The S stands for…same? The iPhone 4S review

The iPhone 4S was never going to be an easy piece of kit to review. Rarely has there been a more anticipated, and then more disparaged, hardware release from Apple. The original iPhone, unveiled five years ago today by Steve Jobs in a presentation now hailed as his finest on-stage hour, spoken of as though it were a sacrament and not a trade announcement, was Apple’s response to years of pleas from the company’s devotees (odd, really, to think of a company — a business, a for-profit entity — having devotees, but there you go…), and was hailed as little short of miraculous when it was finally handed down from on high. By way of contrast, the Motorola ROKR was pointlessness embodied in silicon — a device longed for by nobody, and loved by fewer; I’m simply not willing to do the research, but I strongly suspect that even the Zune, Microsoft’s turd-brown adventure in futility, sold better than the ROKR. Even Steve Jobs struggled to find anything beyond “It’s really nice.”

My new iPhone 4S | Steve's TechBlog

The iPhone 4S, on the other hand, threatened to be little more than a small-to-medium-sized bucketful of meh. The iPhone 4, its immediate predecessor, was an almost obnoxiously successful device, and so the Apple rumour mill (an actual mill, by the way — when it’s not cranking out rumours, it grinds the flour that goes into the artisanal breads used for the unicorn-burger sandwiches upon which senior Apple executives lunch), obviously, decided that it had to be replaced. And it had to be replaced by an iPhone 5. For reasons that were never even remotely apparent, there was something frankly totemic about the number 5. The new iPhone simply had to be the iPhone 5. What, exactly, the iPhone 5 would be, or do, or look like, was secondary. Features? 5. Appearance? 5. Spec? 5. So long as the new phone had the magic digit in its name, it could be a rotary-dial device with a ten-foot spiral cord coming out of the kitchen wall.

And so, on October 4th, Tim Cook announced the iPhone 4S. It would have any number of very, very impressive features. The new camera, for example, would have an eight-megapixel resolution, up from the previous model’s five, with a five-element lens instead of four. The processor would be a dual-core A5 chip, not a single-core A4. Bluetooth would be the new, exciting version 4.0, not the 2.1+EDR of the iPhone 4. And, of course, there would be Siri, the little person inside the phone.

But it wasn’t an iPhone 5. The magic number was simply nowhere to be seen. 4S? What did the S stand for? Since the 4S looked all but identical to the 4 (the giveaway, by the way, is the absence, on the 4S, of a black line by the headphone jack), how could a fanboy show off his new toy? What, after all, is the sense in paying hundreds of upgrade dollars if your new gadget doesn’t scream “I’m new, I’m expensive and my owner is, ipso facto, better than you?” The iPhone 4S is an upgrade to the iPhone 4 — a compelling and persuasive upgrade, to be sure, but an upgrade, not a new model.

There was, as was repeatedly pointed out during the fallout from Apple’s failure to deliver something called the iPhone 5, a precedent to this naming scheme. The third iteration of the iPhone, the 3GS, looked essentially identical to its predecessor, the 3G, and nobody, at the time, used the 3GS as evidence that the world was about to come to an end. But the iPhone 4S, not being the iPhone 5, was destined to fail, apparently — and promptly turned out to be one of the fastest-selling smartphones in the admittedly rather short history of the class.

So I bought one. Apple released the 4S on 11th November last year, and I picked mine up that morning from the Vodafone shop in Papakura. I was ready for a new phone — I had considered an iPhone 4 until I discovered the contract-breaking fee Vodafone wanted from me for upgrading, and my 3GS was starting to show its age slightly. Despite the disappointing plans available in New Zealand, I signed up for a 24-month contract and took my new toy home.

I like the design. I was never overly enamoured of the styling of the 3G/3GS models, which always felt, to my sensibilities, just a little plasticky. There is clearly a reason why Apple decided to retain the 4′s design for the 4S — it looks right. It doesn’t always feel that right, mind — it’s a thoroughly beautiful device, but it feels rather thin in the hand, and so, while I very much like the look of the thing, it feels better in the rather natty case my daughter bought for me.

The screen, of course, is stunning. It is bright, and sharp, and clear, and lovely. It features the 960×640-pixel resolution of the iPhone 4, double the resolution of earlier models and so utterly crisp that, living up to its “retina” tag, it renders images and, in particular, text so smoothly and clearly that individual pixels are simply invisible. Combined with the faster dual-core A5 processor, it offers a graphical experience unlike anything else Apple sell.

