iPhone 4S review

The iPhone has been one of the most anticipated devices every year for the past few years. The iPhone 4S, in particular, generated an exceptionally large amount of hype – and after its announcement there was an exceptionally large amount of disappointment.

Was it worth the hype? Was the disappointment justified?

Read on to find out.

Design and build quality

The iPhone 4S has the same exterior design as the iPhone 4 (barring some minor changes to the antenna). However, seeing as I’ve never given a review of either, permit me to go into some detail here.

The front and the back are both glass. It’s a striking and beautiful design, but with some caveats. The first of these is that the back acquires fingerprints as readily as the front. Fingerprints are often a problem with glossy surfaces, but with glass it gets messy, fast.

The second problem is that the front and the back are equally fragile. On most smartphones, if you drop it on the screen, it’s probably time to replace that smartphone. However, if you drop them on the back, you might get away with a chip, crack, or (if you’re incredibly lucky) nothing.

With the iPhone 4 and 4S, you’re denied that partial measure of safety, and given a much higher likelihood that if you drop it, something is going to shatter.

Glass is also not gripped as easily as say, a textured plastic or possibly even brushed metal.

There’s a metal band around the edge of the phone, which doubles as the antenna. There have been some minor alterations to this to combat the infamous (and mostly exaggerated) “Death Grip” issue.

At the top are the 3.5mm jack and power button, while the bottom holds the charging and data transfer connector.

On the left side is a switch that changes to and from “Silent mode”, as well as the volume buttons. The right side has a microSIM tray, which is extracted with the help of a special tool bundled with the device.

The front, as usual, has the 3.5-inch screen, with the “Home” button at the bottom, and the earpiece and camera at the top.

It remains a simple and beautiful design, but the glass construction does give it an air of fragility.

iPhone 4S

Internals

If the outside didn’t change, then surely the inside did?

Indeed it did – but it’s not a total revamp.

The iPhone 4S gets a spec bump that puts it on par with the iPad 2. There’s a new 1GHz dual-core A5 CPU, along with the PowerVR SGX543MP2 GPU.

HSDPA speeds get bumped to 14.4 Mbps up (from 7.2 Mbps) and Bluetooth goes from version 2.1 to version 4.0.

The only other change is the camera, which gets some advanced optics, a custom lens, and goes up from 5MP to 8MP.

Screen and responsiveness

The screen on the iPhone 4S is the same as the iPhone 4.

The 3.5-inch display is not the largest display on the market, but it is a familiar size for current iPhone users and should be sufficiently large for most first-time buyers.

The 640×960 resolution is also not the highest resolution phone display on the market anymore, with the Samsung Galaxy Note and Galaxy Nexus having 720p screens. However, it is still at the top of the charts when it comes to pixel density, with ~330ppi (though the Galaxy Nexus is starting to nip at its heels).

The iPhone has historically had one of the most (if not the most) responsive touch screens, and the iPhone 4S continues that tradition.

Without any changes from the iPhone 4, the iPhone 4S still has one of the best displays on the market. Colours are vibrant, text is crisp, and it responds to the lightest touch.

Some competitors do have bigger, higher resolution displays available – but no one has yet managed to beat Apple’s display entirely.

iPhone 4S

Sound and call quality

The bundled earphones are definitely some of the better ones we’ve found. For once, you won’t be forced to buy a new pair because you burnt the originals.

The speaker was also more than good enough for watching the occasional video.

Call quality was good with neither side of the call reporting anything out of the ordinary.

Cameras

The front-facing camera hasn’t changed from the iPhone 4, and there’s little need for it to do so.

The rear-facing camera is one of the parts that has been upgraded in the iPhone 4S, as previously mentioned.

The iPhone 4 took great photos; its main competition came from the Nokia N8, with few other devices coming close to them. The camera on the iPhone 4S just bumps it up a notch.

iPhone 4S Photo

The iPhone 4S takes fantastic photos in all sorts of lighting conditions, although photos taken in low light did look a little washed out.

The fact that what you see (on the screen) is what you get means that taking some photos will require fast fingers.

iPhone 4S Water Droplet Photo

Some other additions have been made that are worth mentioning:

The first is that a shortcut to the camera app has been added to the lockscreen. This is accessed by double tapping the home button and clicking on the camera button that pops up. While it’s a nice addition, it’s not particularly intuitive (the first time I noticed it was when I clicked the home button twice by accident).

The second noteworthy addition is that the volume up button can now be used as a shutter button. Honestly, this feels like a kludge. Having volume up as a shutter button is one of the last uses I would have expected for it. It’s not a big deal, but it is somewhat unlike Apple to include something so entirely unintuitive.

