A lot of fuss going around the Apple lunch a few weeks back, a lot of innovation they say; the competitors are as always saying that Apple was not the first and they find devices that implemented something alike at some point. This is usually a never ending story from which myself as customer I only have to win from. Usually in the high-tech history so far, when a company didn’t have important competitors, the level of innovation, the money invested in research and development were very low. That’s why I hope that Apple and Android, Sony’s Play Station and Microsoft’s Xbox, and so on, will continue fighting for supremacy for a long, long time.
However, an important feature, from my point of view, of the new iOS7, a feature that wasn’t explicitly presented, is the Multipath TCP capabilities. If it’s the first time you hear about this, here is the RFC on the topic. Unfortunately, since I live 6000 miles from the US, it was hard to get my hands on an iPhone 5S, so the information I have are from other articles that I came across.
So what is the benefit? The benefits of this include improved network utilization, higher throughput, and greater resiliency by letting the network automatically and smoothly react to path failures. As the name states, a multipath TCP device is capable of transmitting data over multiple paths simultaneously. In plain English, it means that the device can concurrently use Mobile Data 3G and Wi-Fi to transmit data in the same time.
Source: Olivier Bonaventure
The capabilities discovered in the iPhone are limited to just a few application, so don’t expect to be used by Safari for example; at the moment it is limited to the interaction with Apple Servers and the best example identified for that is Siri.
Siri is an intelligent personal assistant and knowledge navigator which works as an application for Apple iOS. The application uses a natural language user interface to answer questions, make recommendations, and perform actions by delegating requests to a set of Web services. Apple claims that the software adapts to the user’s individual preferences over time and personalizes results.
It is a mystery how Apple plans to implement the protocol beyond its own servers, but it is speculated that the company in looking for ways to make iCloud services more reliable and this could become an important step. There are also no guesses if Samsung or other competitor has in plan to implement the same protocol, but in the process of improving the quality of the services and making the access to information more affordable all around the world, this could be an important step.
I go back to the motto of this article and state once more that for the end user, the competition between the producers is the best thing that could happen.
Hand-in-hand with Science 