Iphone 4S, iOS 5 & iCloud - What you need to know
What a tech week!
- Oct. 12 (TODAY – Global release from midnight PST) – iCloud gets turned on for users & iOS 5 is released as a FREE update on iTunes
- Oct. 14 – iPhone 4S release date
Since the announcement of the iPhone 4S on Oct. 4 and the subsequent death of Steve Jobs, Apple has received MILLIONS of pre-orders and have in fact sold out of initial supply for Oct. 14.
Telstra has been registering consumer interest for the last week and has today announced their extremely competitive iPhone Consumer Plans. PF Systems is also taking registrations of interest for our initial shipment of iPhone 4S, so if you’re nearing the end of your contract with Telstra, let us know via our website.
If you sign-up with PF Systems, we’ll also offer a free 20 minute basic setup of your iPhone valued at $33.
What do you get for you money with the iPhone 4S?
The Hardware
| Dual core 1.2GHz and 7x Graphics performance. Same processor as the iPad 2. Webpages and other applications will run 68% faster on the new phone. Games will run up to 7 times faster. | ||
| Implemented mostly due to “Antenna-Gate” on the iPhone 4 launch, the antenna system is split in two so that the reception is optimized between the two, making the 'death-grip' less likely to occur. | ||
| More advanced features, quicker to start using and support for 1080p high definition movie recording. |
Summary: same but better!
The Software
iOS 5 has 200 new features over iOS 4 and is ramping up to be the most significant update yet. The most important features:
| Only available on the iPhone 4S. For those of you who ever used the voice commands on the previous iPhones you would know that it was fairly limited. You needed to select from a short list of commands to do things such as ring someone (sometimes the wrong person) or play some music. We've found it useful and reasonably reliable. Siri promises to take things to a whole new level. You will be able to command your phone to do a large range of things using normal sentences without a pre-learned iPhone syntax. Apparently this feature is not a gimmick and is like something “straight out of science fiction”! | ||
| The headline is Twitter, but this should be read ‘We were too annoyed with Facebook at the time but now we are not and there will be tighter Facebook integration, also”. iOS will make whatever you are doing easier to share on Twitter & Facebook. | ||
| Your iPhone will update over WiFi/3G. No more plugging your iPhone into your computer to get it running the latest incarnation of iOS. |
Summary: Some unexpected features and some long overdue ones.
The Cloud
iCloud is Apple’s answer to the fragmented cloud-services approach of players like Google & Microsoft. It will aim to seamlessly sync and support all your devices (iPad, iPhone, Mac, PC) without complex and error prone syncing/updating regimes. Your desktop computer is no longer the centre of your digital universe, iCloud is.
| For those of you paying for a hosted exchange service which syncs your email/calendar/contacts across all your devices, you know what this is. Now, if you have an ‘@mac.me’ email address (which you get for free), you can do the same thing. You may even be able to use your @mac.me account to collect your other mail and send on its behalf as with Gmail. | ||
| Take photos and see the sequence of photos taken appear on your other devices. | ||
| Sync your purchased music and apps over all your iCloud connected devices eg. buy things on your iPhone and see it in your iTunes on your PC and on your AppleTV. Also, although a US-only service now, iTunes Match will cost around $30 a year and will 'legalize' your entire collection of songs by integrating them into your iTunes account. So if you’re someone with many CDs and many illegal downloads, this could be your chance to come 'clean'. | ||
| Work with Apple productivity software like iWorks (and other third party apps) and access your documents where you left them on any other device. |
Summary: Excellent (in concept) if you want to be 100% Apple, but be careful about selling your soul and watch your data allowance!
As a consumer, PF Systems does not recommend anything other than an iPhone as Apple has continually proved its ability to deliver on its promises. We offer a full set of iPhone services including the full range of Telstra plans and configuration solutions.
All new iPhone 4S purchased through PF Systems will include a one-on-one basic setup service (30 minutes max ;))
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