More Than Throughput: Next Generation Wi-Fi Testing with Ixia’s WaveDevice

It’s been quite some time since I first started writing for AnandTech, and without question there’s been a lot of changes that have happened to our testing methodologies in the past few years. One of the main issues that I’ve always been thinking about while working through reviews is how we could improve our testing methodology in a meaningful way outside of simply updating benchmarks to stay current. Internally we’ve been investigating these issues for quite some time now, and these changes have included the addition of SoC power efficiency comparisons and display power efficiency measurements. There are a lot of other changes here and there that I still want to make, but one of the major unexplored areas has been wireless radio performance.

Wireless performance testing is probably one of the hardest things that we could test, and for a time I had almost given up hope on deploying such testing within AnandTech. However life has a way of playing out differently than I expect, and in the past few months we’ve been working with Ixia to make Wi-Fi testing a reality. Ixia, for those of our readers who aren’t familiar with the company, is a traditional player in the networking test space. They are perhaps best known for their Ethernet test products, and more recently have been expanding into wireless and security testing with the acquisition of companies like VeriWave and BreakingPoint Systems.

We have done Wi-Fi testing before, but in the past we were mainly focused upon a relatively simple and arguably not particularly interesting test case: maximum throughput in ideal conditions. It was obvious that Wi-Fi in many devices is still not perfect, as subjective differences in reception and reliability can feel obvious. However, without any data or methods of replication it was hard to really prove that what we felt about wireless performance was really the case. To see how we’ve changed this, read on for the full article.

Hands On With the Apple iPhone SE

It’s probably not a secret at this point that a number of people were disappointed when Apple seemed to move away from the 4” form factor with the iPhone 6. It turns out that there’s a sizeable market for a smaller iPhone, so rather than letting the 4” size die away quietly Apple has introduced the 4” iPhone SE for those that want a smaller iPhone without having to buy something that is relatively out of date.

In the hand, the iPhone SE basically feels identical to the iPhone 5s. The design is pretty much the same with its lack of camera hump and sharp lines, but rather than polished chamfered edges Apple has elected to keep the chamfer sand-blasted matte. The weight of the phone is also noticeably less than the iPhone 6 or iPhone 6s, which is due to the lack of 3D Touch and the smaller size of the device. The display also looks to be quite similar to the iPhone 5s.

Other than this, I don’t really have a lot to say because it feels almost exactly like an iPhone 6s otherwise. As a heavy 3D Touch user, the lack of 3D Touch is noticeable, especially when playing back Live Photos. But other than that performance is similarly fast and I didn’t see any obvious problems, however many of these under the hood changes are going to be quite difficult to notice in the space of a few minutes as they’re quite subtle.

Although not quite in the realm of a hands-on, the main area of note here is the price as Apple has basically released a cheaper version of the iPhone 6s in a smaller size. In developing countries it seems that the cheaper iPhones are often the most popular, so it’s interesting to see how Apple has effectively upped the value of this version of the iPhone in a very big way. To get close to the 399 USD price point of the new iPhone SE, previously you had to get a phone 2 generations old with a relatively outdated SoC, so it’s impressive to see that now for the same price you can get something that has the latest and greatest in almost every way save for modem and size.

It’s also worth noting that Apple is basically completely uncontested in this part of the market. Although there are a lot of budget phones out there using 4″ screens to hit their respective price point, Apple seems to be the only OEM still playing in the 4” display size space for high-end phones. There are a few Android OEMs trying to keep phones at the 4.5-4.7” segment (i.e. iPhone 6s size) with similarly high-end specs, but no Android OEM is trying to sell a 4” phone with high-end hardware. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of effects this has on sales, although I’m not entirely sure that Android OEMs are going to be following Apple’s lead here as a smaller device makes battery efficiency more critical due to scaling effects.

Apple Releases iOS 9.3

Along with the iPhone SE and 9.7″ iPad Pro, today’s Apple event came with an official release of iOS 9.3. iOS 9.3 has been in beta for quite some time now, with there being both a developer and a consumer beta stream. While 9.3 isn’t a major point release, it is significantly larger than most of the minor iOS updates that are released, with there being both new features and bug fixes included.

For many users the most significant feature in iOS 9.3 is Night Shift. For anyone who uses or has has heard of f.lux, Night Shift is basically Apple’s version of the same thing for iOS. It alters the white balance of your display to reduce the blue component of luminance. There have been various studies on the negative effects of exposure to blue shifted lighting on a person’s ability to sleep, and with iOS devices generally having slightly blue shifted white points this can pose a genuine issue for users reading on their iPhone or iPad before going to bed.

Night Shift has a few options. You can forcibly enable or disable it from the settings app or from Control Center, and you can also set it to enable on a schedule. There’s also a slider that controls how far the white point is shifted toward red, with the warmest setting being about as far as you can go without disrupting usability.

Another notable iOS 9.3 feature is support for Touch ID in the Notes application. With the Notes app seeing more use and potentially storing more sensitive data after the release of the iPad Pro, being able to protect the content inside using Touch ID is a useful feature to have.

The Health app sees some changes as well. It now integrates deeper with the Activity application that gathers data from the Apple Watch, and includes a new dashboard pane that summarizes your exercise info from the Activity app. Previously the Health app would simply pull information from the Activity app and populate its own data sections, and better integration of the two apps is probably overdue. Apple has also added sliders in certain sections that can reveal featured apps that integrate and aggregate data in the Health app.

For iPhone 6s and 6s Plus users, iOS 9.3 adds 3D Touch support from the home screen for a few additional applications, including Weather, App Store, Health, Compass, Settings, and Stocks. 3D Touch support for Weather is a nice addition, and I was surprised by the omission when the 6s first launched.

iOS 9.3 will be coming to compatible iOS devices today. It will be supported on all devices that support iOS 9, which includes all iPads from the iPad 2 onward, and all iPhones from the iPhone 4s onward.