Let’s look at the new iPhone

On October 4, Apple was expected to announce the iPhone 5. Instead of the expected announcement, Apple introduced the iPhone 4S as the successor to the iPhone 4. There was a lot of surprise and discussion regarding what the change signified. Many analysts felt the newer iPhone would not sell well, despite the fact that many potential iPhone purchasers delayed buying a phone and many iPhone 4 users had sold their phones in anticipation of buying the iPhone 5.

Despite analysts’ dire predictions, the iPhone 4S set both a new pre-order record at over 1 million phones and a new sales record in the first weekend they were available, with over 4 million sold. The new phone coincided with the release of the latest version of the Apple iOS operating system for mobile devices, iOS5.

The newest phone offers a number of incremental improvements over the iPhone 4. The processor now supports two processor cores although the clock speed remains the same at 1 GHz. Memory for the new phone has been doubled to 16, 32 or 64 GBytes. Bluetooth has been upgraded from version 2.1 to version 4.0. The phone is now a dual-mode world phone. The battery life has been increased significantly. The rear camera has been upgraded from 5 to 8 megapixels. The display remains the same, and the device is the same size although the new phone weighs 0.1 ounces more. In addition to AT&T and Verizon, Apple has also added Sprint as a carrier.

One big change in the phone is the addition of Siri, a voice recognition application. This appears to be a quantum improvement over the previous iPhone voice recognition app. In addition to the ability to call contacts using their name, Siri is very good at transcribing e-mails, tweets, IM, and other material. It can do calculations. It can search a user’s calendar.

Siri, along with an improved camera,  may be one of the main reasons tot consider upgrading from an iPhone 4. The initial price for each memory size in the iPhone 4S  is increased by $100, which actually translates to the same price per amount of storage as the older iPhone 4. More information is available at www.apple.com.

The upgrade to iOS 5 applies to older iPhones, the iPod Touch (except the oldest models) and the iPad. The new iOS has added tabs to Safari. Many applications seem to run more smoothly. During the initial upgrade period,  many users  had problems with the new device, but these seem to have been fixed, although with no explanation as to the actual causes.