Venus flytrap — iPhone 4S camera closeup | Steve's TechBlog

The camera does the screen justice. Photos taken on the iPhone 4s’s rear-facing camera are consistently of a high standard, with the possible exception of lower-light photos, in which graininess starts to become a little more visible. But increasingly the iPhone’s camera, once dismissed as an afterthought bolted on to the original iPhone, has now become a realistic alternative to a separate point-and-shoot.

The real fun of the iPhone 4S starts when you fire up Siri. Once all the silly games like telling your phone to beam you up (“WiFi or 3G?”) or to close the pod-bay doors (“Really? Again?”) are out of the way, actually using voice activation suddenly becomes something more than just a gimmick. The iPhone has supported voice commands for years, but only with Siri has this become meaningly useful. I’ve always been leery of claims of voice recognition on computers — it tends to work tolerably if you’re a TV news anchorman from Nebraska, or possibly a continuity announcer on Radio 4, but my northern vowels have always confounded such systems. But I’ve been extensively impressed with Siri. With rare exceptions, it understands not only the words I say (it’s clearly been watching Coronation Street), but also the meaning behind them, and so simple tasks like sending my wife a text message (“Tell my wife that…” is all the syntax I need) or setting a reminder (“Remind me to…”) become part of what I’m doing rather than something that requires me to stop what I’m doing, mess with my phone, and then carry on.

Siri on the iPhone 4S — Oh, will the hilarity never end?

Siri’s anthropomorphising of the iPhone raises an interesting philosophicolinguistic question. My wife, being American, uses the American English setting for Siri, and so her phone answers her using an American woman’s voice. I, having had the enormous good fortune to have been born in the northwest of England, use the tautologically- and somewhat meaninglessly-named British English setting, and so my iPhone talks to me with the voice of a bloke from the home counties of England. (There is a third English option, Australian English; the default setting for an iPhone 4S bought in New Zealand is British. Of course.) So is Siri a he or a she? Such are the things that keep a technopundit awake at night.

So all is right with the iPhone 4S, then? Well, no. There is a flaw, a very major flaw, with the phone. Its battery life is, frankly, dreadful. And this is odd, since even better battery life than the iPhone 4 was touted by Tim Cook as one of the 4S’s big selling points. But I struggle to get a single day of moderate usage out of mine. I’ve had it replaced once (and that was a struggle), and my replacement phone isn’t a massive amount better. I’ve never managed the 7 hours of video, or 8 hours of talk time, that Apple advertise; I certainly don’t see the “truly better battery life” advertised on the Vodafone website. Apple’s release of iOS5.0.1 (featuring both interCaps and multiple decimal points) was supposed to address this issue, but, on my phone at least, hasn’t. A complete restore to factory defaults improved battery life somewhat, but neither completely alleviated the problem nor actually allowed me to use the features I paid for on my new iPhone — hardly a success on either count, then.

But I’ll stick with my iPhone 4S. I’m happy with it. There will be an iPhone 5 released one day, I’m sure. But until then, the iPhone 4S, despite its lack of the magic number 5, is a strong update to an inordinately successful product.

Rating:

Tags: 4S, Apple, disappointment, iPhone, New Zealand, review, Siri, Vodafone

A Mightier Mouse

In a weird, but not entirely surprising, moment of synchronicity, my wife and I bought each other the same present for Christmas this year — we each got the other a new mouse. This being Christmas, of course, though, we didn’t simply nip down Dick Smith’s and pick up a quick Logitech point-and-click doohickey — no, it was Christmas, and so, to make things a little more special, we each got a Magic Mouse.

Apple have been trying to get the mouse right ever since they first brought it to the market. The first was a horrible, blocky affair, a brick of pale-turd-brown plastic with a slightly less pale turd-brown button on the top. Since then it has become curvier, then — and this, surely, marked the utter nadir of mousely design — perfectly round and exactly one-and-one-eighth inches too short to use with any real degree of comfort. Oddly, though, because it was part of the iMac package, it did prompt plenty of strangely gushing comment, including remarks in MacWorld that watching the two-coloured ball rotate as the mouse was moved was “hypnotic” and “mesmerising;” clearly MacWorld’s editorial staff back at the turn of the millennium didn’t get out all that much.

