IPhone 4s – Review

By Moseley Labour

IPhone 4s

A conversation between an iPhone 4s owner and a non-iPhone 4s owner.

Non-4s owner: Oh is that the new iPhone 4s

 4s owner: yes it is

 Non-4s owner: Ok, well it just looks the same as the 4 really doesn’t it?  They have not really done much with it.

This is the start of a number of conversations that I have had with friends and colleges when they have noticed my iPhone. Until you actually experience the phone and use it on a daily basis you wouldn’t really tell the differences between the last iPhone.

So on Oct 4^th I was eagerly following the apple event and live blogs. After using my iPhone 3gs for two years, it had been dropped, scratched and just generally battered to within a whisker of its life. Its fair to say that it was time to move on. When the iPhone 4s was announced, like many I was a little disappointed. Looking back on it now it was fairlyignorant of me especially coming from a 3gs.

So lets get the externals out of the way first. The iPhone 4s is pretty much the same on the outside as its predecessor the 4. There’s the same 960-by-640-pixel retina display and the screen size remains 3.5 inch’s. The iPhone 4s is however a few mm larger than the 4 and this may apparently mean it may not fit into all the cases designed for the 4.

So to find the differences you have to delve into the inner workings of the phone its self. Firstly the processor is the dual core A5 processor that is found in the iPad 2. This gives the phone twice as much speed as the 4 and seven times faster graphics whilst still remaining power efficient. The ram is still 512mb and not the 1gb that people were hoping for, however the processor upgrades still give this phone the edge. This upgrade is noticeable especially if you’re upgrading from the 3gs. Every app loads up faster and the graphics on games such as Infinity Blade look absolutely amazing, you sometimes forget that your actually playing these games on a phone.

Next we move onto the storage of the phone. As always there are 16gb and 32gb models available. The 4s now sports a mammoth 64gb version also, just in case you can’t live without every digital media file you have ever owned.

The most notable improvement has been that of the camera, the iPhone’s camera has always been some way below standard compared to competitors.  The 4s sports an8-mega pixel-resolution camera with a custom lens. This custom lens has 5 lenses sandwiched into it, which allows for greater intake and shaping of incoming light to make any image sharper and brighter. Also an improved backside illumination sensor, excellent auto white balance, advanced colour accuracy, face detection and reduced motion blur make this a truly competitive stand alone camera let alone a phone’s. Throw in the ability to record true 1080p HD videos and then edit those videos directly on the phone using iMovie. This truly has now become the camera of choice for so many people.

The last major feature to talk about is that of Siri, which was not actually developed solely by Apple. Back in 2010 there was a Siri app available on the app store and Apple eventually bought the company and pulled the app from the store. The tech press only briefly talked about it, now though it features fully integrated into the iPhone 4s.

Yes voice recognition has been around for a number of years but not in such an intuitive manner. Siri doesn’t just understand a command, it’s able to understands structures and meanings. You can ask the same question in a number of different ways and it will understand the concept of what your asking for and produce the right results.

This voice-controlled feature is now integrated in the keyboard also. This means that full speech to text dictation including punctuation, has been integrated into all aspects of the phone. This can be used in emails, messages, twitter etc. This process works in the same way that Dragon dictation does. Server’s process speech, then the text is sent back to your phone.

Overall it shouldn’t have been a surprise that Apple would just update the 4. The 4 was considered the best smartphone on the market, therefore why would they change a winning formula. The update they have done to the 4s have meant that this is truly the best smartphone overall.