http://createdigital...d-goodness-today/

“Latency” isn’t one metric. Think of speed on a race car. Every little adjustment to the engine, gearing, weight, and aerodynamics has an impact. These results are cumulative. You can’t just get one factor right; you have to get all of them right. And that’s what made Android’s dismal audio performance complex to describe in the past. It has been a combination of factors – incomplete functionality in the developer API, a system mixer that added to latency, and device-specific issues being three major culprits.

Apple has done an excellent job with this on iOS, which contributes to their near-complete dominance of mobile for music apps, and justifyably so. But that should not be taken to mean that it’s impossible to achieve low-latency audio performance when working with a variety of hardware vendors. The Windows (or Linux) PC is a great example – both of what works (extreme low latency across devices using an API like ASIO) and what doesn’t (general-purpose mixers that drive latencies past a tenth of a second).

Based on what Android developers are saying, the platform is at last moving in the right direction. In fact, it’s in stark contrast to what we currently know about Windows 8 on mobile. The very same issues I raised last week in my criticism of what’s documented in Windows RT are the ones Android developers are at last addressing. Windows RT and the WinRT/Metro library for desktop and mobile, based on current information, not only lacks “nice-to-have” features like USB and multichannel audio on a new generation of Windows tablets, but also would seem to set unacceptable latency targets — 100 ms+, or where Android was a year ago. We’re hoping to find out that there’s more we don’t know; but we’re awaiting more information from Microsoft.

Things like this make me think I'm right to continue to wait before replacing my Palm Treo 755p. The Samsung Galaxy IV is supposedly due out before June of next year. I doubt it will have the indestructible flexible display next year that some have rumored - http://www.tgdaily.c...able-oled-display - but 2GB of RAM and a quad core would be make it more future-proof (for a few years anyway). Maybe the audio latency issues will finally be a non-issue by then.

The iPhone 5 is amazingly fast, but there are too many things about the ecosystem that I don't like (the battles between Apple and Google; the weird connectors; no option for micro-SD cards; etc.)

Cheers,
Scott.