Battery life

The iPhone 4S has excellent battery life. Over the course of a day, after sending a flock of tweets, receiving and reading a handful of e-mails, snapping a few dozen photos, and downloading some apps, audiobooks and podcasts (and listening to them), the battery was at around 30%.

Heavy users should have no problem getting a day of use out of the iPhone 4S, and lighter users should be able to get two or more days without too much trouble.

Software

iOS 5 is, of course, the other half of the story. iOS 5 brings a bunch of new features and fixes to the table – I won’t discuss each and every feature, but rather those that stood out during my time with the iPhone 4S.

First up is the Notifications Centre. It has long been said that iOS notifications could do with a whole lot of love, and Notifications Centre tries to deliver.

Swiping down from the top of the screen brings down a pane containing all your notifications, grouped by app, which you can then tap to open the specified app. Groups of notifications can be cleared by tapping on the button next to the group’s name.

Android users may notice that this is strikingly similar to how notifications are handled on Android, though I think it should be taken as a compliment that iOS uses the same idea.

However, there are some differences and some irritations with Notifications Centre. For one, there’s no way to clear a single notification, or all of them for that matter. Notifications can only be cleared by groups and it requires two taps of the clear button, which is frustratingly small.

There’s no real indication that the Notification Centre exists either. You have to have prior knowledge about it to know how you’re supposed to get to it.

Notifications that make use of the Notification Centre, show up at the top of the screen. You can tap on them to go directly to the notifying app, or ignore it and go to it later. However, the notification takes up quite a bit of real estate, which means that it can half cover buttons at the top of an app that may be open.

Moreover, once the notification has come and gone, there’s no indication of its existence, which means that you might forget about it as well.

Notifications that come in while your phone is locked show up on the lockscreen. These can then be swiped to unlock the phone and go directly to the notifying app. This feature is implemented quite nicely.

Next is Newsstand, which lets you buy newspapers and magazines. On your homescreen, it opens up to an iBooks-inspired specialised folder. The biggest problem I have with it, is that there’s no way to get rid of it. You can’t delete it, nor can you put it in a folder (probably because it is one, itself).

There’s also a new app dedicated to reminding you of things, helpfully called Reminders. Items can be given a specific date and time, or can be set to go off when arriving or departing a specific location. There’s also a changeable priority setting.

iMessage is a new messaging application for iOS devices that’s integrated with the Messages app already present. The integration is good and bad: it’s good because it means that you don’t have two applications that do essentially the same thing; it’s bad because you’re not always sure if you’re sending an iMessage or an SMS. Also, iMessage isn’t activated on devices by default – you have to go into your settings and turn it on.

iOS 5 brings with it iCloud. Among other things, the coming of iCloud means that you don’t have to connect your iPhone to a computer running iTunes before being able to use it. This is how it should have been years ago.

Of course, iCloud also syncs your music, photos, applications, documents, bookmarks, reminders, notes, iBooks, and contacts. It requires a desktop client, and on Windows, mail, contacts, calendars and tasks syncing require Outlook (2007 or later) – while Bookmark syncing requires either Internet Explorer or Safari.

Photo Stream syncs your photos between devices, requires no special software (other than the desktop client of iCloud), and it generally worked quite well. However, there were cases where some photos did not stream and there doesn’t appear to be a way to force it other than to sync with iTunes.

iPhone 4S Siri

Lastly is a feature exclusive to the iPhone 4S – Siri.

Siri is a voice-controlled personal assistant of sorts, and it basically allows you to do things with your phone by talking to it.

Siri’s speech recognition was excellent – for me at least, other MyBroadband staff members had some problems with it. However, there are few, if any, instances where talking to the phone would get the job done faster or better than if I were just to do it myself (the old adage “If you want something done right” springs to mind).

Not all parts of Siri work outside of the US either. Anything resembling a location produces a generic (and somewhat lengthy) “error” message.

Overall, it feels like the bigger features were implemented by someone who admires Apple, but doesn’t quite share their attention to detail. In iOS 5 it feels like Apple has forgotten that which is important to it, and has lost focus.

Conclusion

With the dust settling around us, is the iPhone 4S worth the hype? More importantly, is it worth upgrading from an iPhone 4?

In short; no and no.

The most overt difference between the iPhone 4 and 4S is the camera. Honestly, if you’re buying a phone to upgrade the camera, it’s probably time to look into buying a proper, dedicated camera.

Yes, there’s Siri, which is exclusive to the iPhone 4S, but Siri isn’t (in my opinion) universally useful.

If you have an iPhone 4, there’s no real need to run out and get an iPhone 4S. First time buyers, iPhone 3G and 3Gs owners may want to consider the 4S, but if the price is right, the iPhone 4 will serve just as well.