Apple’s next mouse was a much more successful design for one particular reason — it used laser tracking instead of a ball. Suddenly mousing became much more accurate. But it was still a one-button mouse, and this was the cause of much consternation to many users, who simply could not understand why Apple refused, so totally obstinately (a quality surely not attributable to Steve Jobs?), to incorporate a second button. Right-clicking, it seemed, was PC thing to do; right-clicking was of the Devil.

But then came the Mighty Mouse, and this was a decent piece of kit, but it did lead to much wailing and rending of garments, since it, finally, included the heresy of a second button. Actually, it included no such thing — there was still only one button, but the software that read the mouse was sufficiently sophisticated to sense where the click was being applied, and so Apple, as obstinate as ever, managed to produce a two-button mouse with only one button. In fact, this being Apple, there were, in fact, four buttons, real and virtual. But the pinch gesture that constituted the fourth button was far from inspired; simply picking the mouse up was often enough to trigger Exposé or Dashboard. And the actual, physical second button, the scroll nipple, added two-dimensional scrolling, which was a wonderful innovation, but the nipple itself would routinely gum up and become, effectively, useless; a mouse that would scroll up, but not down, was neither uncommon nor helpful.

Apple's new Magic Mouse

Apple tried again this year. The Magic Mouse was released in October, but I didn’t get mine until December (I did write to Apple asking for a review sample for Steve’s TechBlog; I’m still waiting for my reply). Their latest attempt returns to absolute minimalism; there is, it would appear, no physical button at all. The device is, basically, a gently humped surface that sits, cordless, on my desk, all gleaming i-white. That’s it — no cable, since this mouse is only available in Bluetooth, and no nipple, since the surface is the mouse. Just like the Mighty Mouse before it, the Magic Mouse has only one clicking surface, only one physical button, but again the software detects where the click happened.

But other things are missing. The scroll nipple, mercifully, has gone. Scrolling is achieved simply by flicking a finger along the length of the mouse’s surface; with the correct software update installed (it requires Mac OS X 10.6.2, of which more later), you get what Apple are calling “momentum scrolling,” a feature that will be familiar to iPhone and iTouch users — flick a window and it keeps scrolling, slowing down in what seems quite a natural manner once you take your finger off the mouse. It works — surprisingly well. A solid-state solution, then, to the moving-part problem of the nipple. But the nipple also was the third button, and, without it, there is no third button — or, indeed, the fourth squeeze-the-sides button. I wasn’t in the habit of using those two buttons on my old Mighty Mouse, so I doubt that I will miss them, but I have read a handful of rather unhappy reviews and comments bemoaning the loss of this button, claiming that all “serious” users (clearly I’m just a frivolous, trivial user; oh, well) use, indeed need, that third button. I remain unconvinced.

There are, incidentally, third-party solutions to this shocking problem. I’ve been playing today with a little piece of software called MagicPrefs; it extends the Magic Mouse’s vocabulary of taps, clicks and gestures to really explore the multi-touch capabilities of the device, since basically it’s a mouse with a multi-touch surface bolted to the top of it. Frankly, I find it overkill. I’ve configured two extra things — a three-fingered click opens Dashboard, and a three-fingered tap triggers Exposé. But that’s all — anything else and I find windows hiding and zooming and flying across my desktop as though possessed. Not good.

But what does it feel like in the hand? Well, it’s not the hockey puck of days gone by. It’s about as broad and as long as the Mighty, but about half the height, which means that if you’re used to having your hand rest on top of your mouse, you’re in for a little bit of a surprise. It feels not uncomfortable so much as unfamiliar; I’ve had mine less than twelve hours, so I can’t say for sure yet, but I suspect that I will get used to it very soon. I do have decently large hands, mind, and I find that my wrist sits firmly on my desk while my fingers manipulate the thing.

