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iPhone 4S Hands-Ons and First Impressions
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16 months ago the standards were different. Apple started falling behind the competition back then but now the gap has widened significantly. And iPhone will probably keep the market crown but why would we (the consumers) care? Besides, the stats are somewhat meaningless. For example, Samsung has a bunch of phones that are quite similar to Galaxy SII on the market so some consumers do buy them thus potentially decreasing SGSII share but Samsung's overall smartphone market share is growing fast (faster than the Apple's one)
That's definitely the question I'll be asking.
I wonder if someone could make a table of the current plans and pricing across Sprint, AT&T, and Verizon.
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There is nothing to compare. His evo does nothing remotely close to what Siri does.
milo said:
There is nothing to compare. His evo does nothing remotely close to what Siri does.
Siri had damn well better work on my iPad 2. This thing is screaming fast and has no problem wi any task I throw at it, so I don't see why (possibly) having slightly less RAM would mean it wouldn't work at all.
We go through this nearly every upgrade (and even some product debuts):
iPhone 3GS: "That's it?? A compass??"
iPad: "That's it?? Big iPod Touch???"
iPad 2: "That's it?? Same big iPod Touch??"
And so on. Then some months later we open our wallets for these products.
We need to start tempering our initial reactions around here.
Sprint gives unlimited talk, text, roaming, and data for one set price. They win, provided they have good coverage in your area.
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What does this comment have to do this thread? Are we all being punked by the android counterpart to assistant called "*****" which just goes around posting dumb and irrelevant things on discussion forums ?
kironin said:
What does this comment have to do this thread? Are we all being punked by the android counterpart to assistant called "*****" which just goes around posting dumb and irrelevant things on discussion forums ?
No wallet opening here for Apple. I now own a phone for the price of the iPod Touch. No contracts required.
Sorry no. This was the year of the iPad Let-down. Or have we already forgotten about that and bought iPad 2s anyway? Oh. Ok.
1. If you really want a PHONE, there are plenty of flip phones that fit better in your pocket and make reliable calls out there. You'd save enough money to buy that iPad you speak of.
2. I have no doubt that you and all the other 4S apologists will be right back here next year praising the redesign of the iP5 for all of the same reasons that those who are disappointed today are complaining.
Look, I don't hate Apple. I don't want them to fail. But I look to Apple to make things that I want to buy because I know how well they can do it. Sadly, I don't want to buy the 4S. I've been holding on to my 3GS anticipating something really special that would make the upgrade worthwhile. iOS5 sounds promising. I'll try it on my 3GS and we'll see. If that's a no-go, then I will be shopping androids and wp8. Maybe I'll just keep my 3GS and put that money toward an Air - now that's a sexy Apple design. 4/4S? Meh...
Sprint's 3G data speeds are abysmal. Without WiMax support on iPhone 4S, going to Sprint is a suicide.
Prove that the gap has widened significantly. So far I think the gap is pretty much the same as it was for iPhone 4. Judging by the CPU performance, when it launched it was 800Mhz and 1.2Ghz was available on competitors. Now this has dual 1Ghz, and Dual 1.5Ghz is coming soon on competitors. Basically 50% gap in CPU performance, exactly like iPhone 4.
Ram, ok. When it launched iPhone had 512 like competitors, and now 1GB is available, so that gap has widened certainly.
GPU performance, we'll have to wait and see. For all we know, iPhone 4S might have the best GPU horsepower atm.
What else is there in terms of specs? Don't give me LTE. It's not really out there yet for people to benefit. I can see NFC being an argument, but it was back in 2010 as well. So that gap is exactly where it is.
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Hold on a second. We, customers, should not care about Apple keeping the crown, but we should care about Samsungs marketshare growing faster than Apple's?
IMacs have looked the same for three or so year but they keep putting newer and faster engines inside. Same with great cars. This is a major upgrade. But they kept the wonderful design. I of one love the form factor better than the curved versions.
And it's no wonder their customer satisfaction scores are so high!!!
Fock em, I'm sick of them and the Buttheads at Apple. Can't wait to get an Incredible and a carrier with a real 3G network.
Fascinating is somehow inadequate.
(quotes are in order, back to just prior to the iPhone 4 release).
Who do you love?
Nothing comes close to the iPhone. They still have years of lead time and a controlled hardware base to optimize for.
It's odd, but I've felt Apple missed the boat by not opening up their hardware in the PC space, but with phones it's different. Phones are just too complex, evolving too quickly for an open source system to compete.
You're right that Apple's iPhone hardware is not all completely bleeding edge anymore (although it's not far off). They don't blow the competition out of the water in every department. Some screens are larger (although they aren't as clear), some phones use faster cpu's, some weigh less, and some can claim to provide the same software experience (except they're way off on this one). Apple is no longer FAR ahead of everyone, but it's still not really close.
The big thing on the horizon is Samsung's graphene based flexible displays, and their translucent display tech. Those could be game changers...but again...what's going to run on those fancy displays?
What made Apple popular has never been about bleeding edge hardware, but how easy it was for the average person to use it, it works without much fuss, integrates very well with other Apple devices and its services.
A5 in iPhone is not the same as A5 in iPad. We do not know that it will be clocked at 1GHz. They said today that A5 CPU in iPhone is 2x performance of A4. Well, with two cores vs one I interpret it as that the frequency will be the same (i.e. 800MHz, like iPhone 4).
Dual core 1.5GHz processors are already being released.
There was no LTE a year ago (or HSPA+ to this matter). Well now we expect 21Mbps at least. And, LTE on Verizon already covers 50% of US population. By the time iPhone 5 is released, it'll be 100%.
anandtech has benchmarks that show that the ipad stomps all over every higher clocked CPU thrown against it. ARM CPU's in the same class have hige performance differences and Apple is usually way ahead