October 4, 2011 was a day that everyone was anticipating. On that day, Apple held their “Let’s Talk iPhone” event and people were expecting the much hyped, iPhone 5. Based on numerous case leaks and mock ups of the next iPhone, it showed that it could’ve had a significantly thinner design and the bigger screen that everyone wanted. What we got instead was the iPhone 4S, an incremental upgrade from the iPhone 4.

Obviously, initial reactions weren’t that great. People all over the world were disappointed with the 4S, because they were expecting the iPhone 5. Because people were so disappointed, the iPhone’s market share and sales has went down a little bit, making Android phones #1. What’s funny about this is that the iPhone 5 was just a rumor, not something that was confirmed by higher-res graphics in iOS 5, and part leaks.

But when you put the leaks aside, the iPhone 4S is truly not a disappointment. Apple has crammed in a powerful A5 chip to power iOS 5, and the inellegent assistant, Siri. But, is the 4S worth signing your life away with a 2 year contract? Read on to find out.

Hardware / Design

As I stated earlier, this was one the disappointments of the 4S. Compared to an iPhone 4, there is virtually no difference, but to be honest, keeping the design is a positive thing.

Even if the design is a year old, it’s still a work of art. Just like the iPhone 4, you still get the squared-off design with two pieces of glass sandwiched between the aluminum antenna band. With those components, the iPhone has extraordinary build quality. In fact, the iPhone doesn’t feel like a phone, it feels like a piece of jewelry or something luxurious. Unfortunately, the 4S’ design doesn’t come with compromises. Because the iPhone 4S features an all-glass design, you’ll have a significantly higher chance of shattering your phone. Also, the squared off design does take time getting used to, but after a while, you’ll get used to it. The 4S does have one cosmetic change, however. The antenna on the 4S borrows the same exact design from the Verizon iPhone 4. We’ll talk about the antenna more in-depth later in the review.

Retina Display

As time passed by, phone displays have significantly increased in size and it is now a desire for consumers. People want bigger screens and phone companies provides them, except for one: Apple. This is Apple’s fifth iPhone and still, no bigger screen. Obviously, everyone was extremely disappointed with this considering that phone screens are constantly getting bigger. But, there is one feature of the display that makes up for it, and it’s the resolution.

This was one of the hallmark features of the iPhone 4. With a resolution of 960 x 640 packed into a 3.5-inch display, you get a staggering pixel density of 326 pixels per inch. At that resolution, you can’t see the individual pixels even when you bring the phone all the way up to your eye. With this display, Apple has to do system-wide changes to fully support the display. For example, Apple has re-done the icons with much greater detail and has changed the system font to Helvetica Neue, which is a narrower version of Helvetica.

Even to this day, the Retina Display is still one of the best displays in the market right now. One thing to note, however is that the 4S’ display is manufactured by Toshiba, making the viewing angles slightly lower.

Performance

 Something that is completely different from the iPhone 4 are the internals of the 4S. Under the hood, you have a dual-core A5 processor that is clocked at 800MHz and 512MB of RAM. The specs compared to a modern Android phone doesn’t sound overwhelming, but in reality, it’s faster than today’s Android devices.

The chart above shows that the iPhone 4S is faster than the Samsung Galaxy S 2, both in CPU and graphics benchmarks. The thing with this is that the Galaxy S 2 has a 1.2GHz dual-core processor with a full gigabyte of RAM, and yet the 4S beat it.

But, benchmarks are just numbers. What matters the most is the actual performance when using the phone itself. Everything in iOS 5 (startup, animations, loading apps) is buttery smooth thanks to the A5 processor. The performance compared to an iPhone 3GS is night and day, while compared to the iPhone 4, it isn’t that much of a difference. To fully experience the A5 processor, you’ll have to use CPU intense applications like iMovie, or playing Infinity Blade.

Camera

One of the more significant features of the 4S is it’s 8-megapixel camera sensor, which blew me away. The new camera features an updated backside illumination sensor, a fifth lens element, and has increased the aperture to f/2.4. Also, the camera is capable of recording 1080p video, which looks stunning as well. The best way of explaining the camera performance is by looking at some sample pictures and as you can see, it’s stunning. These photos are straight from the iPhone and has not been edited at all.

Antenna Performance and Battery Life

As part of the slightly changed hardware, the iPhone 4S has an enhanced antenna design, which is supposed to end the over-dramatic “antenna gate” issue that the iPhone 4 had. Apple says that the antenna will “intelligently” switch between the two antennas, providing better call quality and signal strength.

After using the phone for a good amount of time, signal strength has been dramatically improved both from the 3GS to the 4. Also, the antenna gate issue as been resolved. One thing that all iPhones lacked from was the call quality. The 4S sounded slightly better compared to the 3GS, but it could still improve.

As far as downloading data, the AT&T iPhone 4S does get one slight advantage over the Sprint and Verizon iPhone. Apple is taking advantage of AT&T’s HSDPA 14.4Mbps network, which is generally faster than normal speeds. The 4S averages around 3Mbps which is pretty quick for a phone network, but nothing can beat LTE with it’s mind-boggling 20Mbps download speeds.

When Apple posted the 4S’ battery performance on the website, something didn’t seem right. Compared the iPhone 4, talk time on the 4S increased from 7 to 8 hours,but from there on, everything get different. Internet browsing on Wi-Fi dropped from 10 to 9 hours and the most substantial difference is in the standby time: 300 to 200 hours. The reason why battery standby decreased is because of the new A5 processor, which is power-hungry. Although, Apple did make a very slight bump in the battery capacity to accommodate the new processor, but it doesn’t seem to make it any better.

