It's been almost a full day since Apple announced the iPhone 4S: the successor to the top-selling iPhone 4. The fifth iteration in the iPhone series keeps the same industrial design yet packs twice the processing power and about seven times the graphics power of the previous iPhone if Apple is to be believed. In essence, it houses the same
chipset that can be found on the Apple
iPad 2 possibly even with the same amount of RAM. For those in the dark, the
iPad 2 uses the Apple A5 chip which is basically a
rebranded Cortex A9 dual-core manufactured by
Samsung clocked at 1 GHz with the
PowerVR SGX543MP2 for graphics. It should be kept in mind that no other company, at least as of now, sells that graphics chip in any of their products and benchmarks show that it blows the competition out of the water since it employs two cores. Yep, that's a dual-core graphics processing unit right there. This has been proven time and again by the fact that the
iPad 2 outpaces its competition (read: the Android tablets mostly employing
Nvidia's Tegra 2) significantly in most graphics benchmarks out there. Then again, those are only benchmarks. However, you would be hard-pressed to find a slicker looking and more responsive OS than the
iOS today. That Apple strictly regulates the apps that can make it to its
AppStore is well-known, which is probably why Apple can offer the sort of performance they do on their mobile OS but I digress. The other big improvement (actually there are a couple) comes in the imaging department from Apple. Sensor size on the iPhone has increased from a "paltry" 5
megapixels to 8. Apple claims to have improved white-balance by 26%. Apple employs what they call the Image Signal Processor which is instrumental in bringing about major improvements to picture quality and brings with it almost zero shutter lag. The video-recording department also sees a jump from 720p recording to 1080p. The other notable announcement includes the arrival of a new 64GB model in addition to 32GB and 16GB models which were standard on the previous generation. It makes the iPhone only the second phone in the mobile industry to offer that kind of inbuilt storage, the other being the elusive
Nokia N9. Amidst speculation of the iPhone 5 which would presumably feature a bigger screen among other things, there were many who were not impressed with what Apple had on offer yesterday. This could be made evident by the fact that their share price fell down nearly 5% following the announcement. Consumer disinterest isn't quite justified though, considering the fact that Apple has employed most of the technology present in most high-end
smartphones today although it has joined the party a little late. Among other things, people were probably miffed about the lack of change in design but that is a minor quibble considering it's an industry-leading design. Apple, for the most part, seems to be going in the right direction with
iOS 5 and a myriad features to accompany like the new voice-guided
tasker Siri which looks very promising, at least from the demos. The next iteration of the iPhone seems to be a June affair at
WWDC next year so it remains to be seen how the rest of the industry progresses by the time that happens. In the meantime, if you currently own any previous gen iPhone, now seems like a good time to upgrade since there isn't much Apple can change outside of a bigger screen come June.
