Now that we’ve had a month to digest Apple’s 5th generation of the second-coming of mobile telephony: The iPhone 4S I thought it was fitting to take a look at what this product really means in terms of Apple’s product cycles.
As one might speculate based on the name alone this is a fairly minor revision of the current-generation iPhone 4. The new device carries only a few minor hardware adjustments, but some very significant changes for the software itself (most of which the iPhone 4 will receive as well).
The most significant hardware changes are the upgrade to a dual core ‘A5′ ARM CPU, a completely redesigned 8MP camera and the integration of the voice-interface called ‘Siri’.
The first two pieces of this puzzle are fairly easy to understand. The new A5 processor will give the handset much more power, particularly for gaming or video intensive applications. The second new piece of hardware, the redesigned camera has a higher resolution sensor, larger aperture and an additional lens element, all of which are said to contribute to brighter, crisper, “better” photos than any of the previous iPhones.
The odd-ball of the bunch is Siri. This is something which might be described as an assistive technology, something designed for users who would have trouble interacting with the phone in a traditional manner. But if science-fiction has taught us anything it’s that we’ll all be talking to our computers in the future and the keyboard and mouse will be “quaint” figures of our collective social memory.
Siri was rolled out in Beta to the iPhone 4S and is the only iOS 5 device receiving the enhanced voice interface despite similar processing power in this past year’s iPad 2. The “beta” monicker is something that Apple has used only sparingly in years gone by and it tends to be in a fairly traditional sense of the word, being applied to products which are truly unfinished when they are made available to the public. There has been a great deal of speculation as to what this means for the future of Siri. Many feel that the technology will eventually make its way on to every Apple product from voice-enabled phones, to computers through to the Apple TV. The digital living room device is, in my opinion, the killer target for the new technology as it would allow a remote-control free experience (assuming it knew when to listen to you and when to ignore the sound coming out of your TV).
But all that aside I really wanted to focus on this one point: the iPhone 4S is the next logical step for Apple. After the initial release of the iPhone in 2007 it was followed up with the iPhone 3G which was arguably the first “complete” version of the handset in 2008. June of 2009 saw the introduction of the iPhone 3GS which was for all intents and purposes a revised version of the previous year’s model. 2010 introduced the iPhone 4 with an all new design and the first instance of an Apple device with an Apple CPU (the A4). After such a major upgrade nobody knew what would happen next. Speculation early in 2011 led many to believe (correctly as it turns out) that Apple would abandon it’s traditional June timeslot for iPhone launches eventually delivering the new phone in October.
The delay also led to a great deal of speculation that Apple must be using all this extra time to produce an absolutely killer new iPhone 5 which would revolutionize the phone market as much as the iPhone 4 had the year previous. The iPhone 4 is still one of the best selling single handset models ever, particularly if you focus on smartphone sales. As time dragged on so did the predictors, pundits and pranksters. We saw mock ups of super-sized, super-small, super-thin, dual screened, cloud-based, fat, thin, black, white, pink, polka-dotted, tutu-wearing, pipe-smoking, tap-dancing iPhones (OK, I made some of those up, but you get my point). When the new handset finally arrived, it was not the much touted iPhone 5, but a revision to the iPhone 4 complete with evolutionary hardware upgrades and a new piece of software that may someday change the way you interact with most of your technology.
It makes sense. The next iPhone will (probably) have a more significant redesign. The next iPhone will (probably) not be called the iPhone 5. The next iPhone will have Siri. The next iPhone — well, we’ll see it when it gets here, won’t we (or when it inevitably gets left in a bar somewhere in San Francisco).