iPhone 4S Official, What’s New and First Impressions

It’s official! The iPhone 4S is real! And it does indeed still sport the exact same design as the iPhone 4 of 2010! Whether this is a good or bad thing though we’ll leave you to decide, however it now features an A5 dual-core processor with supposed 7x faster graphics than the iPhone 4, which Apple so amptly demonstrated with a nice live demo of Infinity Blade on the iPhone 4S in their ‘Let’s Talk iPhone’ event.

Blistering speed, amazing graphics

The demo clearly showed some serious graphics capabilities, and when combined with the iPhone 4S’s retina display, it really looks great. The iPhone 4S will also feature a battery life of 8 hours during 3G talk time, and Apple has also worked hard to change the way the antennae system works, stating that; ”Our engineering system has worked really hard at advancing the state of the art… it can now intelligently switch between the two antennas between transmit and receive.” What this means is that the iPhone 4S will be able to offer faster download speeds of around twice the speed of the iPhone 4.

It’s a world phone

As for networks, and the iPhone 4S is both GSM and CDMA making it a “world phone” as Apple likes to call it, or perfect for frequent fliers as we like to call it. This feature is a sure win for high flying business folk.

Much better camera

One massive hardware update the iPhone 4S has over the iPhone 4 is the camera. Amazingly, the 4S’s camera will go down to a whole f/2.4, and features a 26% improvement on auto white balance as well as a much higher sharpness. Unsurprisingly, Apple has thrown 3 more megapixels in to the iPhone and it now has an 8 megapixel snapper, capable of recording 1080p HD video which will be great for those of you who found 720p video a little low rent.

Siri, the personal assistant

Another very interesting thing about the iPhone 4S is its voice recognition capabilities, however Apple is dubbing this as a personal assistant. Called “Siri”, this feature will allow you to pose questions to your iPhone such as ‘what is the weather like in x’ and it’ll slam on some results for you on your iPhone’s display, as well as say them back to you. A neat feature, huh? On demonstration at the iPhone event, this feature worked a charm and received a fair bit of applause from the audience, especially when asked ‘who are you’ to which Siri replied ‘I am a humble personal assistant’.

Pricing and availability 

The iPhone 4S will be priced as follows in the US; Black and white versions 16GB: $199, 32GB for $299, 64GB for $399 and pre-orders for the 4S start this friday, the 7th and it’ll be available on October 14th (that’s this month for you eager souls). Confirmed countries include the US, Canada, Australia, the UK, France, Germany, and Japan.

Overall

Overall our impressions of the iPhone 4S are mixed. On the one hand we are really disappointed that Apple has done nothing aesthetically to the iPhone which we put down to being lazy. These new updates above however do bring Apple’s smartphone up to scratch against the competition on paper, and the addition of neat features such as “Siri” and that awesome camera make for one very handy bit of kit.

Is the iPhone 4S a worthy upgrade from the iPhone 4 though? Well anybody passing you in the street wouldn’t know which handset you had let’s be honest given that the display size is still 3.5-inches, but if you simply must have blistering speed, then we see no reason as to why you shouldn’t fork out for this handset.

In other news, we have already written on the possible iPhone 5 features coming in 2012 as an update to the iPhone 4S. Be sure to hit that up.