Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, Phil Schiller, followed up a couple of iPod updates by introducing the widely rumored iPhone 4S, the latest and greatest handset from the company.
iPhone 5? Not so fast. Apple has just introduced the iPhone 4S, the latest generation of the company’s flagship mobile product which may look the same as the current iPhone 4 on the outside, but “inside it’s all new,” according to senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, Phil Schiller.
The iPhone 4S comes packing the A5 processor first introduced with the iPad 2 earlier this year, promising a 2x speed improvement with dual-core graphics and up to seven times the graphics performance of the previous model.
So what else does the iPhone 4S have to offer? How about eight hours of 3G talk time, six hours of 3G web browsing (nine hours via Wi-Fi), 10 hours of video and 40 hours of music playback for what Schiller calls “fantastic battery life.”
The wireless antenna has been improved with the iPhone 4S, which Schiller promises will have “even better call quality” by intelligently switching between two antennas to transmit and receive. The new model will also take advantage of 14.4 Mbps HSDPA download speeds, effectively doubling those of the iPhone 4 where coverage is available.
The iPhone 4S is also a world phone, which means it’s capable of running on both GSM (AT&T) or CDMA (Verizon, Sprint) networks -- no more separate models for separate networks. “That really benefits customers a lot,” Schiller claims, particularly for those of us who travel internationally.
Following up on the popularity of the iPhone 4 as a camera, the iPhone 4S will include an eight megapixel sensor for a whopping 3264x2448 frame size -- 60 percent more pixels than the previous model. The new camera will also be 33 percent faster at capturing images, with backside illumination for 73 percent more light. A five element lens also promises 30 percent more sharpness from those images.
More obvious improvements will come with the new face detection feature, part of a new Image Signal Processor the company designed which also results in 26 percent better automatic white balance and lightning-fast shutter speeds -- 1.1 seconds for the first picture, and a mere half a second for the next. Video recording also gets a boost with the iPhone 4S, bumping up the resolution to 1080p HD and adding video image stabilization and temporal noise reduction.
The iPhone 4S also introduces a new digital assistant feature called Siri (check out our separate coverage on that), and will introduce the device on October 14, with preorders starting Friday, October 7. Available in 16GB for $199, 32GB for $299 or 64GB for $399 with a two-year commitment, the iPhone 4S will be available in seven countries at launch, with an additional 22 coming on October 28 and a total of 70 by year’s end.
What about the iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS? Apple will continue to offer them both, with an 8GB iPhone available for $99 with contract and the 8GB iPhone 3GS absolutely free with the same two-year commitment.
Apple’s “Let’s talk iPhone” event wrapped up this morning with announcements of a refreshed iPod nano and iPod touch, iOS 5 and iCloud arriving on October 12 and the new iPhone 4S hitting stores on October 14, with Sprint added as a third U.S. carrier and a 64GB model available for the first time at $399 with two-year agreement.
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