Because of the new processor, a good number of 4S users are reporting terrible battery life; some said that the phone dropped 2% after 30 minutes of standby time, which is usually not good. Because there has been numerous reports, Apple took action with the iOS 5.0.1 update, which is supposed to fix all battery issues, but Apple is still investigating the issue. During my use of the iPhone 4S, battery life has been excellent. The phone will last a full day and I’ll usually have about 50% left. Obviously everyone has different usage patterns, so battery life can vary.

With 200+ new features, this has to be one of Apple’s biggest software update ever. Of out of the 200+ features, I’m just going to list my favorite features of iOS 5.

 Notification Center

 Possibly one of the biggest requests that Apple has received was an easy way of accessing your notifications and also have un-obtrusive notifications. Finally, iOS 5 now has an Android like pull down menu that shows your recent notifications, and has two widgets: stocks and weather. The pull down window is certainly a nice addition, but the more significant one are popup notifications.

Gone are the frustrating popup notifications, and now when you get a new text message or email, a small notification will slide down on the top of the screen. Best of all, it doesn’t interrupt you. As of right now, there is one slight problem with this concept. When you do get a notification, you can’t dismiss the notification right away. Instead, you’ll have to wait until the notification fades away, which can be annoying. Though, there is a catch to that. There is an un-official way to dismiss them, and the way you do it is you slide Notification Center down very slightly, and release.

Another improvement that Apple has down are lock screen notifications. When you get a notification, you can just slide the icon to the left and go straight into the application. It’s a really handy feature, especially when you have a lot of them.

         iMessage

Another big addition to iOS is iMessage, which is Apple’s very own BBM like service. Just like BlackBerry Messenger, you can text to all of your iOS 5 devices for free through a Wi-Fi network, or cellular data. Not only you can send texts, you can send pictures, contacts, and videos, though it would be nice if Apple allowed document sharing on iMessages.

     PC Free

Another big addition to iOS 5 is that you can “cut the cord”. What I mean by that is that you can now setup your device without connecting to iTunes, and sync and backup wirelessly. Also as part of the PC Free package, you can change the device name within the settings.                                  

                Photo Editing

With iOS 5, you can now edit your photos right within the camera app. Now, it doesn’t provide you Instagram like filers, but give you basic editing like auto enhance, red-eye removal, and crop. The auto enhance feature does a great job at enhancing photos, but sometimes it wouldn’t work as well. If you want serious editing to your photos, you should use Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop.

 iCloud

Remember MobileMe? It was mostly a “Mobile Mess” because nobody used it. It was $99 per year and it provided services that doesn’t necessarily enhance the iOS experience and it was not integrated well within the OS. When Apple announced iOS 5, they’ve scraped MobileMe and replaced it with iCloud. 

iCloud is a complete revamp of Apple’s cloud services and I believe they’ve finally got it. Gone are the iWeb and iDisk services and have been replaced with services that are actually useful and integrates well into the OS. iCloud does retain some MobileMe services like email, contacts, and calendar sync, but now it’s more than that.

With iCloud, you can have photos, music, apps, and documents backed up and synced across your iOS 5 devices. Also, as part of the PC Free package, iCloud can automatically backup your device (app data, photos, contacts, etc.) in the cloud. Another service that Apple provides is called iTunes Match. For $24.99 a year, iTunes will scan all of your music and match your songs for high quality music directly from the iTunes store.

With all this, you get 5GB of storage for free and it won’t count your music, apps, books, etc. Instead, it stores your backups, Mail, documents, and etc. If you feel that 5GB isn’t enough, Apple will offer you more storage options for a fee. For $20 per year, you get 10GB of storage, $40 for 25GB and $100 for 55GB.

Siri

The biggest feature of the iPhone 4S isn’t the camera or the processor, it’s Siri. As you know the iPhone had some type of voice control that allowed you to control your music, call contacts, and basic stuff like that. The problem with that is it’s very limited and you have to speak commands, not by using regular sentences. Meanwhile, Android’s voice control is more cohesive like asking for map directions, and most importantly, voice dictation.

With the 4S, Apple has completely revamped voice control and made it extremely useful. With Siri, you can use natural language to send texts messages, emails, restaurant suggestions, setting alarms, and tons more. If you ask Siri a more complicated question (like whats the square root of 144), it will use Wolfram Alpha and provide your detailed information about your command. For restaurants, Apple teamed up with Yelp to provide local restaurant data and suggestions. Another added bonus with Siri is that you now have voice dictation. So whenever you bring up the keyboard, there’s a little microphone button next to the spacebar and when you touch it, you can start dictating.

While all of the commands are nice, Siri does have a humorous side. If you ask Siri a silly question, it’s most likely to give you back an answer. Here are some examples above.

Wrap-up

Overall, the iPhone 4S is an excellent phone. The combination of an excellent display, camera, processor, and operating system makes the the iPhone 4S an unbeatable phone. Sure, it doesn’t have LTE or a bigger screen, but it’s something that you can easily ignore when you actually use the device.

But here’s the burning question: should you upgrade if you have an iPhone 4? To he honest, it’s really up to you. If you really want the extra speed and the 8 megapixel camera, go ahead, but you’ll have to fork over $649 for the phone off-contract. If you own an iPhone 3GS, it’s a no brainer. You’ll be experience the features of the iPhone 4, except you get some extra features.

So, is this the “ultimate device”? You decide, but me personally, it’s a yes.