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Friday, October 7, 2011

7 Things to Convince Me to Switch to the iPhone 4S [REVISITED]

I previously wrote about the possibility of switching from the Android world to the iPhone world.  Now that the iPhone 4S has been announced, and will be released next week, I figured it would be a good opportunity to revisit the demands I made in order to make the switch a no-brainer:

1) The iPhone 4S must be released on Verizon at the same time as ATT
Check.  Plus, it's being released on Sprint.

2) The iPhone 4S must be capable of utilizing LTE
Fail.  However, as I mentioned in my previous post, there was a little bit of wiggle room on this one, and now that I have seen what the current generation LTE chips do to battery life on the existing Android handsets, I'm happy to stay away from it for now.

3) The iPhone 4S must have a dual-core processor
Check.  It will include the A5, which will supposedly increase general processing performance by 2x and graphics performance by 7x.

4) The iPhone 4S must include an NFC implementation
Fail.  I must admit that I figured that NFC, in general, would have come a lot farther this year.  Google just recently introduced Wallet, which is currently only available on one phone on one carrier.  We have a ways to go before this really goes mainstream.

5) The iPhone 4S must use a better notification system
Check.  iOS 5 includes a notification system very similar to the existing Android implementation.  It looks good to me!

6) The iPhone 4S must have a dependable, free (or inexpensive) turn-by-turn Navigation application
Check (TBD).  I have discovered Waze and Mapquest to be two free options, and there appear to be a few not-too-expensive options.  I'd have to test them out to determine their quality though.  Any suggestions?

7) Along side the iPhone 4S, Apple must provide free MobileMe access
Check.  iClould will be free, and available this coming Wednesday (October 12th).

So, there you have it.  The only two fails were for LTE and NFC, which were definitely my least critical concerns for the new iPhone.  Without further ado...

iPhone here I come!

3 comments:

Brandon said...

I have to say, having used iOS 5 for several months now that it's kind of a sleeper release. The features are not very exciting on paper, but they are pretty awesome in upgrading the overall experience.
-The notifications and notification manager are MUCH better and make a huge difference to the feel of the phone.
-The iCloud syncing/backup is amazing and has saved me several times when upgrading between betas. It still delights me every time I buy a song on iTunes and it's instantly on both computers, Renee's phone, my phone and the iPad with no effort.
-Upgraded Bluetooth software makes my phone work much better with my car's handsfree and music systems.
- Camera from the lockscreen was very useful on vacation this summer and using the volume button to take pictures is a very welcome addition.
- iMessage works exactly as it should: you don't even know it's there but it routes SMS/MMS through iCloud if you're texting to another iPhone. This will save me money every month.

You'll have to post about how well Siri works when you get the new phone. I'm really impressed with what I've read about it!

Matt Augustine said...

Hey Brandon -- thanks for all of the insight! Yeah, I've kinda been under the impression that this is the year that Apple is focusing on infrastructure and general platform enhancements, rather than form factors and feature sets. To me, they're just setting the stage to completely blow us away next year.

I'm really glad to hear that the new iOS5 features will come in handy. I'm really, really looking forward to having a usable camera/video camera for when those opportunities with the kid(s) present themselves... because right now, the camera on my phone is basically unusable.

I will definitely let you know what I think of Siri once I get the hang of it :)

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