Tag Archives: iPhone4

My iPhone4S after 3 weeks

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I had an iPhone 3GS for 2+ years and for a short time while still at AOL, I had an iPhone4.  When I turned in my AOL iPhone4 in December, I decided to grin and bear it until the next iPhone came out.  So was my game plan of waiting worth the wait?

There is no discernable difference between iPhone4 and iPhone4S on the surface, however, it only takes a few minutes of using the phone to know there have been some important improvements.

  • The connection speed is much faster.  Loading webpages, getting email, it’s all just much faster.
  • Getting my location is much faster, so loading Google Maps, Foursquare, Facebook Places, just works so much better.
  • The camera rules.  From videos to pictures, the quality of photos I am taking now with the iPhone is as good as my point and shoot.  Take a look for yourself:

Sunset with the iPhone 3

Sunrise with the iPhone4S

Here are some of the things that have not won me over yet:

  • While everyone is fawning over Siri, I have not really used it.  I think it has tremendous potential, especially once application developers can start fully taking advantage of it.
  • iCloud works, but it does not feel like a finished Apple product.  I can’t see what photos have synced via a web page and overall managing what is being synced between my 4+ devices was not as easy as it could be.
  • I had to do a full restore on my wife’s phone because every time we loaded a photo album the app would crash.  We could not delete the photos, nor could we restore from a backup.  The full restore seems to fix thing.

Moving from iPhone3 or 3GS to iPhone4S is a no brainer, but I would definitely hold off on moving from the iPhone4 to iPhone4S.  The camera, Siri and the better speed is not worth the upgrade in my opinion.

Oh the humanity…iPhone5 is actually called iPhone4S, Why does it matter?

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I have read at least a dozen different blog posts in the last hour from different sources about how Apple let us down today with iPhone4S.  Please, can we stop this?  Yesterday I wrote that Apple was going to call the next version iPhone4S, and that was just fine with me.

Of course after today’s reaction, Apple should have called the phone iPhone5 or iPhone10.  The point is version numbers of a product are always blown out of proportion.  It reminds me of the book and movie The Right Stuff, when Chuck Yeager broke Scott Crossfield’s speed record of Mach 2.0 by flying at Mach 2.44, no one cared because the “media likes a nice round number.”

Enough, let’s move past this.  The new iPhone is significant and despite what the media thinks, the phone is going to be the most popular mobile device sold in the 4th quarter. Here are my favorite features from today’s announcement:

  • Siri is going to be awesome to try.  I am skeptical that any voice recognition will work well, but the demo I got of Siri previous to today was better than any other attempt.  When I have seen people use voice recognition software in the past, they change the way they talk, to sound like a robot almost to interface with the device, but Siri is definitely different.
  • The camera rules, and the apps that go with the camera make it as good or better than point and shoot cameras.  The cold/warm start times to get the camera loaded for a picture is very impressive too.
  • More power and more speed for applications to use and for users to access information across the net.  Though it was disappointing that Apple did not deliver a 4G/LTE iPhone.
  • Most people will say the find your friends feature is lame and that Foursquare, Facebook and others have this market cornered, but the truth is that I might use this feature more for knowing where my friends and family are when they are running late or where my wife is when we go to a shopping mall.
I think there is a difference between pleasing the media versus getting consumers excited.  Apple will always focus on the latter and that should be applauded.  When people walk into the Apple store and when they see their friends using the new iPhone,  they are going to want one.