Apparently the life cycle of the iPhone 4 has been the longest yet; by that I mean that normally Apple announce new models at the WWDC in June, but with the 4 Oct “Let’s talk iPhone” event at Cupertino, they’ve overrun that cycle.
With all the rumours of Apple buying up mass-manufacturing glass-cutting machinery, a “tear-drop” MacBook Air profile design, bigger screen, wider handset, yadda yadda yadda I must admit I was expecting the iPhone5. 16 months, hopes up, hype up, Steve Jobs retired and Tim Cook expected to fill some very big boots…
I got home past the deadline for the start of the Cupertino show and was disappointed not to be able find a live webcast – it was all “live blogs” with some being less live than others!
After 40 minutes of waiting, reading that the tech bloggers of the mainstream publications were getting bored of the proceedings, I felt more than a little deflated.
I ditched the laptop to experience life back in the real world and ate dinner with my family, watched a little TV, listened to my daughter play violin etc and saw the BBC’s “60 seconds” news coverage (The highlights of the day’s news in 60 seconds, funnily enough) Their story went along the lines of…
“Apple has announced the launch of it’s new iPhone… It has a better camera!”
Wow!
So, all these hopes, raised expectations and we get an iPhone 4S.
I have to admit that I am a little bit disappointed.
But wait… what if I hadn’t read the rumours, what if I hadn’t been led to expect more?
An 8Mp camera – Sounds great! Better optics? Yes! Better battery life? Cool! Everything stored in the cloud? Awesome! I think… Maybe that’s why I haven’t seen this to be the 64Gb version, no external/additional memory… [edit: Just saw the screen shots of the show this AM and there *is* a 64Gb version, priced at $399 in the USA, so what price in the UK? I shudder to think]
But I have to ask – with the network operators’ universal tight-arse policy of dropping our contractual data usage from 1Gb to 750Mb and charging us more for it – won’t this just play into the hands of the service providers? Sure, I use my device mostly at work or at home, hopping onto the wireless and saving data/bandwidth costs. But the new ul/dl to the cloud or iCloud sounds like a recipe for… a potential cash haemorrhage if you’re out and about?! After being in Dublin in July and sharing photos of my travels, my bill for just 3 days away was nearly £40 higher than usual!
Saying all that, I want to see how this camera works, I want to shoot into the sun and take shots in the near dark. I want to see how the 2,500+ photos on my iPhone4 port to the iPhone4S and where they end up.
I’m not an Apple fanboy but I’d like to see first hand how much better this 4S is over my “old” iPhone4 – and then, maybe, we’ll get a “proper” evolutionary step next time round, worthy of the moniker iPhone 5.