The iPhone 4S is here, and ready to dominate once more, a year and a half after the iPhone 4 Changed Everything Again. It’s not looking too different on the outside, but don’t judge a book by its front cover: inside, it’s packing iPad 2 power, and there’s an extra special feature Apple wants to shout about, literally. It’s called Siri, and it’s ultra intelligent voice control for the computer in your pocket.
Sadly, Apple hasn’t changed the exterior much, meaning the same ultra-sharp 960×640 3.5-inch Retina Display and glass front and backs. It looks like Apple really is sticking to its guns on larger-screen phones being too big to use. Of course, it’s still a marvel to look at, so if you’ve got dainty fingers you may have no qualms with it.
On the inside, it’s running an A5 dual-core processor, as the iPad 2 does, and for the first time, a 64GB version will be available. Apple is quoting a 7x speed improvement and eight hour talk time over 3G, or 10 hours of video playback, which sounds promising, though we’ll wait until we get one to review before confirming. The camera has been upgraded from 5MP in the iPhone 4 to eight megapixels, a backlit CMOS sensor with an f2.4 aperture.
On the video recording front, Apple says the iPhone 4S can handle 1080p full HD video, and like the iPad 2, wirelessly mirror its screen over AirPlay to an Apple TV.
Apple’s also implying that antenna issues are a thing of the past, claiming max download speeds over 3G are now 14.4Mbps, if your network can handle it.
The iPhone 4S will run iOS 5 out of the box, but many of the new features have been known about for sometime, such as iMessage chat, a Notification Centre, ad-stripping mode in Safari (Reader) and the photo stream. But Siri is new, and headed only to the dual-core iPhone 4S – you can read more about it here.
The iPhone 4S is available on 14 October in the UK in black or white, with pre-orders opening on 7 October – that’s Friday, people.
Is it enough? What do you make of the iPhone 4S? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
Out TBC | £TBC | Apple
