iPhone 4S

Sure, this is a notebook forum, but figured I'd toss in a dedicated thread to the new phone anyway Hopefully it won't get moved to one of the sister forums, which are <del>kind of</del> dead....

So, thoughts? Feels kind of incremental to me. Undecided whether I want to upgrade from iPhone 4 to it tomorrow...probably will though....

 

I dunno I was disappointed. There really wasn't any reason to delay the launch till September. Its just an iPhone 4 with a dual core chip. I was hoping the iPhone 5 would be something revolutionary, like the iPhone 1.

Everybody has been catching up since the iPhone 1. The trouble is they've caught up now and all Apple did was buff the camera and made it a dual core phone.

That is pretty disappointing IMO. The siri thing looks pretty cool though, but its iOS5 you probably don't need an Iphone 4S for it.

At least it wasn't like the Ipod Touch, that didn't even get upgraded at all, and 64gb is still $400.

 

Apple could've called it iPhone 5, since what was the major difference between iPad 1 & 2 (not a whole lot...). It sucks for the touch line, as there is not much competition, so a zune player line might've been good for touchers in hindsight.

 

I think there are nice upgrades there for people who use them (camera, Siri). Unfortunately, I never use the camera, and I don't see myself talking to a phone unless the AI starts getting a personality (at which point I'll name it HAL).

The spec upgrades surely are nice, but as the owner of both an iPad 2 and an iPhone 4 with hundreds of apps, I haven't seen a single one that really challenges the current hardware. Maybe the games I play just aren't that intensive (i.e. I find Infinity Blade to be hopelessly boring)?

I'll still end up getting it though...no reason not to when you actually gain money from Gazelle in selling the old one (quite a lot depending on if you're eligible for an upgrade), assuming you're willing to lock in for another 2 year plan.

 

I don't think it's that surprising given that they did not do a major rework until the iPhone 4. This is only the second one. I'd love to have a dual core 4s if the battery life holds up.

 

Isn't it 200 something to upgrade? It is "new" so the price would be high.

 

Gazelle pays you $250 for a 16GB black iPhone 4 in new condition.

Although if you're not qualified for an upgrade, would the cost be more than $200?

 

My friend sold one on craigslist for like $410.

 

I think most iPhone 4 users don't seem to realize is that these upgrades such as the iPhone 4S are not targeted to iPhone 4 users. This upgrade is best targeted to the iPhone 3GS customers or even people who've never upgraded from the original iPhone or even first time iPhone buyers. This same thing happens every time there's a new Macbook that comes out. The owners of the previous model discount it as if Apple didn't do much to it to give them a reason to upgrade. That Macbook isn't targeted to the owners of the previous models.
I think the iPhone 4S is quite a huge improvement for my needs and as someone who never owned an iPhone I am definitely considering one finally. Some people are saying Apple was just playing "catchup" to the competitors? So? What's wrong with that? The competitors are always playing catchup to Apple. Besides, do people here always expect Apple to do something sooo fantastic every time? At the end of the day they are only humans that come up with these new features. Show me something soooo fantastically innovative from any of the other smartphone companies? I haven't been impressed with any of them tbh.

 

There is another thread discussing this:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/off-topic/615649-iphone-4s-what.html

iPhone 4 thread fragmentation!

 

Siri is awesome , Hopefully it works like Ironman's Jarvis.

 

I don't know you guys but .. It won't matter if they put a quad core i7 on the iPhone if the screen is to small to begin with

 

Too small? It is a phone, not an iPad.

 

Is there any info if Siri works offline?

 

Siri looks like it is really nice but right now it is only for the iPhone 4s despite me having an iPad 2 that, from what I have heard, actually has slightly more overall power than the 4s. So Siri for me is pretty much a bust since it won't work with anything I have and I am not about to pay an ETF to upgrade to the iPhone 4s either.