And it is easy enough to manipulate. The wireless Mighty Mouse was a heavy thing — it was a clunky deadweight to drag around the surface of a desk. The new Magic Mouse feels about as heavy as a corded Mighty Mouse — an entirely comfortable weight, even with batteries installed (and full credit to Apple for including the requisite pair of AAAs in the box). On my desk, at least, the two black plastic rails on the underside of the mouse grip the surface of the desk quite decently, so that the two-fingered side-to-side swipe that is the only out-of-the-box Apple-offered multi-touch gesture causes no problems; the mouse doesn’t slip around when I swipe, although a different desk surface might give different results. The click of the mouse is much more positive than the click of the Mighty Mouse; the pressure required to click it is definitely a bit higher, as is the travel of the click, and there is a more noticeable da-dit sound as the button goes up and down.

Aesthetically, of course, it’s enormously pleasing — plain white, with only a ghostly-grey Apple at the tail of the mouse to show which way round it should sit — I have been dense enough once already today to try to use it back-t0-front, which works surprisingly badly. The packaging is typically Apple, too — a clear perspex box contains the mouse, which sits on a small white plastic tray which, I suppose, one could use as a stand or a home for the thing when it’s not in use on the desktop.

Overall, then, a pretty solid upgrade to the Apple mouse line. It was expensive — NZ$119 — but Christmas gave me and the missus a great opportunity to treat ourselves (well, each other, really — we didn’t actually plan things that way; we’re not quite that sad), and so far I think I’m pleased with my new mouse’s magic.

Apple’s Magic Mouse Rating:

Tags: Apple, Magic Mouse, mouse, nipple, review

On being assimilated

When Real Steve Jobs announced the iPhone, two years and a half ago, I knew I needed (not wanted; I needed) one. When Steve again walked the stage of the WWDC, last year, and told us of the goodness of the iPhone 3G, I was convinced to the degree that I queued up for nearly six hours (yes, I know…) outside Tampa’s Apple Store to secure a brace for myself and the missus.

And so, when this year’s iteration was to be unveiled, I dutifully chewed my fingernails in anticipation of spiffy new features. But they failed, almost entirely, to materialise. A compass? Meh. A better battery? About bloody time. An oleophobic screen? Be still, be still, my beating heart. All in all, I was utterly, comprehensively and thoroughly whelmed. Not overwhelmed, mark you, but whelmed — here was an iPhone that failed to set my young heart aflame.

Had my life continued down the path I’d been anticipating a year ago, I would have been somewhat torn — it was a new iPhone, and I knew I’d want it, but there wasn’t quite enough in the new release to justify the many more hundreds of dollars it would inevitably cost. But fate, as it has a habit of doing, intervened, and I recently decamped to New Zealand, a move that rather changed things. Around the time that the latest iPhone was released in New Zealand, I found myself looking to sign up for an antipodean cellphone, and so on Friday I found myself making for my local Vodafone shop. I bought one (I’ll get another for the lovely and talented when she arrives next month), and brought it home to start playing with. And here’s what I discovered.

Superficially, it’s all but identical to the iPhone 3G. The lettering on the back is glossy, rather than the matte of the last edition, but otherwise, you’d be hard pushed to know that you’re holding a 3G S (a somewhat less than brilliant naming system). The same glossy plastic forms the back, the same shiny metal covers the external switches. So what is new?

Well, there is the speed. Apparently, the internal circuitry of the new iPhone supports the much-vaunted 3.5G network that AT&T (of whom more later) will, sooner or later, be rolling out. But said technology has yet to trouble New Zealand either, and so I have no way of testing this new feature. But overall, the device does seem that little nippier. Applications do seem to open a little more quickly, and animation and graphics feel a tad more fluid. This is, of course, a highly subjective impression; it might be simply down to the fact that I’m chuffed with my new toy.

Most of the features of the new phone are also to be found in iPhone OS version 3, which I installed on my old 3G iPhone the day it was released. Cut, copy and paste have finally been implemented, finally putting an end to complainers who likened their absence to the Dark Ages. Oddly, though, I’ve not actually used any of these features yet — I can only assume that I’ve become so thoroughly used to using my iPhone without them that, now that they’ve finally arrived, I simply forget that they’re there. The new landscape keyboard that, again, people have been clamouring for as though its absence were a scourge against humanity is a little disappointing — I tried it and, frankly, found that I much preferred typing on the regular portrait-orientation keyboard. The keys felt more comfortably spaced that way.

The compass has proven to be a bit of a one-day wonder. It’s ever so impressive that Apple have managed to shoehorn a magnetometer into this device, but, frankly, what is the point? I appreciate the integration with Google Maps — having a map face in the same direction that I’m facing is clever, but hardly earth-shattering.

