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Yesterday Apple announced the iPhone 4S at a press conference in California which you can view here. A quick breakdown of the new and improved features over the iPhone 4 follows:

• Upgraded CPU – A5 Dual Core CPU, 2x faster processing, 7x faster graphics
• Upgraded Camera – To 8MP from 5MP, increased aperture size, additional lens, improved start-up time, face-recognition & image stabiliser
• Upgraded Video Recording – To 1080P@30FPS from 720P@30FPS
• Added Siri – Voice command system
• Added iCloud – Adds features sharing all media, documents, photos, apps, calendar, mail, contacts between Apple devices, remote backup to iCloud, find friends and locate iDevices remotely and wipe them.

Upgraded CPU

Having a more responsive interface and apps running quicker is never a bad thing, that being said the iPhone 4 already had a responsive interface and to many people this may not really be noticable. This feature is touted as being ideal for gamers however the number of people, even from those who game, that actually run graphically intensive games is rather limited. This does give the potential for developers to produce more advanced games and apps specifically for the iPhone 4s in the future.

Upgraded Camera

This is said by Apple to be much closer to using a dedicated camera with the quality of pictures that it takes, and that it would stop the need to carry around a camera, at least a basic one. The features that have been added are definitely useful, increasing the aperture size and physical number of lenses should noticably increase picture quality. For many people it will eliminate the need for a separate camera. Whilst these improvements are good this was mostly the case for the previous iPhone 4 also, and won’t make a major difference to many people.

Upgraded Video Recording

Moving to 1080P from 720P is a nice step up and a natural progression, as this is the limit of almost all TV’s today being Full HD this standard is unlikely to progress in the immediate future. It is nice to have this though the disk space usage would no doubt be rapidly used up shooting video at this quality, and generally for anyone’s personal videos 720p would be adequate so I would not class this as a killer feature.

Siri

This is one of the biggest new features Apple have been pushing,  and whilst it’s new for Apple to offer it integrated on the phone you could previously download this as a free app on the App Store for the last 18 months. It allows you to use voice commands which can be naturally spoken as opposed to specifically set phrases, it’s billed as a personal assistant. It does this by processing your speech on it’s external servers and using artificial intelligence tries to do what you want. Some of the uses they have demonstrated so far include making phonecalls, setting calendar events, replying to text messages, checking the weather and playing music. This feature does look interesting, I’m sure a lot of owners will be playing with it testing the AI once available. Whether it’s actually a feature that people would use long term though or just a gimmick it’s hard to say. It could be very useful whilst driving to operate the phone handsfree so that seems like a strength, however it’s not completely handsfree as you need to hold the home button at present, perhaps this could be enabled via software in future though.

iCloud

The second big new feature Apple are pushing is iCloud, which will enable sharing of seemingly any data between iPhone / iPad / iDevices. One of the features demonstrated is taking a picture and having it instantly available on another linked device (This synergises nicely with the high quality pictures of the iPhone 4(S) and the larger high res screen of the iPad 2 (and upcoming iPad 3). It can also share music, videos, apps, documents, calendar events, contacts, basically everything that you can store. Some of the more interesting features are not the sharing though, it also lets you back up your devices to the cloud when your phone is connected via WiFi. This is a great feature, anyone who has lost their phone (especially an iPhone) knows how stressful it can be, losing all your contacts/videos/photos and being able to restore this on to a replacement phone and essentially not have lost anything apart from the physical phone would be a relief. Of course this has been available via iTunes but in the unfortunate event of a computer failure or loss at the same time as the phone it would be very useful.

Another feature of iCloud is device tracking, you can track these from their GPS signal so if your phone was lost or stolen you may well be able to track it down or provide the police these details. Finally they have a feature where you can also add your friends devices to track their location, I feel this is more of a novelty feature and thankfully you need their permission to do this so it’s not too stalker friendly, and you can turn off tracking whenever you wish.

Summary

The iPhone 4S wouldn’t be considered a must have upgrade from the iPhone 4 for all but avid Apple fans, it does add some quirky new features and improve some old ones, but nothing strikes as a must have. It is however an attractive upgrade for any iPhone 3G / 3GS users that have been waiting to upgrade.

– Steve Jobs sadly passed away the day this article was written, we would like to dedicate it to his memory. A true visionary, his work shall be remembered for many years to come.