iPhone 4S review
I've been using smartphones since I got my hands on the 1st generation iPhone back in November 2007. Back then it was truly amazing and had so much promise. That was before we got the App Store. Then the iPhone not only became even more awesome, it also became a huge part of my business. The specs of the original iPhone seem totally quaint by today's standards, but it changed the phone business practically overnight. Industry darlings Nokia and Blackberry were knocked of their perches and are both rapidly plummeting towards irrelevance today. Now nearly everybody with a smartphone uses an iPhone or something that looks like an iPhone. In the same way the Mac changed the way people see and use desktop PCs back in the 80s by popularising mouse driven GUIs. So as the market leader it's only fitting to have a look at the latest from Cupertino to see what's next.
The Design
As industry pundits and the internet nerdosphere are quick to point out and moan about, the iPhone 4S looks more or less identical to the iPhone 4. It's a sandwich of glass with a tasty stainless steel and silicon filling. Mmmm silicon.
As I'm on a 18-24 month upgrade cycle for my phones (because I'm not totally mad/rich) I get to skip every other generation of iPhone, which means I'm only now upgrading from a 3GS. This makes the 4S a big change in terms of design for me.
It certainly looks beautiful, in fact it makes my 3GS look stone age in comparison, but it does't fit quite so comfortably in the hand due to the lack of any curvature in the back. That the back is made out of glass makes me a little nervous. I do try and avoid dropping my precious expensive electronics, but hey these things can happen. While I wouldn't take my phone outside without a case wrapped snugly around it, knowing there's an extra bit of glass to potentially break is a little unsettling. Still it is toughened glass so I guess I shouldn't stress too much about it and no doubt I'll stop worrying once I've had it for a few incident free months.
Colour-wise you can have any colour you like, as long as it's black. Or white. So I bought a white one. I like white shiny electronics, they have a sort of 2001: Space Odyssey, futuristic feel to me. They also don't show up finger prints so much which is a bonus.
The buttons on this phone feel great. The volume buttons are nice and clicky, they even make a nice physical 'click' sound when you press them. The home button similarly feels good, better than the slightly mushy feel of the one on my 3GS. It's firm enough that you won't accidentally press it but not too stiff, and also makes a nice natural click. The lock button has a similar feel to the volume buttons, so thumbs up there too.
The Specs
The 4S has a really fast processor and extremely fast GPU, that's pretty much all you need to know here. For some odd reason that must have to do with being 'vertically integrated' or something, it's actually much faster than all the other apparently higher-specced Android phones on the market. Crazy. The bottom line is the things screams, even when eventually it gets out matched in the never ending one-upmanship of the smartphone world, it's still gonna be an awesome performer.
The 4S like the 4 before it, has what Apple's marketing gurus call a 'retina display'. The theory being that the human eye can't make out individual pixels when something is pushing beyond 300dpi at normal viewing distances. To say it looks amazing is to understate how freaking awesome it is. 960x640 fills a good portion of my 24" monitor's pixels, and when squished down into a 3.5" display it looks like some kind of magical animated paper. Photos look incredibly sharp on it, text looks like it was freshly printed by a laser printer, it's gorgeous. As you'd expect from an Apple product, the viewing angles are great and the maximum brightness setting will make your phone visible from space*.
* Please don't dazzle astronauts with it.
The Camera
The 4S' camera deserves special mention. Compared to what my 3GS can produce it's night and day. Ignoring the difference in megapixels, the image is brighter, sharper and less grainy. It's hardly a DSLR replacement, but as the camera you've always got with you, it's really very good. Here's a sample shot I took down at the marina. Here's another shot this time taken indoors at night. To my eye I think at 100% the images look a tad over sharpened but if you scale them down a bit the quality is largely indistinguishable from a dedicated point and shoot camera.
From a technical perspective the camera app has been improved a lot. It's very speedy to both start and between taking shots, something which Apple went to lengths to stress when they announced the 4S. There's nothing more annoying than seeing something cool and wanting to take a photo of it, only for the moment to pass while you're thumbling around waiting for the damn camera to wake up. So any speed up here is a welcome improvement. The very nice clicky volume up button can also double as a shutter button when the camera app is running, making it much easier to hold the phone steady when taking shots. Unlike my 3GS, the 4S now has a flash, can overlay a handy 'rule of thirds' grid and has a nifty HDR function to help balance exposure in very contrasty shots. I consider non-bouncable flashes pretty awful in general so I'd consider the one on the iPhone (or any camera really) to be there for emergencies only. In fact 3rd party apps let you use it as a flashlight or emergency beacon, which is probably the most useful thing you can do with it.