Voice activation has been added, one more of those catch-up features that Apple pretty much had to add. I confess to being impressed with its accuracy — my experience with American voice-recognition software is that it is hobbled by its assumption that everyone who ever uses it must be from the American midwest, and my Coronation Street vowels routinely confound such systems, but my iPhone makes a decent fist of decoding me. I’m still not sure how much I’ll use it, but it’s certainly an interesting novelty.

The iPhone 3G S’s new camera is the most visible hardware enhancement. I’ve long wondered why cellphones have to have cameras; I’ve finally come to the conclusion that as soon as one company added the feature, every other manufacturer had to, even though the two concepts have relatively little connection. I don’t, after all, insist that my toaster has a microphone, or that my dog is Bluetooth-enabled. But mobile phones, it has been decreed, will henceforth have cameras. And still cameras are no longer enough — they must now be video-capable. Much has been made of the quality or otherwise of the camera in the iPhone 3G S; most of it is pretty fair. It’s a phone, not a bloody Hasselblad medium-format camera, so I really don’t quite know what people expect. It takes pictures, and they’re perfectly functional. And it also takes highly serviceable video. I don’t see Martin Scorcese throwing away his Panaflex kit just yet, but if you want to make a lasting record of little Suzy turning her first cartwheel, you could do a fair bit worse. The integration with the rest of the OS is useful, though — on-phone trimming followed by the ability to email the video is rather convenient. I still don’t see cameras as a core feature of a phone, though, so I’m yet to be convinced that this is an area that Apple really need to be spending too much time.

The feature I’m most impressed with so far, though, is the oleophobic coating on the screen. In the days before we knew of the iPhone, I was highly sceptical of the idea of a touch-screen iPod. Surely, I would find myself thinking, my greasy fingers would smear across the screen and render it barely watchable. And, much as I enjoyed using my original iPhone, I found my prediction disappointingly correct. With last year’s iPhone 3G, I took to using a screen-protector sheet, but somehow it felt wrong, almost as though I was putting a barrier between myself and my toy. The 3G S’s screen, though, simply does not need a protector. I bought, as I mentioned my phone on Friday morning, and on Friday evening, as is customary, I found myself in the Warkworth RSA with Neil and Alex, who took a modicum of polite interest in my new gadget. I mentioned the screen; Neil reached across the table, took a hot, freshly-fried chip, and smeared it across the surface of the phone. “There, it looks pretty greasy now!” I liberated my iPhone from his Welsh clutches, gave it a quick wipe across my All Blacks rugby shirt, and handed it back to him. Spotless.

I’ve had my iPhone 3G S for barely a weekend. So far I’m less incrementally impressed than I was this time last year with my iPhone 3G, but then, I was less blown away with it than I was with my original iPhone a year earlier. Apple will have to pull something quite spectacular out this time next year if they hope to make even more money out of me; in the meantime, I’m enjoying being wired wirelessly again. I guess I’m powerless to resist a new iPhone. Resistance, clearly, is futile.

iLife ’09 review

After not inconsiderable (and, at the time of writing, ongoing) grief, I’ve finally received my copy of iLife ’09, the latest iteration of Apple’s lifestyle-app suite. It’s slimmed down in interesting ways — the packaging, typical of just about all Apple’s consumer-level software (including Mac OS X, server edition included), is a small, slightly-larger-than-a-CD-sized box, with, intriguingly, a list of all four applications in the suite on the back.

Yes, all four. And they would be, in the order listed, iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand and iWeb, all of ’09 vintage. iDVD appears to have become Apple’s latest red-headed stepchild, consigned to the software naughty corner along with AppleWorks, OpenDoc and the late, sadly lamented HyperCard. (iTunes, of course, isn’t part of iLife any more; it’s been quietly spun off as an adjunct of Apple’s iPortable line.)

There is, increasingly, a degree of integration between the various members of the ever-shrinking iLife family, but, in the end, they’re four different, individual, stand-along programmes, each with its own focus and purpose. It seems only fitting, then, that Steve’s TechBlog gives each programme its very own review.

iPhoto ’09 Rating:

GarageBand ’09 Rating:

iMovie ’09 Rating:

iWeb ’09 Rating:

Tags: Apple, iLife, review, Software