Today’s Apple event was highlighted by the announcement of the new iPhone, which really isn’t a new phone per say, but is really a redesign of the current iPhone4.  The “new” phone will be called the iPhone4S.  With this redesign, Apple has made some nice improvements:

  • Dual Core A5 chip, same processor powering the iPad2
  • New 8 Megapixel camera with larger lens aperture
  • HD Video recording in 1080p
  • The brand new iOS5 operating system with over 200 new features
  • iCloud cloud storage system
  • “First phone to intelligently switch between two antennas to transmit and receive”
  • And Siri, the intelligent assistant who responds to your voice

The use of the new A5 chip out of the iPad is supposed to result in up to seven times greater graphical processing power, two times the computing power,  and all while increasing battery life.  Apple is touting this new camera as “This just might be the best camera ever on a phone. And with all-new optics, it just might be the only camera you need.”  They upgraded the camera to 8 Megapixels, and increased the lens aperture size, which should allow for high quality photos from a phone.  With the launch of iOS5 comes some new features, mainly a new notification center, where all notifications are along the top of the phone, which reminds me of the Notification bar from Android.  Another new feature is iMessages, which allows unlimited messages to be sent between an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch running iOS5.  Another new integration is iCloud, with cloud storage for all your photos, music, mail, documents and more, which wirelessly pushes all these files to all your devices.

The new iPhone4S incorporates all these new features with all the old features that iPhone fans love, the beautiful retina display, AirPlay and now AirPrint, FaceTime, and the ever expanding library of apps.

Also announced was Siri, “The intelligent assistant that helps you get
things done. All you have to do is ask.”  Siri is integrated into the new operating system of the iPhone4S, and seems like a radical integration of voice-recognition software paired with interpretive software that can take what a user says and then output what they’re looking for.  If it works as advertised it may be the beginning of a new era of hands-free usage.

With all these improvements the iPhone4S should be a solid high-end phone, there weren’t many radical changes but there wasn’t much to improve on.  Therefore, it seems Apple focused more on the software side of the phone, and we’ll see if that pays off for them longterm.