Ok, Tim Cook has wrapped up the iPhone 4S event and there really wasn’t any surprises there. In fact it left me not wanting to run out an buy a new iPhone, which is good for my budget, but not great for Apple.
Lets hit the highlights.
iOS 5 is pretty much everything they said it would be back when it was announced. They spent a lot of time going over it, and iCloud again, but it was all a recap. This is to say it looks great, and we finally have a release date, October 12th.
iPod nano, nice new UI tweaks, a bunch a new watch faces for “watch mode” (really?) and new colors.
iPod Touch now in white and black, $199 8GB, $299 32GB, and $399 64GB. Goof price points, but nothing new announced.
iPhone 4S, New A5 Dual Core Chip with dual Core Graphics 2x faster for CPU, and 7x faster for graphics. It’s now a world phone with support for CDMA and GSM in every Phone. New Antenna Design and software lets you effectively “double” the 3G speeds, and dynamically switch antennas for best reception. New 8MP Camera, with better optics and tech, including 1080p image stabilized recording of video, and super fast photos.
And now Siri, voice assistant. very cool, but hard to explain. Basically you can ask Siri to do anything your phone can do (at least with Apple’s built in apps). Such as, “Siri Define Mitosis” and it will read/display a definition. “Siri find a greek restaurant with in 5 miles.” and Siri will present you with a list of greek restaurants ranked by rating. ”Siri text Rob and remind him we are recording tonight.” “Siri make a lunch date with Cindy for 2PM on Thursday at Panera Bread”, and Siri will not only mark the calendar for you but send out an invite to Cindy. “Siri set and alarm for 7AM tomorrow.” etc…
In addition to that level of voice command, you can now dictate to any app on the phone. (I imagine Siri is an API developers can use to build it into their apps.)
iPhone 4S is coming to Sprint.
Now, what was missing. It wasn’t clear if, and how much of Siri will be built into the iOS 5 update that is coming to the iPhone 4 and older models, the iPads, and iPods.
I suspect you need that dual core processor to get Siri, I expect dictation to be in the update but not the Siri assistant proper. A shame but not deal breaking.
No iPad announcement, at all, no Apple TV update, no iPod Classic mention.
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