is using? It will probably not work.

I've been testing for hours just to find my iPhone founds iTunes (using a Bonjour browser) but my computer does not find the iPhone, and, in any case, iPhone says it's unable to find the iTunes library.

There are also a couple of minor bug solved (that I can't talk about), but anyway the system feels almost like finished.

Finally, there is still nothing about iTunes Match, which in any case may not be available outside US until some months past launch.

** EDIT **

After rebooting, retrying, reconnecting, the iPhone appeared magically when I just forgot about it on the Bonjour browser on the iTunes computer, and now it is syncing via wifi.

The screen on the iphone simply says "pass 1 of 4" and on iTunes ("pass 1 of 6", funny) the device appears as if it were connected directly.

Speed does matter

In today's world, speed does matter.

We want to arrive as fast as possible to our works, to our homes, to our beds.

Then why are we still using slow networks in our homes?

When we have more than one computer in our homes, we usually connect them using an ISP provided switch, either by wireless or using cabled ethernet.

And those equipment is limited to a theorical limit of 54 Mbps when wireless, 100 Mbps when cabled. Even if our computers do support 300 Mbps wireless or 1000 Mbps cabled, we are limited by that piece of hardware, the slowest one, the switch.

And speed DOES matter, a lot indeed.

I did a little test using netstrain, a simple command line utility that being run on two computers measures the speed of the network between them.

Theorically a 100 Mbps cabled link should be able to transfer up to 12 Megabytes per second, in practice netstrain showed a slower speed of 8 Megabytes in practice.

Using a not so expensive Gigabit (1000 Mbps) switch gives a theorical transfer up to 120 Megabytes per second, 78 Megabytes per second in practice.

Yes, that's a 10 times faster speed, using just a 25 € Gigabit switch!!!

That means that transferring a file will take 10 times less time!

Stop using that crappy switch, spend a little bucks and get a Gigabit switch.

And forget all about wireless, unless there is a real and important need for it.

Cable is efficient to 80%, wireless is efficient to 60% under ideal conditions.
That ideal conditions stop to exist when you turn your microwave owen on, your neighbor receives a phone call in his new wireless phone, or you live in a building filled with ISP gifted wireless switches (like mine, with 25 different wireless networks on sight), making wireless efficiency fall to 10% and online gaming an impossible achievement.