So I got myself a 4S… you know… because I fuckin’ can 😉 Just kidding, but that’s beside the point.

The point is I’m posting because my friends/readers wanna know what I think of it. Because there’s that whole “is the improvement worth replacing the my current iPhone with?”

There are two answers to that, depending on your “iPhone” if you’re using anything older than a 4, then yes – for the simple reason that even the iPhone 4 was already a drastic improvement over its predecessor. Now if you already have an iPhone 4, the answer would depend on what “feature” appeals to you – factoring in how you use your phone everyday.

Personally, I bought the 4S because of the improved camera. When it comes to photography, it’s very difficult to judge “incremental upgrades” at face value – because when it comes to photo quality, any upgrade, no matter how small – is always worth consideration. ¹ A camera could have the same exact specifications but improve drastically in one area such as low light, and that to me already would be worth upgrading to

Then there’s a matter of Siri – which currently works exclusively with the 4S. I can only assume it’s part of Apple’s marketing strategy – as I see no reason why it wouldn’t be able to run (albeit slower) on even a non A5 chip. ² Or at the very least, it should be able to work with the iPad2s – since they use the same chip.

So now that I’ve gotten to play with it, what do I think? Read on…

First Impressions

I won’t bother going over the visual details, because there’s really nothing to say. It’s basically an iPhone4 with adjusted innards. It isn’t thinner (or at least doesn’t feel that way) – and the difference in weight, if any, isn’t noticeable even if you tried. Only the packaging has changed – and really, who gives a shit about that? A new Apple user may be impressed with little details of packaging in every product they release – but not us – we’re fucking veterans right!? So just assume that the packaging is different but still as “Apple-cool” as it can be. ³ Ok, if you just HAVE to split hairs, fine… the new box shows the iPhone on a white bg (instead of black) and the box’s depth is half an inch thinner than the iPhone4 case. There, happy!?

In short, if you’re looking for any physical change – then this “upgrade” isn’t for you.

I heard that some units ship with a SIM ejector and some don’t. Mine didn’t come with one – which was a bummer – but nothing worth complaining about. Also, it comes pre-activated. Meaning it works out of the box without having to connect it to iTunes. Of course you still have to connect at least once to configure it in detail (should you want to), but if you don’t, you can still use the phone as a phone (and with the few apps iOS has built-in)

Actually, and I haven’t confirmed this, but you could technically be totally PC-free assuming you use iCloud’s backup feature. ⁴ I’m assuming it can store all your settings, etc. negating the need ever to connect to iTunes physically (assuming you already have configured it in the past to use WiFi sync But given it only provides 5GB free and that a new iPhone today is at least 8GB, that’s a pretty useless feature.

Photo Quality Comparison

I probably won’t do a video comparison cuz that’ll take to much time to set up, encode, upload, etc. But it’s safe to say that this upgrade is worth it for videographers because this is the first true HD recording phone Apple has released. While I cannot vouch for the improvement in video quality – I’m assuming it’s connected to the photo-quality since we’re talking about the same sensor – so I’ll dive right down to the photo comparisons.

Basically, Apple has claimed to drastically improve the quality of the photographs. Larger images, better low light performance, better color processing. I’m here to confirm that, apart from low-light performance ⁵ The jury’s still out on that all claims are true – but I will go as far as saying that it’s a drastic improvement – as you will see in the pictures.

In all pictures below, that the 4S is better in general – and it’s all because of the factors mentioned above – but you’ll also notice that they are subtle differences that, quite honestly, only a really discerning eye would notice. The normal user who just wants decent photos would do just as well with the iPhone4 as they would with the 4S.

Images on the left are the iPhone4, and the 4S on the right. Apart from clicking to “embiggen” the pictures, I’d suggest you actually check out their pages on the gallery – because we’ve got EXIF information on there. I’ll try to mention it here as well, but in case you need “proof” then it’s there for your scrutiny.

Well lit area (natural light)

There’s no surprise that good light is the great equalizer when it comes to photography. My girlfriend’s inferior Sony Cybershot could do just as well as my LX3 when the lighting’s good. So for these shots, we pay more attention to sharpness, details, and colors.

Here I worried a bit since the iPhone4 seemed sharper in general. But then I looked at the EXIF and remembered that the 4S has a much shallower depth of field to focus on – because of it’s f2.4 aperture compared to the 4’s f2.8.

I also noticed that the 4S took the same shot one ISO-stop lower (400) than the 4 (500)

The more demanding the lighting conditions get, both will automatically switch/step to higher ISOs until they reach the shutter speed they need to get the shot. Basically, this means that the 4S has more “headroom” to work with – since it consistently uses a lower ISO setting compared to the 4 when taking identical shots.

The color is a bit different as well, there’s a warmer feel to the 4S shot – but then again it must’ve been the yellowish elements behind it reflecting on the metal. In that case, then the 4S would be more “accurate” – even if the 4 looked more “neutral.”