That was the real issue for me. This year, it seems like the iPhone 4s was more of a stander protocol update rather than something that was really impressive. When the iPhone 4 came out last year, I really wanted one. I couldn't since I was on Verizon so I went with the Droid X instead (which I think was really the next best thing at the time). I didn't see anything in the iPhone 4s that really makes me want to ditch my Droid X and upgrade. Siri is about the only thing that I really, really, really want but it isn't worth the $600 I am going to have to pay to upgrade early to the iPhone 4s through Verizon.

Now, I would be talking differently if had Apple come out with a larger display iPhone featuring a quad-core processor, major functions in iOS specific to just that phone, a longer battery life, and a metal casing. That wasn't the case so now I will have to wait until next year when the iPhone 5 comes out and my contract is up (which, in the end, will be better).

P.S. I believe Siri works only when a data connection (wi-fi and/or 3G) is available. The feature will be in beta when the iPhone 4s launches and it seems like it is going to communicate a lot with Apple's servers in order to understand the words it is interpreting especially since Apple is trying to enforce casual dialogue. I don't think Apple has confirmed this but that appears to be the case. Otherwise I think an entire 16GB iPhone 4s would be full with nothing more than voice data.

 

I guess this is true. Dragon Natural Speaking is a 2-3GB program and can only understand a single language. The iphone can understand 3 language so that would take lots of space.

Some other things I was wondering about siri. One of the examples was "Remind me to call me wife after work", or something similar. Ok I get that you will need to tag your contacts with "nicknames" such as wife, mom, dad, girlfriend.... Unless it somehow uses facebook to get that info. But mainly I was wondering how the phone knows when "after work" is. Does it just take 17:00 or some other time I defined, does it use the GPS to check my location and remind me when I am moving away from the place defined as work. Seems you might need to define some parameters before you can use this.

I am not sure if I will ever use Siri really. Basic voice commands to call someone while driving or replying is great. But Android can do that too. The weather demo stuff is pretty stupid. Clicking the weather app is way faster. I can open it look at it and check if it will rain before I would even finish the sentence "Do I need an umbrella today". And asking basic questions? while impressive I think I can use google faster than siri. It is really something that I need to try a few days. If Siri doesnt suck Apple should make a web demo where you can try it on a pc.

 

Hardware-wise, the just released iPhone 4s "caught up" to the more than 6 month old Galaxy S2.

 

According to the blogs, it sets up a geofence around your work location, and notifies when it detects that you've left that area. Probably doesn't involve much customization of parameters--your work address should already be input in your contacts if you're OCD about keeping your contacts up to date (like me)

 

I believe the command was "when I leave work"... so the geofence will properly trigger that.

 

And Sprint's Galaxy S II has 4G.

Must be nice to be a little behind in tech yet be able to sell at a premium to millions... no wonder Apple is so polarizing.

 

Yep and that 6 month old Galaxy S2 won't see the light of day in sales compared to the iPhone 4S even though it's been out longer.

 

The Galaxy "app store" (to the extent you could even call it a single store) is way too unregulated for my comfort (sort of like Amazon's ebook store). Especially if you like downloading a lots of apps each day just out of boredom. Add to that the risk of actually getting a virus or trojan on your phone...something you almost never have to worry about on the iPhone (as long as you don't jailbreak it or do something completely stupid of course).

You do see some really weird apps in Apple's app store too from time to time, but it's much rarer, and they usually get pulled pretty quickly.

It's disappointing that the iPhone 4S doesn't support 4G though, albeit understandable considering the state of the roll-out these days. Still not enough to make me switch over to the Samsung though.

 

# of sales matter to the average well-informed consumer how? The better product is what matters isn't it?

Fact is, they're both great, easily #1 and #2 anyway you look at it. It's akin to Apple JUST releasing SB Macbooks. Just pointing out it's a bit silly. Anyway, it looks like Apple is turning to software integration again. Good for them. But I would like to see the proper hardware to back it.

