Wesley's Tool-Box

In Korea or Japan, loud camera shutter sounds from smartphones are a fact of life due to the voluntary standards for the camera-equipped cellphones meant to ease privacy concerns. Issues had already been raised as far back as 2001 in Japan and Korean government started taking action in 2003. These standards call for a mandatory shutter sound of certain loudness even in silent mode. In Korea, sound level is set to be between 60 and 68dBA.

Note that this is not mandated by law in either countries, so there is no legal repercussion for not honouring the standards. Still, it poses an annoyance in many legitimate circumstances, something that users in other countries would never encounter. Imagine that the phone will make a loud sound whenever you take a photo or a screenshot(!) even in silent mode. There are 3rd party camera apps that try to avoid the sound, but for the screenshots you would ultimately need a system-level hack. This means jailbreaking or finding an obscure bug/feature.

I noticed that this problem has been exacerbated on the iPhone 7 series because it is using two speakers instead of one. You'll now get to hear the noisy shutter sound even louder, in stereo. To get an objective picture of the situation, I brought out my iPhone collection for a round of sound level measurement for the camera shutter sound. Here's how they stacked up.


The test was done by measuring the sound using the "Decibel 10th" app on the iPad Pro 9.7". Tested iPhone was 40cm(16") away from the iPad's microphone. To human ears, an increase of 10dB is felt as the sound being twice as loud. This means that the integrated speaker got roughly two times louder since iPhone 5 onwards. Incidentally, this would've been necessary to meet the aforementioned Korean standards. The 60dB level must be attained at a distance of 1m(3.28'), and there is a decrease of 8dB for moving from 40cm to 1m. Taken together, it becomes obvious that the iPhone 4S and earlier models wouldn't be loud enough.

And as expected, iPhone 7 I bought in Japan was the loudest, even though the second speaker was facing away from the iPad's microphone. One consolation is that the sound heard by the subject isn't much louder than before; you only hear it as being much louder because the second speaker is facing you.

Meanwhile, the iPhones bought in the United States turned out to be relatively quieter even when the volume was set to the loudest. In fact, my iPhone 7 Plus had a very quiet shutter sound even though music playing on it was quite loud in contrast. This shows that Apple is intentionally boosting the speaker output beyond normal levels when the shutter sound is made on the Korean and Japanese models. It would be difficult for those who haven't used these models to realize how loud they are.

If you want to hear the difference for yourself, here's the video of the test that the results are from. If anyone had been wondering why I still try to get iPhones from the United States, this should be the answer.

Continuing from the last post, let's look at the indoor performance of the front camera. I took photos of a table in the living room where the kids have built what's essentially a toy village with Lego blocks. It should serve to show differences in colour reproduction, if any.


With the exception of iPhone 4, the colours look more or less correct, which is good. Also, the iPhone 7 did manage to take clear photos when the objects are closer, so it's doing a good job as its intended role of a selfie camera. 6S Plus result is fuzzier, but this time it can be attributed to a slight camera shake and would likely be nearly as good as 7 but with less pixels otherwise.

Next up, I took shots of the same scene with the rear camera, once with good indoor lighting and once with faint indirect lighting so I could observe how much noise can be seen for each cases. For the darker shots, I tried to have the camera maintain at or close to ISO 800 to make a close comparison.

It is pretty safe to assume that the latest iPhone has the best camera in general. The tradition continues with iPhone 7, which allows me to take impressive photos like the one you see here. But to truly appreciate the improvements, a good round of comparison is in order.

First, let's look at the basic specifications as reported by the EXIF data. For the rear camera, we have these values:

And for the front camera:
Last year's rear camera was mostly about the increased pixel count; with the quality improvement taking a back seat. Front camera did jump out of the 1.2-megapixel hole, which was overdue. This year, enhancing the image quality is back in focus. The sensor can now capture on a much wider colour space (DCI-P3, a.k.a. Display-P3, instead of the traditional sRGB), and the wider aperture on the new rear lens (f/1.8, up from f/2.2) should allow for lower noise and brighter night shots. Meanwhile, the front camera can now take 7-megapixel photos.

Smartphone software and hardware become more sophisticated by the year. So a new device is expected to be faster than its predecessor. But it's a balancing act of both raw performance and power consumption. The A10 Fusion chip in the iPhone 7 series has four cores - two high-performance cores and two power-efficient cores to do just that. It's supposed to be the fastest A-series chip yet while not impacting battery life. So how does it really do on performance? Apple claims up to 2 times faster for CPU and 3 times faster for GPU compared to 2 generations ago (iPhone 6 series). Let's see if that's true.


