After waiting with bated breath for the Apple iPhone 5, some Apple users were disappointed by the release of the iPhone 4S on 12th October.
The new phone features the new operating system, iOS5, an 8MP camera which can be used for HD video recording and the new voice recognition software, Siri.
Siri is more accurate than old software. When asked questions about various topics- among them: weather, share prices, London Underground tube station locations and restaurant locations- it understood what was said around 90% of the time. Whilst the new software is accurate and very novel (although standing in the street asking your phone what the latest Apple Inc. share price is, might attract some odd looks), it only works when asked about American businesses. It was capable of finding the weather in London, but was unable to locate the nearest Underground station. With a key function of this software being unusable in the UK, what is a major selling point of the phone is made much less of one.
It could be said that Apple are now playing catch up to reach the specifications of phones released by other mobile companies. Whilst the 1 GHz dual core processor is impressive, it is still slower than the 1.2GHz dual core processor of the Samsung Galaxy SII released six months before the Apple iPhone 4S. The iPhone camera, whilst no worse than that of the Galaxy SII, only matches the number of megapixels it has. For a phone released six months after another, we’d hope for something at least a little better.
Whilst Samsung may be beating Apple with regards to phone specifications, in the courts, Apple appears to be winning the latest battle of the on-going war. An American judge ruled last month that Samsung infringed on patents owned by Apple. The sale of the Samsung Galaxy tab 10.1 (a tablet computer) has been banned in Germany. Despite this, Samsung is trying to ban the sale of the iPhone 4S in Australia and Japan.
