After getting a good night’s sleep to truly absorb the 4S, my take is that it’s a brand new model that doesn’t just offer incremental updates.
It does everything the iPhone 4 did plus a variety of things better:
- A dual core A5 processor versus the iPhone 4 A4 single core processor. The end result being twice the speed and up to 7x the graphics performance.
- Supports speeds up to 14.4Mb/s while the iPhone 4 supports speeds up to 7.2Mb/s. That’s good news for AT&T Mobility HSPA+ network users.
- Intelligently switches between antennas for improved call quality…and no more “antennagate” issues
- Offers far superior camera performance with 8 megapixel resolution versus the previous model’s 5MP spec. The optics in general were improved as well to offer up to 30% sharper images.
- 1080p verus 720p video resolution and lastly…
- it runs on both GSM & CDMA networks….thus making it a true take anywhere “World Phone”
For a side by side “tale of the tape”, our friends at Engadget offer a nice chart. As I hope you’ll agree with me then, even if you too have to “sleep with it’, with the improved performance, the iPhone 4S deserves to be recognized for its own merits as a very good new model.
For one last feel good, for those of you planning on buying the 4S, the physical dimensions and control features are exactly the same. So your existing iPhone 4 case will work. But if you need one or want to upgrade, we offer a wide variety of cases and other cool accessories from which to choose.
Unfortunately, the faster download performance is useless to those in the US, since AT&T’s HSDPA support maxes out at around 1.5Mb :(.
I find it funny that people is talking about the iPhone 5 as a successor to the iPhone 4S. The next one will be iPhone 6.
I’m starting to think that Apple is adopting a variation of Intel’s tick-tock product release model. iPhone 3, iPhone 4, and presumably iPhone 5 were/will be major hardware updates (ticks) whreas iPhone 3s and iPhone 4s were updates within a current product (tocks). iPad to iPad 2 seems like a tock a well.
A lot of folks were disappointed by the lack of 4G LTE, Near Field Communications, a larger screen with the same pixel dimensions and reduced pixel density, an aluminum-backed case, etc.
To them, I have to say, that is likely the iPhone 5.
Apple is very good at timing. They’ve learned over the years, that if you are going to succeed with a product, it had best work nearly perfectly on day one. They knew they could do the iPhone 4S nearly perfectly, and sell millions and millions of them to satisfied customers from day one.
So to those of you who are disappointed, I would only advise you to be patient. The reason they didn’t release an ‘iPhone 5’ at this time is that they didn’t want to release a less than almost perfect device, and reduce their customer satisfaction scores and incur the associated customer service expenses of doing that.
Even if the device were perfect, it is doubtful that enough 4G LTE network bandwidth is available in enough places to support the demand represented by 40 or 50 million new iPhones flooding the market in about a year’s time.
And even as Android phones move to 4G of one sort or another, Apple still has the #1 and #2 selling phones in the marketplace. That should continue with the 4S in the lineup.
Remember, with Apple, it is all about the total customer experience. Enjoy the 4S if you need a new phone.
God bless Steve Jobs. He’s made Apple a tool to learn and have fun doing it. May he rest in peace (you’ve earned it Steve).
You forgot one of the biggest feature. Siri.
Actually didn’t forget it…I was more about direct comparison to similar or same features. :-)
Siri does sound cool…though not sure about the name…I’ll always think about Tom Cruise’s & Katie Holmes’s baby girl…