 

iPhone 4S: What can you say to Siri? | TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

 

And? I don't see what the point is in either of those comments. We can rewind to last year when companies were catching up to the iPhone 4 (in terms of performance) a good 4-6 months after it was released. So Samsung was playing catchup last year and now Apple is? Whatever floats your boat I guess.

My point is none of that really matters. It has nothing to do with sheeple, drones, or any other insult people will throw at iPhone buyers. Manufacturers do this type of stuff all the time. It took Dell and HP a while to finally get SB notebooks while Apple had them earlier than (almost?) anyone else. As I said, the iPhone 4 was ahead in terms of hardware and even many models released after it with 1GHz ARM processors still couldn't match the iPhone 4's performance. Lets also not forget that the iPad 2 has been ahead of all tablets and smartphones out now in terms of performance. Sure, the dual-core processor in a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is fast but it isn't garnering the benchmarks and performance that the iPad 2 has. So I guess everyone will be playing catchup to the iPad 3 when it comes out early next year?

Who gives a crap? Are people that petty that they will start pointing out things like this just so they can fuel the hatred fire they have against Apple for some unconformist conformist reason?

 

@kornchild:

Uh... you're saying exactly what I meant. Specs don't really matter as much because sales hinges on more than that... at least to the general consumer. Techies like most of the people on this site will focus on specs and customization, whereas my mother couldn't care less how many cores her phone has and if it supports active widgets.

That's where the polarization occurs, whether you agree with it or not. Maybe I should have added the "tongue-in-cheek" emoticon to my post.

 

did you expect it to have holographic 30 inch tv built in?
Its more powerful.. thats expected imo.

It was already powerful though, gfx in apps is amazing.

 

Yes. Actually, yes.

In fact, it also needs to be able to detect molecular composition, scan for disease, collect engineering-related data, and conduct various other forms of data analysis.

 

That would be the TriPhone.

 

Galaxy S is far, far from a sales disappointment.

The iPhone one was an incredible revolution. People understate how much it changed the world. The other iPhone iterations built up on that. I saw the previous iPhone 4 as the culmination of the original iPhone design, what the original iPhone would have been if they had the time and the resources and the money.

But six months after the iPhone 4 everybody else finally caught up. The Galaxy S for example. This is why I thought Apple delayed the launch. So they could come out with something revolutionary. A delayed launch for a dual core processor and a personal Cortana, is underwhelming. I was hoping for something that would change everything again, like the original iPhone or the iPad.

People say, well other competitors don't do that. Thats true, but that is what makes Apple great. They launch products like that. They took us from the original iPod to the clickwheel, to the ipod touch. Just like I expect an A student to produce A work I expect a revolutionary company like Apple to produce products that are ahead of the curve.

 

I thought I was quoting Bill Nye and not your post, sorry about that.

 

I definitely agree with you that the Android Market is very fragmented and much less secure than the App Store, however Jailbreaking is not as big a risk as people make it out to be.

Sure, you can get yourself into situations that may put the iPhone at risk to malware but for the most part, you have to go very far out of your way to get into that sketchy kind of stuff. Having been an iOS user (and jailbreaker) before, I say that alot of the Jailbreakers out there do so to gain functionality that Apple simply do not support.

Sorry to jump in but I felt that I needed to throw out my experience.
/end spiel

Anyway, on the topic of the iPhone 4S, I hope that they've bumped up the RAM. I would imagine that SIRI may be a bit taxing on 512MB.

As for the A5, iOS was already 10x smoother than Android running at 800MHz on a single core processor, so I hope that the trend of including a dual core processor doesn't ruin what made Apple king in the smartphone battery life division.

 

Anyone else is getting bored talking to People who want to explain you the 4s is just a 4 "clocked a little higher" ?

Anyway iam definitely getting this one on launch day. My 3gs is going to my girlfriend

 

I am only using 3g because i lost my 2g.
For me personally there isnt much reason to upgrade since i dont game on the iphone. I like responsive big screen with a lot of space for emails, texts or web pages, few apps which i happen to use on occasion are working just fine. Why upgrade...

