Here is the low down on the brand new iPhone which is being dubbed the most amazing iPhone yet, which it is just for the fact that it's the newest release in the iPhone family.
The iPhone 4S in all reality is not worth users with the iPhone 4 to upgrade. Now if you are upgrading from an older device 3GS and below the it is worth it. The two main selling points are Siri (which was originally and AppStore app) and the new A5 Dual-core chip. A lot of users were very disappointed to see that there wasn't any cosmetic change, and that the RAM wasn't upgraded to 1 GB. Apple seems to have focused their attention on the new iOS 5 and not as much on the inside components. They went out and recruited several members of the Jailbreak community which can be seen in the new notification system. The processor in the iPhone 4S is the same one found in the the iPad 2. I am very excited for the new phone just for the fact that I am indeed upgrading from the 3GS.
Macworld had this to say about the iPhone 4S:
Although the iPhone 4S sports a faster processor and an
upgraded camera, the feature that everyone will be talking about is
Siri. Siri, which replaces the Voice Control feature introduced with the
iPhone 3GS, allows you to speak commands to your phone and have it do
your bidding. You even activate Siri the same way as you did Voice
Control: by holding down the home button on the iPhone itself, or by
holding down the control button on your wired or wireless headset.
What I’ve described actually sounds just like Voice Control, but
Voice Control’s speech-recognition engine was severely limited. It
required a strict vocabulary and couldn’t do much more than dial your
phone or play music. Siri doesn’t require a strict vocabulary—if talk like Yoda even you try, it’ll generally figure out what you’re trying to say. That one leap makes interacting with Siri seem much more natural.
MG Siegler over at TechCrunch had
this to say about the iPhone 4S camera:
Much will be made about the upgrade from 5 megapixels to 8
megapixels with the iPhone 4S. But the bigger difference is the
engineering behind the new camera. Apple notes with pride that their
engineers were able to completely re-architect this tiny camera to
produce images that are on par with the nicest point-and-shoots
available. They credit five “precision elements” to record incoming
light (versus four in the already excellent iPhone 4 camera) and the
inclusion of a larger f/2.4 aperture to bring in more light.
Joshua Topolsky at This Is My Next had this to say about his experiences with the updated antenna:
During the announcement in Cupertino, Apple made a point
to call out the new (or rather, improved) antenna design on the iPhone
4S. The company claims the phone can “intelligently” switch between its
two antennas providing better call quality (and presumably fewer dropped
calls). In my testing, I did seem to be getting more bars more
consistently, though it’s tough to say if it made any big difference in
terms of call quality. As far as dropped calls were concerned, I
certainly didn’t notice any pronounced issues while testing the phone in
New York. I did have a few dropped calls, but I also have dropped calls
on my Nexus S — so I’m a little more apt to blame the network than the
device.
The following paragraph is from The New York Times:
Android phones seem to come out every Tuesday at 3:45
p.m. Apple updates iOS and the iPhone only once a year. So Apple had a
lot of catching up to do, even some leapfrogging. There are some rough
spots here and there; for example, every now and then the 4S’s camera
app gets stuck on its startup screen. And while the battery still gets
you through one full day, standby time is shorter than before (200 hours
versus 300). But over all, Apple has done an excellent job.
The question isn’t what’s in a name — it’s what’s in a phone. And the
answer is: “A lot of amazing technology. And some of it feels like
magic.”
All in all it seems that the biggest feature update is SIRI. I know that a lot of the Android users out there are probably reading this saying that they "have had that" for over a year now, but the Android voice command software is just that, not artificial intelligence like SIRI is. SIRI will revolutionize that aspect of mobile phones for years to come. SIRI works with all kinds of voice types, and if you have ever used Google's voice commands, it can be very frustrating to some users that have an accent, or at least an accent Google doesn't recognize. On an end note, anyone that has ever messed around with a jailbroken iPhone, knows just how limitless the boundaries are.
With that, though, the new iPhone 4S is a solid phone and only being a
subtle upgrade from the iPhone 4, it is a major improvement over the 3G
or 3GS. Either way, no matter what you are upgrading from you surely
will not be disappointed. It seems that Apple has really taken advantage
of that dual-core processor with the new iOS 5 and I am looking forward
to getting my hands on the new device.
