The Apple iPhone 4S – My First Two Weeks

I have been a long time fan of the iPhone, and when the iPhone 4S was released two weeks ago I picked one up. I have now been using it for two weeks and thought I would share some thoughts and experiences of it.

Siri

Siri is one of the big new features only available on the iPhone 4S (today). Siri enables you to get things done by just asking – for example, you can say you want to add a calendar event or send a text message.

By default Siri is switched off, so you have to enable “him” or “her”.

Here in the UK we get a Male voice, where as in the US they have the option of a Female voice. You can change it by changing your language setting to English (United States) but then the software looks for certain words and ways of speaking – certain things I asked didn’t work as well when set to US as apposed to UK.

Siri works quite well, when it works. I cant tell you the number of times it hasn’t worked, or given me some bizarre response.

That being said, the programmers have a real sense of humour and have some responses available to the obvious questions:

Battery Woes

Oh where do I start???

Having used an iPhone 4 for well over a year, I could get a full days use of it, including having certain location services enabled, and my email accounts set to Push my emails to the phone.

So given that Apple were promising at least an hour additional battery life out of the iPhone 4S I was somewhat surprised how quickly my battery was going down, even when I wasn’t actually doing anything.

It was quite unnerving just sitting watching the battery remaining percentage literally tick down in front of my eyes. I was getting about half a day out of the battery and not actually using the phone that much at all.

For the first time in a very long time I saw the dreaded red battery logo and my phone shut down.

Needless to say I wasn’t very happy.

I did some quick research and noticed that I wasn’t the only person having this problem.

Some people were saying it was expected as the 4S has a more powerful processor (ok, but Apple said it had at least an hours MORE battery, not LESS).

Others advised turning off various services – ok, I thought, I can do that.

So I turned off a few things and the battery still went down quickly.

In the end I had to turn off the following just to get a “working” day’s use of the phone (at that’s not even using the phone that much as an actual phone):

• Siri
• all Location Services
• Wireless
• Bluetooth
• Push email
• and a few other things

so basically I have to turn off most of the functionality that makes having an iPhone worth having. Basically I am almost back to having just “a phone to make phone calls”.

So Apple, hurry up and release a fix already!

Final Thoughts

So, the question I get asked the most at the moment is “was it worth upgrading from the iPhone 4”? Well, to be honest, the answer today is No, it wasn’t. At least, not today. The battery issue is frustrating me the most. I’m not seeing significant improvement in the speeds (although I am seeing some) and while Siri is fun for a but, ultimately right now, here in the UK, it’s not that much use.

I am happy with the camera functionality (not that I use the camera that much, but it’s certainly nice to have it available), plus the HD video shooting capability is great.

If you have an iPhone 3 or 3GS, then it certainly is worth upgrading – no question about it.

I assume that Apple will release an update at some point soon to fix the battery issues, they always do.

Don’t get me wrong, I am happy with the 4S, I’m just not as happy as I could be…..

Do you have an iPhone 4S? What do you think?