 

Actually, Apple was "catching up" even in 2010... but it is really the launch cycle.

When the iPhone 4 came out in June 2010 it could slug it out with the top Androids - Google Nexus One, Sony Experia X10, HTC Desire and Samsung Galaxy S three of which were out before the iPhone.

It was not until April 2011 when you Samsung Galaxy SII, HTC Sensation and Motorola Atrix. That was ten months after the iPhone 4 release.

Now you have the iPhone 4S, a Q4 2011 release using Q1 2011 technology. I don't know. LG, Samsung, SE and HTC have already announced 4.3-4.65 inch phones with 720p screens, 1.5GHz dual core processors, 1GB of RAM and 4G/LTE.

I don't know, I think we will be still be seeing a new iPhone early next year. Not a 5, even if just to bring in upgrades like 4G.

 

All i can say is wait for the iPhone 5, I have a friend that is working on some of the tech on it, obviously he couldn't tell me much but its going to blow us all away.

Saying that Dual-Core processing and 1080 recording capabilities is never a bad thing.

 

why would they call it a iPhone 5... it should be a 6.

iPhone 1 = iPhone
iPhone 2 = iPhone 3G
iPhone 3 = iPhone 3Gs
iPhone 4 = iPhone 4
iPhone 5 = iPhone 4S
iPhone 6 = ????????

calling the 6th one iPhone 5 would be weird.

 

Skipping the number 5 entirely in the name would be weirder and probably confuse a lot of people even more.

 

No problem... sometimes things get mixed up.

As for the numerical naming of the iPhone, I'm surprised they are able to sell so many iPhone 4s in China.

 

My Iphone 4 has a cracked screen because it fell out its case a bunch of times right after I bought it. I finally wised up and bought an Otter case. I keep waiting for it to fail, but at the 1 1/3 year mark it still works. I thought about the 4S just for the peace of mind, but until the 1 1/2 year mark you pay the $350 penalty for a new phone. After that, the penalty drops away if you extent your contract by 2 years. But given the small value improvement (probably none for me personally), I probably will just wait for mine to fail.

 

If Apple's products have shown us anything (at least iDevices), its that you can't compare raw system specs between them and other devices from different manufacturers. The reason I say this is that the first iPad used the single-core A4 processor yet it was able to compete with tablets that were later released featuring 1.2GHz single-core ARM chips. The clock difference meant little in terms of benchmarks or even real world performance since the iPad was still noticeably faster. Fast forward to today and again, the iPad 2 with the A5 SoC is still outperforming other tablets and the preliminary benchmarks I have come across for dual-core 1.2GHz ARM chips still put the A5 ahead.

So the iPhone 4s might have similar clock speeds or less amount of RAM but that doesn't mean anything if it is still scoring higher in the benchmarks, performing smoother than the competition, and/or offering more higher quality apps. We can look at benchmarks all day for smartphones and compare them to the iPhone 4s. None of that will really matter since Apple has already established that the app experience is the most important factor when it comes to mobile products like this. The iPad would have been a complete failure had it not pulled in developer support. The iPhone would have flopped had Apple not garnered developer support. Someone can release a quad-core Android smartphone now that is over twice as powerful as the iPhone 4s. It won't really matter to the end consumer if the iPhone 4s still has more quality apps (which it will). Hence why the underlying hardware in a smartphone is less important than the actual experience it provides both with the OS it runs and with the apps available for it.

 

kornchild2002 is correct in that the A5 has the fastest GPU (sgx543mp2) out there, however the Exynos 4210, Snapdragon s3, and OMAP 4430/4460 all have faster CPUs. The choice for apple was clear as iOS uses more gpu acceleration.

But all these SoCs were still used in phones released Q1 and Q2 2011, we'll have quad cores Q1 2012 from nvidia... Still the iPhone is about on par with the Galaxy S II speed wise.