GeekBench 4 Result Details: 4S | 5 | 5S | 6+ | 6S+ | 7

GeekBench has been a standared in benchmarking CPU performance across many platforms. The 4.0.1 version that came out recently runs on iOS 9 or later, so I can only compare up to iPhone 4S. Still, you can see that iPhone 7 does indeed perform well. It is about 2.1 to 2.2 times faster than iPhone 6 Plus, and 35 to 40 percent faster than iPhone 6S Plus. We no longer have 2x performance jump like back in iPhone 5 - 5S transition, but things are in line with Apple's claim here.

My iPhone collection is constantly growing. When you lay them down like this with their boxes, it provides me with a nice view of how the technology is evolving. As with all things, though, old devices simply ceases to be supported by the manufacturer. The three iPhones at the top no longer receive any major iOS version updates and are stuck in their time. The new member of this is the iPhone 4S, topping out at iOS 9.3.5. I expect iPhone 5 to join this group next year because, along with iPhone 5C, it is the last in the line of 32-bit iPhones and iOS 10 visually warns about an app that's not 64-bit.

iOS updates or not, all my devices are kept in good working condition. So I brought them out for another annual round of tests. For this year's tests, devices from iPhone 5 to 7 had iOS 10.0.1. 4S, 4, and 3GS had 9.3.5, 7.1.2, and 6.1.6, respectively. Last year, devices from iPhone 4S to 6S Plus had 9.1. Let's take a look at the boot times.


Unless it's an old device that's feeling the weight of a new OS, newer devices tend to have a quicker boot time. Strangely though, iPhone 7 does not boot up as fast as its predecessor, and this was repeatedly observed. Perhaps this is due to the tested device having a large, 256GB storage and the system taking its time to test its integrity.

Shortly after finishing the battery tests for the earlier post, iPhone 4S and later generations received the iOS 9.1 update. Then the thought crossed my mind that I should have tested the "Low Power Mode" introduced with iOS 9. It's a feature touted as enabling you to use the phone up to an hour more by cutting off some background activities, reduce the screen brightness, and slow down the processor. Would it equally benefit different generations of the iPhones? I ran the GeekBench 3 again to find out.

Here, the only major differentiating factor would be the processor speed because the iPhones were in airplane mode and the screen brightness was manually set to lowest like the previous tests. I did re-run the tests for the 'normal' mode because the iOS version was changed from 9.0.2 to 9.1. And as always, the values are normalized to the designed battery capacity.



This revealed that Apple's claims were not overblown. With the exception of iPhone 4S, the iPhones indeed lasted significantly longer under Low Power Mode: about one and a half hours with 5 and 5S, and about two and a half hours with the Plus phones, which are around 30 to 50% gain. It seems that the processor is clocked down to squeeze out as much battery time as possible. On the other hand, the processor for 4S can't seem to throttle back for this mode, resulting in practically no changes. This means that for 4S, the real-life battery savings would have to come from other tweaks.


And if we measure how much work is done with each mode, it gets more interesting. It confirms that the 4S isn't doing anything different, while iPhone 5 seems to fully trade battery time for speed. Meanwhile, the newer generations are able to do more work under the Low Power Mode. This means that if the tasks you do a lot on your phone isn't impacted too much by this mode, it might not be a bad idea to keep this mode on while you do those things if you want to maximize battery life.

Battery life is something most smartphone users take a big interest in, sometimes more than the raw performance. What good is a fast phone if you can't use it long enough without recharging? For iPhones, this is especially important because you can't swap out the battery without disassembling. So I decided to test this as the time allowed.

Now, each of my iPhones had been used for wildly different lengths of time, so the level of remaining battery capacity would be different as a result. This would obviously affect the tests, so I checked the capacity using iBackupBot, as you can see here.


Fortunately, batteries were mostly in good condition, having 90% or more capacity left. The brand new iPhone 6S Plus actually had slightly more than it should. Still, the difference is non-negligible. So the results of my battery tests would be normalized to the design capacity to make the comparisons fair. The 6S Plus results would be lowered a bit while the others would be boosted, all according to their respective ratios.

For a heavy-load scenario like playing a game, I used the battery test included with GeekBench 3. This is available for version 3.3 and higher, so iPhone 4 and 3GS, which can only run lower versions, had to be left out. With this test, airplane mode was turned on and the low power mode was turned off. To see how much effect the display backlight has, the test was run with both lowest and highest brightness settings.



With the screen brightness lowered, iPhone 6S Plus pulls ahead of all other previous generations. It's an impressive feat, beating the 6 Plus at the second place by about two and a half hours. The gap significantly narrows with full brightness, but it still manages to stick around slightly more. Considering that this is done with 5% less design capacity, it's certain that the 6S Plus is quite efficient despite all the enhanced performance.

Meanwhile, the battery capacity of the Plus series is so large that it has enough power left over even after driving a bigger backlight and much more screen pixels. Overall, the Plus series lasts noticeably longer than the predecessors. Curiously, the 5 and 5S don't show much difference in regards to the screen brightness compared to the other models. It seems the characteristics of the screen used for these devices were different.