Great, honset review. I have an iPhone4 and while I do believe it was a great improvement over the 3, especially the glass cover, which seemed to give me better tactile feel and didn't get as greasy, there is nothing that seems earth shattering about the 4S. Your points are really excellent. I heard Robert Scobbel say yesterday on Google+ that Siri is going to be the next biggest "step" in tech. I think that's a joke. It's another voice command assistant. Whoopee doo. The fact is he is right that we will be seamlessly integrated into technology, though it won't be because of Siri.

I particulary like your line, ""We'll just keep releasing new versions with incremental improvements so that people keep buying the same product over and over again"

I feel that they have breached some trust with this latest release.

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Thanks for your comments Tony... I think I saw that post about Siri. I agree wholeheartedly with your comment about the breach of trust... I feel like the corporate world is forgetting more and more everyday that the customer is NUMBER 1!!!

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I thought it interesting that in the USA Today article about Steve Jobs on Thursday last week, they attributed to him a philosophy that electronic devices are merely consumable products that wear out their usefulness in six months. It seems that the general public has adopted that attitude.

I have owned the DROID-X phone for the past 14 months and have had very few issues with it. I am sure it will work well for me going right into 2012. BTW, it came with an 8MP camera when it was released in the summer of 2011, and its predecessor (the DROID Bionic) has a 13 MP HDTV video camera!

I think Apple will have a tough time staying in the lead with Jobs gone now.

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I had just a few comments on this...

1. Chaning display sizes for iOS is problematic. Graphics are designed at certain dimensions to look perfect on the screen, changing that dimension would stretch objects in ways that would pixelate and distort the image/quality. For items like retina display and ipad the basic dimensions were they same from the original iPhone they just multiplied by an even number so that the image was an even 50% - for the iPad this meant pixelation but because the shape was the same the items were not distorted. For designers of apps, they didn't have to create multiple graphics for different types of screen sizes, they just had to put out 2 different versions of graphics one an even 50% of the size of the other. Not sure if that makes sense the way I am explaining it. Right now, designers have to save out seperate graphics for 2 different iphone screen resolutions and another for the 1pad. That means every image is saved out 3 times. This is a pain but it would be even worse if they changed the screen size to an entirely different dimension.

2. 4G is a marketing term taken way too far by Phone companies. There is no standard to determine whether or not something is officially 4g or not. In fact, the new iPhone will be pushing out data speeds equal to if not faster than phones that have previously said they were "4g" -- don't fall for the marketing campain, it's just a letter to make you belive something is faster. Look at the actual benchmark data and see how it holds up in the real world.

3. I agree that live wallpaper and widgets are super cool however they take away valuable sysem resources from the processor and the ram. Apple designs its own A5 chip to use very little processor or ram... in fact it even underlocks it's chip in the iPhone 4. This means having to cut back on things like live wallpaper that looks great but sucks up resources. Also, by underclocking the processor they can keep the heat down and improve battery life while still only runing a fraction of the ram that other phones use. These items result in less expensive internal materials, and better use of resources which means that your iphone will do what you want it to without issues (usually!) -- as opposed to competitors phones which advertise fancy features and then slow down to a crawl when you try to throw a couple of complex tasks at it at once.

4. Correct, externally the phone looks almost identical however the camera is vastly improved. As you said, megapixels have very little relation to the quality of a photo and while the 8 megapixel bump is glady appreciated what makes the new camera especially nice is the upgrade to the lens and and the A5 chip which has it's own signal processor. The upgraded lenses alone are worth the upgrade if you use your camera to take phoes. The new additions means a larger f/2.4 aperture which lets in more light, so photos will look brighter and better than they did before especially in low/bad lighting situations.

5. You probably won't notice the speed bump unless you are REALLY into gaming or you hold the two phones side by side. Compared to a 3GS it should aqually be quite noticable how much faster but let's be honest an app opens in 5 seconds or 1 second... does it really make that big of a difference? The truth is while it may not be something you need these things will continue to get faster as new items get realased... at least until it's so fast that there is no point in upgrading the speed at all.

6. Siri is more than just voice commands. Heck, I'm sure your 3gs has voice commands (most smartphones do) - just hold down the Home button for 3 seconds. But Siri isn't exactly the same. Currently you can tell your phone to do certain items but you have to word things precicely. They are programmed to hear maybe 5-10 different sentances in a certain order and that is about it. Don't try to speak too quickly or with an accent and heaven forbid if there is any background noise at all. But with Siri we now have a form of artificial intelligence in your phone. Not only can you speak casually (and not like a robot) but you can ask things any way you want. From math problems to questions about the world, you can have it dictate emails and text messages and make changes on the fly that you couldn't before. The program analyzes what you say and interprets that data based on your conversation so if you were talking about setting up a reminder for tomorrow and then you tell it nevermind, move that to next monday it will understand that your new command is related to the previous command... Best of all it learns as time goes on. I expect this time next year it will be an even better service.... I guess it's hard to explain without seeing it in action.

All I can say is this. Touch screen devices existed FAR before the iphone (I had 3 of them)-- but none were any good and when I heard that the original iPhone was going to be a touch screen device I rolled my eyes (oh god... here comes another stylus) but apple didn't just put out another touch screen device, they changed the entire way you interact with touch screen devices and now you would be hard pressed to find a NEW phone that has physical buttons. -- All I am saying with SIRI is don't let your pre-conceieved notion of voice commands make you skeptical about what apple is doing because what you have seen before is poor implementation and hopefully what you are going to see is voice done right.

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Thanks for your comments Oscar, I must say I have changed my mind on certain aspects since writing this article and the subsequent release of the actual phone. Still not worth my investing 600+ dollars to upgrade my 3gs... I can't help but giggle, as I read the extent of your comments, and have to ask: do you work for Apple? lol

thanks again for your comments, hope to talk to you again ;)

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I just noticed the review at the top telling me that it is a classless move to criticize Steve Jobs. LOL!!!

While I'm sorry for the man's death, and he seemed like a great human being, for one I never mentionned him in this article, and for 2, let us not forget that he was a business man. With investors. And bottom lines.

My opinion stands. It is despicable for a company to keep releasing the same product with incremental improvements.

My personal feeling about his death has no bearing on my opinion of the iPhone 4S.

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I think Jobs bought into the business practice of "planned obsolescence" and he did it so brilliantly so that it made the majority of consumers feel really great that they were getting an upgrade with a few new features. Macs and iPhones are great products though it's clear that one doesn't have to get sucked into upgrading each time Apple releases their next version.

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I have to agree with Oscar. His detailed points were very well put. In other words, he said the things I would have said if he hadn't beaten me to it!

I will qualify that I do not work for Apple, though I did work as a contract worker at Apple in late 2008 on iPhone support, and I've been an avid Mac fan since mid-1987.

That said, I've read rumors that Apple has been encouraging developers - especially those designing games - to start using vector graphics rather than pixel (or bitmap) graphics. This would make things scaleable in ratios that do not need to be factors of 2. Much like Adobe's Postscript made laser printers possible by getting rid of the jagged-edged bitmaps, vector graphics would provide much smoother lines no matter the screen size ratio used. This would mean that the same game could scale to the iPhone, the iPad and perhaps in the future, AppleTV.

As for Siri, I dare you to ask your Android voice command what its name is, or if it would marry you, or what its favorite color is. I bet it won't be quite as much fun as asking Siri those same questions.

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Thanks Dave! Um yeah, I'm sure it's funny to ask Siri those questions, but is she useful in other areas? Or is she constantly misunderstanding your commands?

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I'm sure she's just like a woman.

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lol Tony! :)-

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