Introducing iPhone 4S
Today Apple announced the release of iPhone 4S—the forthcoming member of the iPhone family. The iPhone 4S brings a major internal upgrade—what Apple is referring to as “entirely new” guts—while maintaining the physical design of the iPhone 4. Here is an overview of some of the major new features of iPhone 4S:
iPhone 4S contains Apple’s dual-core A5 processing chip, which brings up to 2x more power and up to 7x faster graphics than iPhone 4. The A5 processing chip in the iPhone 4S is efficient enough to support up to 8 hours 3G talk time, 14hours 2G talk time, 6 hours 3G browsing, 9 hours Wi-Fi browsing, 10 hours of video playback, 40 hours of audio playback or 200 hours of standby time (whew!).
Apple has revolutionized the cellular antenna with iPhone 4S, which can switch between two antennas to transmit and receive. This allows for improved call quality as well as up to 2x faster HSDPA data speeds—a maximum of 14.4 Mbps (iPhone 4 tops out at 7.2 Mbps). According to several live blogs, during the the keynote Apple referred to these speeds as “what [our] competitors call 4G.” Additionally, designed to be a world phone, iPhone 4S supports both GSM and CDMA.
The camera in iPhone 4S has also gotten a substantial upgrade. As Apple highlighted today, iPhone is the top camera on Flickr. Accordingly, the camera upgrade is intended to make the iPhone 4S’s camera “better than a point and shoot.” iPhone 4S contains an 8-megapixel camera, a new lens with f / 2.4 aperture and a hybrid infrared filter. Together these features—combined with the A5 chip and new backside illumination sensor—add up to sharper, brighter, more color accurate higher-resolution photos taken at faster speeds than with previous iPhone cameras. As an added bonus, on iPhone 4S the Camera app is accessible from the Lock screen! iPhone 4S will also allow for in-app editing of photos and support 1080p HD video recording with video image stabilization and noise reduction.
iPhone 4S will exclusively feature Siri, the personal assistant software that supports voice command and dictation. Available in beta on the iPhone 4S with built-in support for English, French and German, Siri works with most of the built-in apps on the iPhone 4S. Siri fulfils to requests for the weather forecast, stock market updates, directions and much more. Perhaps the coolest of Siri’s abilities is that it recognizes natural language and can respond to inquiries such as “What’s the traffic like around here?” Learn more about Siri and check out a video on how the software works on Apple’s website.
The iPhone 4S will be available in three storage configurations, including a 64 GB model, at the following price points: $199 (16 GB), $299 (32 GB) and $399 (64 GB) with a new 2-year AT&T, Verizon or Sprint contract beginning October 14 in stores. As with iPhone 4, iPhone 4S you will be able to choose either a black or white model. Do you plan to upgrade to iPhone 4S?