What like a 4.65inch 720p curved amoled screen, LTE, a 2000+mAh battery, and be even faster?

 

I don't understand the fascination with a curved screen. Is that so that it's more comfortable as a phone? Because I can't see how typing/scrolling/using a curved screen for everything would be better.

 

Hehe... so no one is going to buy the iPhone 4S yet tons of people commenting on Engadget waiting for the sites to come up for pre-order (seems only Verizon is working).

 

Quite honestly, if I was on the market for a phone, I would get the iPhone 4s. I think the issue was that tech news sites hyped us up and we also hyped ourselves up so when Apple released this incremental update, it seemed like a big letdown. Given Apple's past, we should have seen this coming since the iPhone 3G was upgraded to the iPhone 3Gs and then to the iPhone 4. It looks like Apple might do major updates once every two years with incremental ones in-between.

Either way, the 4s doesn't look like a bad phone and I probably would have purchased it but I am not on the market for a phone. I am just over a year into my contract with Verizon on my Droid X and I won't be able to do anything until November of next year unless I feel like paying a $350 ETF (which I don't). So I have to wait until next year before getting an iPhone and that will (hopefully) be the iPhone 5 with the holographic keyboard, 4.5" 1080p SAMOLEDLOL diamond glass display, extreme Intel Core i7 processor, 8GB of RAM, has the ability to run iOS and OS X in parallels, and comes with an app that will do my laundry for me.

 

I agree kornchild2002 it's about overall experience which is somewhat subjective. I didn't care that iOS has more apps I'll never use, I had a choice between an iPhone 4 & a Nexus S on launch day or the EVO 4G ( which I didn't think was ready for me on its launch day). In the end decision I valued the experience of the EVO's larger 4.3" screen & louder speaker for Google Navigation etc over the others. While I will certainly check out the iPhone 4S, the specs of the Nexus Prime suggest I would also potentially find greater value there but I'm excited to check out both in reviews & in person to make a personal decision.

 

Have you tried the Nexus S? The curve is subtle but interesting. I've only played with one for a couple hours so I can't provide a long term assessment. It was remarkably light and comfortable but I opted for the EVO 4G because of the larger screen & louder speaker. I look forward to trying the Nexus Prime which I hope also has a loud+good speaker & I'd pay a prorated Sprint ETF if the Nexus Prime with LTE lives up to the hype.. or even iPhone 4S if it happen to delight me.

 

Never mind....

 

I think iphones are slightly more polished devices overall then androids. Other then that a lof of people stick to iphones because a) they bought it when android s%cked; b) they bought used iphone extremely cheap or got one from at&t for free; c) they like specific apps that android doesnt have.

 

When I took a look at the iPhone last year, I passed on it because it did not have informational widgets. Something I have been used to with my previous Windows and Symbian phones was simple things like displaying my next calendar event on my home screen. I also preferred using larger screens. Than there were things like notifications, vCards compatibility, Bluetooth file transfer and OTA updates.

On the other hand I find iOS to have a much shorter learning curve, a more consistent look from app to app, which would lead me to think it would the user friendliness department.

I think which one offers than best user experience is subjective, depending on the type of user.

The excessive hype was probably caused by the delay in the release. It gave the impression that there was some new technology being worked out. In the end, it may just be Apple was putting the finishing touches on iPhone 5. iOS 5 does add a lot of nice new features to iOS like the drop down notification menu and OTA updates.

Given the iOS has its own ecosystem, the speed will always be sufficient since no app will be released which cannot run on an iPhone. In that sense, hardware specs could be irrelevant. Faster phones will require the developers develop apps to make the additional features useful. You really only buy faster phones, well like the way we buy faster PC's, for future proofing.

The matter I post on was whether the iPhone 4S is future proof enough for a two year contract. I think you will see an LTE version sooner than later, and waiting for that one is probably worth it.

Note: The AT&T version will be updated to display a "4G" indicator even if does not have 4G technology, which might make things really confusing.