It’s been nearly a month since I took delivery of my new iPhone 4s, so I thought I’d spend a few minutes taking a look at the latest Apple device that so many people expected so much from.
So what’s new? Well for me pretty much everything. Up until my upgrade I was struggling along with the original iPhone 3G so was massively in need of a new phone. My 3G pretty much ground to a halt when I stupidly updated my software to iOS5 – everything slowed down to a snail’s pace and the phone almost died every time I tried to make a call or even send a text, so the new 4s couldn’t come soon enough.
When it arrived I wasn’t disappointed. While the masses were left moaning about how boring the new handset was, I was left celebrating the iPhone 4S and the glut of top-end tech features that has bought my mobile phone to life again.
The changes to the iPhone 4S are simple to detail – the camera has been upgraded to 8MP, the CPU is now the same dual-core A5 processor as seen in the iPad 2, and there is a seven time increase in graphical processing power. Overnight I could take crystal clear pictures and video, check in on Foursquare in seconds and play Angry Birds in real time – basically it’s helped me love my phone again.
The one feature I have yet to be convinced about is the ‘male PA in my pocket’ – Siri. Yes it can tell me what the weather is going to be like tomorrow and how many calories there are in a bagel, but I have struggled to fully bond with ‘him’. 
Admittedly it’s a smart piece of technology, but it’s a nice to have, rather than a must have feature and isn’t something I can see me really ever needing to use (in fact I have disabled the feature, in part hoping it might help improve my battery life).
This brings me to the issue that has plagued the iPhone since they first launched and the only real problem I have with my new handset – the poor battery life. Reminiscent of the furore around ‘antenna-gate’ when the iPhone4 was launched, there have been a number of 4s users (including me) reporting issues with the battery life. Nobody know for sure what is causing the problem, but fortunately Apple has moved quickly to address the problem and is hoping to release a fix in the coming weeks which should sort the problem out.
In summary, for many the 4s is more of an ‘evolution of a handset’ than a ‘revolutionary new handset’ – but for me and anyone else upgrading from a 3G or 3Gs it’s a whole new world. I have no doubt that the 5 will be the revolutionary device that everyone was craving, but for now the 4s has everything that anyone could want from a smart phone (other than a longer battery life). No doubt like the rest of the world I’ll be keen to get my hands on the 5 when it is released but for now the 4s has more than enough features to keep me entertained.