I was going to write something to diss the new iPhone 4S. But the legendary visionary behind the iPhone passed on, and I think we should take the moment, instead, to pay tribute to the man who has changed the face of computing, mobile communications, and media consumption in many ways. So this post got left in draft for a couple of days.
But hey, life has to move on, and so many people have written about Steve’s passing, that I think there’s little need for me to say more. So it’s back to writing about the iPhone 4S, and I’m resurrecting this post.
The iPhone 4S, surprisingly, is remarkably unexciting. I think that pretty sums up just about every review that has been posted, unless the writer has been totally brainwashed by Apple. I like Erin Burnett’s story on CNN “Seriously?! The iPhone 4S“. For some inane reason, people are buying the iPhone 4S without knowing what’s in it. They just want an iPhone.
Apple says they received 1 million pre-orders on launch day. AT&T alone saw 200K sign-ups in the first 12 hours they opened to take pre-orders. This is simply record breaking. You would have expected the iPhone 4S to be superbly amazing given the staggering pre-orders.
But, the iPhone 4S simply falls short. First of all, it looks exactly the same as the iPhone 4. I know, why change the design if it has proven to work. But it’s a new phone, it needs to look different. At least I thought so. Make it a different colour, at the very least, if you can’t make it look different in form factor. There are plenty more colours between black and white. Why would anyone want to buy last year’s iPhone? Apparently 1 million people don’t agree with me.
If looking new is not important, then how about new features? Oh well, I think about the only new thing, hardware-wise, is the 8 megapixel camera. I actually mind the camera in my phone a lot, so an upgrade to 8 megapixel resolution, together with promised better optics and improved sensor, does interest me quite a bit. No, I’m not planning to buy an iPhone 4S, but I wished other manufacturers would take camera quality more seriously in the phones they produce.
(Ok for the techies out there: I know there is also the new A5 CPU. But an ordinary user wouldn’t care about that, and personally, I thought the A4 was plenty good enough for the iPhone. Yes, yes, I know it never hurts to have something even faster.)
This leads me to think, either:
- Innovation, at least in the iPhone department, is drying up.
- Apple has overproduced iPhone 4 parts and is trying to dry up their inventory before the next launch.
Back to the topic of needing a new look. It’s not difficult to come up with a new look. If Apple has trouble innovating the next killer phone design, why not get those rumour-making folks who created all the iPhone 5 impressions to help out? Some of them do look reasonably decent.
Erin Burnett said the S in iPhone 4S stands for “Seriously?!”, and I’ll add on another: “Same”. It’s the iPhone 4Same. It wouldn’t sell if Apple had called it iPhone 4.01. (Oh wait, maybe it would still sell out just the same…)
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