iPhone 4S First Impressions
The UPS guy delivered my new iPhone to me this morning. I ordered last Friday morning from AT&T when the Apple servers had their regularly scheduled meltdown. I trusted Apple to get to to me more, but the lack of trust in AT&T turned out to be unfounded thankfully.
iOS5
This isn't a new thing to me since I was using IOS5 for the past few months on the beta program. (Yes, I'm a paid up developer) I can talk about it now though. :-) The new notification system is finally up to par with what the Android ecosystem (and jailbroken phones) had for a while now.
Speed
The first thing I really noticed was the speed. The overall performance of the device seems a lot speedier. There's noticeably less lag when going between applications. Going from the main screen to being ready to take pictures is substantially faster than before. In the end though the older iteration of the phone wasn't slow by any means
Siri
I'm not sure how much I'm going to use her, but it's freakishly cool! I'm sure we'll have a DamnYouSiri.com (yes, it's already taken) pop up soon."What reindeer sex do you want to get take out from?"If nothing else I'm really hoping that something like this gets more common. I don't think that we'll be able to stop people from texting and driving unfortunately, but if we get it so it's not as dangerous we'll be a bit head of the game.It really does feel futuristic though. "Wake me up in half an hour."That being said, as I'm writing this the server end of the Siri service seems to be down or overloaded. I guess everyone else is asking her "What's the meaning of life" looking for all the different answers."All evidence to date suggests it's chocolate."AntennaThe antenna-gate from the iPhone 4 launch has died down. Even with that over a bit more than a year and a half Apple has improved the antenna system quite dramatically. The phone now has diversity transceive (transmit and receive) on two strips of the antenna. I went down to my basement where I typically have zero or one bars of signal strength and I was looking at two bars.Nice!
Camera
The camera got a bump as well. It's now 8 megapixel and fairly decent at that. The sensitivity of the photo sites has gone up instead of down so we're getting pictures with less noise for a given light level.
Overall
If I simply had an iPhone 4 I don't know if it would be worth the upgrade. It's cool and all... but it's still just a really awesome phone. For me it would be a toss-up.In my case however as I upgrade Ennie gets the older phone. This winds up being a two-fer upgrade since both of us move a generation forward. In this case I think it's completely worthwhile.