I am a huge geek. This a fairly well-known fact. I love Apple. I always have since my Apple ][e back in the early 80s. Weirdly enough, I have bought every iteration of the iPhone so far, though not all for me. I had an original, bought Chondrion a 3Gs, bought a 3G for me for 50 bucks, then Chondrion gave her 3Gs a bath in the toilette, so I bought her the 4, then my mom a 3GS. My 3G was in some pretty sad shape. It hardly ran any apps at this point, and had no ability to run iOS 5. I had knew whatever the next iPhone was, I was going to get it, whether it was called the 5 or 4S. I stayed up to 3:30 AM CST to preorder my white iPhone. (More people notice the different color, so I attract attention to myself so everyone knows how cool I am to have the latest iPhone.)
A week later, my iPhone arrived in the morning. The biggest difference between my second generation iPhone and the 4S is the 4S gets reception in my house. Most cell phones don’t work in my house on the farm in the middle of nowhere. On occasion, when tethered to my desktop computer, the 3G might get a bar or 2. (My wife’s 4 gets one or 2 without tethering.) But the new 4S? Nearly perfect reception. That’s a big deal to someone who’s never had a cell phone he could use at home before.
The big question is obviously how is Siri, the built in voice-activated assistant? I love me some Siri. I need to text message, Siri takes dictation. I need to play a specific podcast / playlist and Siri can do that. Better still, Siri does takes orders in conversational English. I don’t need special commands or phrases. I also like how Siri is able to create reminders for me. That is the one that really gets me. Like usual, the new technology Siri represents doesn’t excite me for what it does today, but for what it’s going to do in a few years. My immediate reaction to after playing with Siri was “why isn’t this on my desktop???” I can’t way for Siri to be on my desktop so I can tell her to respond to an email while I’m drawing, or pausing my music when there’s a phone call rather than hitting a key literally inches (which is miles in a desktop) from where I’m drawing.
The iCloud is pretty cool so far too. I’m not sure I’m the target for this service yet, but as always, the future is interesting to me. The iCloud is going to make it so my laptop really is just my computer on the road, rather than a second computer. Right now, iCloud makes the Back to my Mac feature work, so the need to take my large comic files to school on a drive and then recopy them at home is pretty much eliminated.
The 4S has a pretty spiffy camera on it, but I haven’t played much with it. The full 1080p video could come in pretty handy, especially with children in my life now. Also, 8 megapixel still images means I can do some pretty nice on the fly photos, when I don’t have my full SLR with me. I can’t help but wonder how many more versions of the iPhone until we get a physical zoom lens. I suspect we could see that in the 5, for sure by the 6.
All in all, my Apple Fanboy is sated with the 4S. I must also say it felt somewhat cathartic to buy the 4S the week that Steve Jobs died. I wonder how many people bought the phone specifically because of his death. In the dead of night, as I waited for preorders, Apple’s website had that wonderful iconic black and white photo of Jobs on its front page. The preorder really felt like the wake for Apple fans. I literally stayed awake, and as I waited for the amazing iPhone, I thought back and reflected on Jobs.
For me, the iPhone was both a moment for the future, and a reflection of the past.