The 4S can now shoot full 1080p video which looks pretty decent, although like all sub-60fps 1080p video tends to look a little juddery/wobbly when handheld. This is somewhat helped by some fairly effective electronic stabilisation, but you'll need steady hands, a steadycam or some kind of tripod adapter if you want to make something that looks broadcast quality. I'm pretty fussy though, so I'm sure the YouTube crowd will love this thing and inducing motion sickness in their viewers.
Oh yes there's also a VGA quality front facing camera for video conferencing or using the phone like a mirror for when the need arises (and lets face it, it does).
Update - here's a nice sample video I found on Vimeo.
The Software
The software is where the real magic is of course. The 4S ships with iOS 5, the fifth major version of Apple's trimmed down version of OS X for ARM devices. Handily for both users and developers like me, iOS 5 runs on every iPhone as far back as 2009's 3GS. All without hacking your phone, snark. I can't be arsed to go over all the new stuff but Apple has kindly provided a list.
The AI
So the 4S comes with something called Siri, which is described as an intelligent agent. Born out of a DARPA project, Siri aims to make your life easier by letting you reply to text messages, setup calendar events, reminders and so on using your voice. None of this stuff is terribly new, but what is cool about Siri is that it is very good at figuring out what you mean no matter how you phrase your questions. Indeed it's basically engineered to puzzle out your natural language question and answer it without you having to learn a particular grammar or syntax. Importantly it also understands context, so if you're asking about the weather for today and then add 'how about tomorrow?' after you've had your answer, it knows you're still talking about the weather and gives you tomorrow's forecast. In practice it seems to work really well most of the time. I really look forward to seeing how this grows over time, I think it's going to be pretty big. It's just so much faster to say 'schedule a meeting at 2pm tomorrow' than to tap into the calendar, tap to tomorrow, tap add an event, set the time etc. You can do that all while holding the phone up to your head just like you would a regular phone call, easy. Here's a little convo with Siri to give you a taster. Even when I'm not terribly clear asking it to cancel the lunch it figures out what I mean. The bleepy noises are Siri entering and exiting listening mode which can be activated by either picking up the phone, clicking the button on your headset or on the screen. You get a transcript of your conversation, so where it's faster you can go in and make corrections or tap buttons to confirm or cancel.
The Conclusion
The iPhone continues to be the best smartphone money can buy, so long as you you can afford it and aren't interested in hacking your phone. There are a few areas where Apple could improve, it would be nice to be rid of the glass back for example, but generally the quality of the hardware and software are top notch. You can get a 4S unlocked from £500. Typical cost on a 24 month contract is about £100 upfront and £30 a month. The Guardian has a handy breakdown of all the tariffs and TCOs for the various UK networks.
The Design
As industry pundits and the internet nerdosphere are quick to point out and moan about, the iPhone 4S looks more or less identical to the iPhone 4. It's a sandwich of glass with a tasty stainless steel and silicon filling. Mmmm silicon.
As I'm on a 18-24 month upgrade cycle for my phones (because I'm not totally mad/rich) I get to skip every other generation of iPhone, which means I'm only now upgrading from a 3GS. This makes the 4S a big change in terms of design for me.
It certainly looks beautiful, in fact it makes my 3GS look stone age in comparison, but it does't fit quite so comfortably in the hand due to the lack of any curvature in the back. That the back is made out of glass makes me a little nervous. I do try and avoid dropping my precious expensive electronics, but hey these things can happen. While I wouldn't take my phone outside without a case wrapped snugly around it, knowing there's an extra bit of glass to potentially break is a little unsettling. Still it is toughened glass so I guess I shouldn't stress too much about it and no doubt I'll stop worrying once I've had it for a few incident free months.
Colour-wise you can have any colour you like, as long as it's black. Or white. So I bought a white one. I like white shiny electronics, they have a sort of 2001: Space Odyssey, futuristic feel to me. They also don't show up finger prints so much which is a bonus.
The buttons on this phone feel great. The volume buttons are nice and clicky, they even make a nice physical 'click' sound when you press them. The home button similarly feels good, better than the slightly mushy feel of the one on my 3GS. It's firm enough that you won't accidentally press it but not too stiff, and also makes a nice natural click. The lock button has a similar feel to the volume buttons, so thumbs up there too.
The Specs
The 4S has a really fast processor and extremely fast GPU, that's pretty much all you need to know here. For some odd reason that must have to do with being 'vertically integrated' or something, it's actually much faster than all the other apparently higher-specced Android phones on the market. Crazy. The bottom line is the things screams, even when eventually it gets out matched in the never ending one-upmanship of the smartphone world, it's still gonna be an awesome performer.