In this shot, you can see difference in color. In relation to what I just mentioned, these are the “warm-colored” elements behind the previous shot. And you clearly notice how the 4 washes it out a bit. It’s bordering on applying a bit more magentas/reds to counter the yellows (and ultimately greens) – even if the latter is naturally present in the scene.

If you can’t spot it, I invite you to pay attention to the wooden basket (and compare the warm tones) as well as the green of the “metal stalk/leaves” You can see the 4S is clearly smarter in detecting those subtleties.

Also, surprisingly the 4 uses a whopping 1000 on the ISO setting whereas the 4S only used 400.

Incandescent lamp

Here I opted to force a color tint on the scene to see if the phones know if the scene is naturally tinted or if it has to do some extra color balancing. So in short, I was expecting all shots here to have yellow tints because, well, that’s what my eyes were seeing, duh!

For both shots below, it’s easy for the unexpecting person to prefer the 4’s shots because it neutralized much more “tint” that was present – making the shot seem accurate (white is really white, etc.) But if you would remember that that was NOT how the scene really looked like. I was using an incandescent light – therefore I would have to give the 4S the points here for being more accurate.

Now people may ask “Then what’s the point of having white balance settings on cameras if you prefer accuracy over what the colors of the subjects would be in during ideal lighting conditions?” The answer is first, I prefer it, not you. Some people would like the tints neutralized, not me. And I was always of the mind that you can always adjust color balance in post. It’s much easier to neutralize a photo’s color than to apply a tint to it after the fact. So I prefer that the photograph is always as true to the real scene as possible.

Low-light

To be honest, both still perform rather poorly in low light. Only advantage of the 4S as far as I can see is that it manages the same shot with a lower ISO (800 as against 1000).

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So there you have it, the photos haven’t been adjust in any way. Feel free to scrutinize the EXIF and pixel peep all you want – I’ll leave it to you to decide if the improvement is worth the upgrade.

Siri

Now this is where I was surprised. At first I was a bit skeptical: While Siri was impressive in the demonstration, I always had doubts as to how effective it would be in the Philippines.

First, any feature that involves geolocation is much useless as expected. You need a proper, up-to-date, reliable database/infrastructure to be able to handle that – neither of which is present in our country. So disappointing as it was, I couldn’t fault Apple with that.

I did expect it to work with the normal functions though – stuff that didn’t require geo-fencing. Sending SMSes, Writing notes, creating alarms, and some types of reminders ⁶ Since it’s possible to use geolocation along with reminders

So if you just manage your expectations properly, that really leaves only one concern: how good Siri (or the dictation function) is in understanding a person’s speech.

In a nutshell, it’s friggin’ AWESOME!

While I guess milage may vary depending on people’s accents/fluency – I can’t begin to tell you how pleased I am on how Siri handles my speech. The only thing I really have to worry about is volume. But other than that, she understands what I say with amazing accuracy.

I’ve made two videos demonstrating both Siri’s “interpretative” skill – and the dictation feature’s accuracy in recognizing words. First I tried making a note, checking which words Siri would interpret as instruction – and which words she’ll interpret as the actual text content. Pretty amazing if you ask me, she even understood punctuation instructions.

In the next video, I decided to read to her a passage from one of my favorite poems. I basically tested how the system would fare in extended dictation times. so I know if it’s possible to write say, lengthy emails without worrying if the system’s going to crap out on you in the middle of a session. I also attempted using other punctuation instructions.

Again, very impressive results. And it’s quite impressive how the system handles punctuation instructions. It can even recognized commands for parentheses, etc. The only drawback I think is you can never use the actual word in place. Say if you want to literally write the word “hyphen” or any punctuation for that matter, you’d have to disable dictation first, then type it out and resume. ⁷ Unless of course, I’m missing some escape command – if anyone knows about it, message me about it!

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Another disappointing thing is that Siri only works when you’re online. Not only that, but the server has to be responsive as well. The reason this is frustrating is that I’m pretty sure the actual speech recognition isn’t necessarily tied to the server. ⁸ Because if it was, then that would mean it would have to send the audio data of your voice to the server every single time – which would take forever It’s only tied insofar as it needs to get an answer AFTER it has already interpreted what you said.

Having said that, I don’t see why you need to be online if you want to do “non-question” tasks (i.e. sending a text message, making an alarm, etc. even composing an email draft) And yet, there it is. It stalls or sometimes refuses to respond when the internet is acting up, and is unavailable at all when you’re offline.

I hope they get to re-thinking their implementation soon. Because when it works, it really works. Just the other night, I was in a full-on chat session with some friends. I was lying in my bed, with my iPhone, and was just dictating away my responses. iOS/Siri’s dictation features are good enough that you can already really use it in place of manual typing. And just imagine if you plan to respond with a rather lengthy sentence – dictating it is so much faster than typing it out – even if you’re already using shorthand TXTing (e.g. “ur” in place of “you’re/your”, etc.)

Conclusion

Depsite the usual cons that comes with new technology, I personally don’t regret the upgrade. I expected to be wowed by the camera improvements – which weren’t as eventful as I’d hoped. But Siri, and the dictation feature more than made up for it 🙂