For better or worse, the new iPhone 4S looks much like the iPhone 4, although it’s a different model to the iPhone 4 that was sold in Australia. The 4S design is based off the CDMA Verizon iPhone 4, which means if you’re upgrading from an iPhone 4, your case may have trouble fitting, due to the offset for the mute switch being different. Internally, a lot’s different, however: it’s adopted the A5 processor first shown in the iPad 2 and the effect is remarkable — this is a speedy smartphone that powers through most basic tasks with aplomb.
The A5 within is a dual-core chip, giving it significant processing and graphical power updates, although few apps so far will really push the graphics side of it just yet. By way of comparison, using the BrowserMark benchmark on the iPhone 4S gave a total score of 85,265; the competing Samsung Galaxy S II (also a favourite power smartphone here at PC User) managed 56,754.
The camera in the iPhone 4S has also seen a specification bump, now sporting an 8MP sensor tied into a f/2.4 lens, giving it excellent low-light shooting capabilities alongside 1080p video recording. Both worked very well in our tests and while it’s still entirely possible to take awful shots or video with a smartphone camera like this, it’s equally possible to take some quite stunning shots.
Then there’s Siri, Apple’s much-touted voice-guided ‘intelligent assistant’. Siri relies on a net connection to quickly upload spoken voice samples and intelligently meet user requests. Australian English is one of the standard voice types and it’s well worth picking for the change in accuracy it brings, with one major caveat. There’s no location-aware assistance outside the US just yet, which means if you ask Siri where the nearest anything is, it’ll respond that location features sadly only work in the US. The official Apple line is that it hopes to bring location-aware Siri outside the States sometime in 2012, but there’s no solid timeline announcement for Australia yet.
That said, Siri’s a step above the voice guidance found in most phones; not only can it manage basic tasks such as music playback or web searching, but it’s also contextually aware, so you can string conversations along without having to restate individual parts. It’s only a beta at this stage and it’s not quite worth getting an iPhone 4S for in itself — at least not yet.
For existing iPhone 4 users, the iPhone 4S is a speed bump with Siri and little else. Most contract users are unlikely to be out of their contracts just yet, so the upgrade bump isn’t perhaps enough. Anyone coming off a 3GS contract or switching from another phone should definitely consider it.
Great phone,but i find it hard to spend big money on it as i already have a mint ip432. I would love that 64gb though