3Apple logoIphone 4S: Just a disappointing catch-up

So, I see that Apple have released the latest iter­a­tion of their “amaz­ing” iphone.  Each time a new iproduct gets released I find myself yelling at TV, Radio ads, and oth­er ignor­ant people who don’t seem to real­ise that their is noth­ing spe­cial about Apple products.  This time I’m going to share a few thoughts pub­licly instead.  I’ve just watched the offi­cial release video over on the Apple web­site.  So, with that as the basis, here are my thoughts on the “new” fea­tures in the iphone 4S…
8 Mega­pixel camera
first launches by nokia in Feb-2009. Now avail­able in over 120 phones.

“Now works worldwide”
ROFL. Avail­able since the last millennium.

Siri (aka Voice Recognition)
Google Voice (Actions, Search, etc) has done this on Android since Aug-2010.

1080p30 video
Avail­able on plenty of oth­er phones. First one that comes to mind is the HTC Sen­sa­tion.  I can even do it with cus­tom ROMs on my 2 year old HTC Desire.

Image Sta­bil­isa­tion
Come on? This is new?!  There are no phones with REAL image sta­bil­isa­tion — its all elec­tric­al sta­bil­isa­tion, not optical.

Face Detec­tion
In pho­to’s? Android is about to bring face detec­tion to the lock screen!  My 2 year old Desire does face recog­ni­tion.  I’m pretty sure even older iphones do this per­fectly well.

icloud
Ever heard of google? They do all these things. Its a big part of their key busi­ness — tak­ing over the Inter­net.  They’re already estab­lished, tried and tested.  They’re access­ible on all plat­forms on all devices.

Dual-core chip
already in Sam­sung Galaxy S2, LG Optimus 2X, HTC Sen­sa­tion, Motorola Atrix, and no doubt plenty oth­ers very soon too.  Also, I’d like to take issue with the claim that this speeds up web-brows­ing.  The lim­it on web-brows­ing speed on a phone is nearly always caused by con­nec­tion speed.  Unless you’re on 4G, which the iphone 4S does­n’t have! D’oh

What I notice is still missing…

  • 4G
  • con­tact­less payment
  • adobe flash
  • replace­able battery
  • free turn-by-turn navigation

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3 Comments

JJamie

You have to admit, the hard­ware is not rub­bish. iOS 5 and iCloud put right a lot of what was miss­ing, espe­cially when you com­pare it to Android. The new hard­ware and soft­ware fea­tures have clearly been designed in response to Android alone (Apple’s decision to badge up Siri as Beta is an indic­a­tion of their play­ing catch-up).

I dis­agree with you when you say that there’s noth­ing spe­cial about Apple products — I would say that there is. As your art­icle points out, they’re often not first with fea­tures. When they do decide to include them though, they’re usu­ally very well executed.

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JSJon Scaife

The hard­ware is fine. The soft­ware is ok too. Yes — it’s a clear response to android, and its a pretty good effort at a response too. How­ever, that’s the point — its a catch up — not innov­at­ive. And it has­n’t fully caught up — there are still things miss­ing. Why pay more for less?

You reck­on when they include them they’re “very well executed”. I don’t agree. It usu­ally takes them 3 gen­er­a­tions to get it right, if they ever do. The first ipods had ter­rible audio qual­ity, far inferi­or to the dia­mond Rio which came before it, and in some tests I read at the time, inferi­or to an ori­gin­al Sony walk­man from the 1980’s! There is also the issue of poorly designed anten­nas need­ing a rub­ber con­dom before the call qual­ity was what it should be. And of course the fact that Apple laptops lead the way in terms of num­ber of burn­ing bat­ter­ies. Giv­en that they pretty much only make PCs, mp3 play­ers, phones and tab­lets, and i’ve poin­ted out prob­lems with core func­tion­al­ity or safety in 3 of those 4, I can­’t see how any­one can think they execute well first time.

On the oth­er hand, their mar­ket­ing is always executed excep­tion­ally well…

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JSJon Scaife

Note: I haven’t bothered to provide ref­er­ences, as any­one can just use google to veri­fy the facts I’ve presen­ted. How­ever, if there is enough demand I can and will provide 🙂

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