Apple iPhone 4s reviewed

I have to admit even though I dont say much about Apple products in the office, the best thing I have in possession is my Apple iPhone 4s and naturally being an quality assurance tester and having owned one for the past few weeks, I think this is the perfect opportunity to review the phone and its features.

When you first get the phone, you get it in a nice shiny white coloured Apple iPhone box which makes a change from the black one i got with the Apple iPhone 3GS.

After going the sim swap and getting the phone activated, you just plug it into your iTunes and restore all the data onto the new phone.

Siri

An example of the features and capabilities of Siri

Now the weird thing was I thought this would work straight out of the box because it tells you to press the big button at the bottom, but each time i did this it would open Voice Control, it turns you need to go into the settings to activate this feature. Now i have to admit i was quite impressed initially with Siri, naturally with voice recognition you wouldn’t expect the voice to sound natural like a human being but Siri’s male voice is surprisingly not too bad, the only problem and for me its a big problem is you cannot change the voice to a womans.

I can see its uses though especially when writing a text message as you can use the wonderful Dictate feature, but it would feel absolutely weird taking to your male Siri assistant during your train ride to work so I go down the traditional route of using my fingers to type the text.

Admitabbly its early days for Siri its still in beta so I am hoping Apple can very soon sort me out a woman’s voice.

Gaming

Gaming takes on a new level on the iPhone 4s

The new Apple iPhone 4s takes advantage of the new dual core A5 chip the same chip as used on the iPad2, I have to say the gaming is amazing, I’ve got various platform, action and puzzles games and it is out of this world, despite the wonderful technology i still can’t beat my sister at Fruit Ninja.

Camera

I’ve always felt with Apple iPhone’s this is one area they’ve not excelled in, this phone however comes with an 8 megapixel camera and boasts HD video, I’ve tried it recently at my sister’s graduation it does take extremely nice photos, camera also comes with an auto enhance feature and HDR which takes three shots and combines them into one, however I find this feature a little hit and miss and seems to lack the vividness from the original shot.

The video is 1080p MPEG4 compressed whilst its really good it would have been nice if the phone allowed us to set the video quality to 576p, 720p and 1080p as if you record too many the files soon add up especially when you are only on a 16GB phone like I am.

Conclusion

For people with an iPhone 4 this wouldn’t be a major improvement and I would wait for iPhone 5 but for people on 3G and 3GS its definitely worth the update.