The 4S like the 4 before it, has what Apple's marketing gurus call a 'retina display'. The theory being that the human eye can't make out individual pixels when something is pushing beyond 300dpi at normal viewing distances. To say it looks amazing is to understate how freaking awesome it is. 960x640 fills a good portion of my 24" monitor's pixels, and when squished down into a 3.5" display it looks like some kind of magical animated paper. Photos look incredibly sharp on it, text looks like it was freshly printed by a laser printer, it's gorgeous. As you'd expect from an Apple product, the viewing angles are great and the maximum brightness setting will make your phone visible from space*.
* Please don't dazzle astronauts with it.
The Camera
The 4S' camera deserves special mention. Compared to what my 3GS can produce it's night and day. Ignoring the difference in megapixels, the image is brighter, sharper and less grainy. It's hardly a DSLR replacement, but as the camera you've always got with you, it's really very good. Here's a sample shot I took down at the marina. Here's another shot this time taken indoors at night. To my eye I think at 100% the images look a tad over sharpened but if you scale them down a bit the quality is largely indistinguishable from a dedicated point and shoot camera.
From a technical perspective the camera app has been improved a lot. It's very speedy to both start and between taking shots, something which Apple went to lengths to stress when they announced the 4S. There's nothing more annoying than seeing something cool and wanting to take a photo of it, only for the moment to pass while you're thumbling around waiting for the damn camera to wake up. So any speed up here is a welcome improvement. The very nice clicky volume up button can also double as a shutter button when the camera app is running, making it much easier to hold the phone steady when taking shots. Unlike my 3GS, the 4S now has a flash, can overlay a handy 'rule of thirds' grid and has a nifty HDR function to help balance exposure in very contrasty shots. I consider non-bouncable flashes pretty awful in general so I'd consider the one on the iPhone (or any camera really) to be there for emergencies only. In fact 3rd party apps let you use it as a flashlight or emergency beacon, which is probably the most useful thing you can do with it.
The 4S can now shoot full 1080p video which looks pretty decent, although like all sub-60fps 1080p video tends to look a little juddery/wobbly when handheld. This is somewhat helped by some fairly effective electronic stabilisation, but you'll need steady hands, a steadycam or some kind of tripod adapter if you want to make something that looks broadcast quality. I'm pretty fussy though, so I'm sure the YouTube crowd will love this thing and inducing motion sickness in their viewers.
Oh yes there's also a VGA quality front facing camera for video conferencing or using the phone like a mirror for when the need arises (and lets face it, it does).
Update - here's a nice sample video I found on Vimeo.
The Software
The software is where the real magic is of course. The 4S ships with iOS 5, the fifth major version of Apple's trimmed down version of OS X for ARM devices. Handily for both users and developers like me, iOS 5 runs on every iPhone as far back as 2009's 3GS. All without hacking your phone, snark. I can't be arsed to go over all the new stuff but Apple has kindly provided a list.
The AI
So the 4S comes with something called Siri, which is described as an intelligent agent. Born out of a DARPA project, Siri aims to make your life easier by letting you reply to text messages, setup calendar events, reminders and so on using your voice. None of this stuff is terribly new, but what is cool about Siri is that it is very good at figuring out what you mean no matter how you phrase your questions. Indeed it's basically engineered to puzzle out your natural language question and answer it without you having to learn a particular grammar or syntax. Importantly it also understands context, so if you're asking about the weather for today and then add 'how about tomorrow?' after you've had your answer, it knows you're still talking about the weather and gives you tomorrow's forecast. In practice it seems to work really well most of the time. I really look forward to seeing how this grows over time, I think it's going to be pretty big. It's just so much faster to say 'schedule a meeting at 2pm tomorrow' than to tap into the calendar, tap to tomorrow, tap add an event, set the time etc. You can do that all while holding the phone up to your head just like you would a regular phone call, easy. Here's a little convo with Siri to give you a taster. Even when I'm not terribly clear asking it to cancel the lunch it figures out what I mean. The bleepy noises are Siri entering and exiting listening mode which can be activated by either picking up the phone, clicking the button on your headset or on the screen. You get a transcript of your conversation, so where it's faster you can go in and make corrections or tap buttons to confirm or cancel.
The Conclusion
The iPhone continues to be the best smartphone money can buy, so long as you you can afford it and aren't interested in hacking your phone. There are a few areas where Apple could improve, it would be nice to be rid of the glass back for example, but generally the quality of the hardware and software are top notch. You can get a 4S unlocked from £500. Typical cost on a 24 month contract is about £100 upfront and £30 a month. The Guardian has a handy breakdown of all the tariffs and TCOs for the various UK networks.