The day after Apple announced the iPhone 4S, I wrote the reasons that I predicted that lawyers would love it. Now that I've been using an iPhone 4S for over a week, all of those reasons have turned out to be very true for me. I love Siri, and even though I have used it for less than two weeks, I cannot imagine using an iPhone without the feature. It is amazing how well Siri works to quickly give me information that I need, and I love being able to dictate e-mails on my iPhone. The improved camera takes beautiful pictures and video, and the speedy processor and iOS 5 make that camera even more useful. The improved antenna is giving me faster speeds downloading over 3G, typically over 6 Mbps in New Orleans, versus the 3 or 4 Mbps that I had been seeing. (It wasn't that long ago I was paying AT&T for a 3 Mbps DSL line for my home computer, and now I'm seeing twice that on a phone!)
I've also discovered a few things about the iPhone 4S that I had not expected:
Louder. The internal speaker on the iPhone is just so-so for music, but has always been very useful for when I want to listen to a podcast. My only complaint in the past was that the volume on my prior iPhone 4 (and previous models) was sometimes not loud enough. On the iPhone 4S, the speaker is much louder. I don't have the equipment to measure volume, but I can say that the volume is increased enough that I often find turning down the volume while listening to a podcast, something I rarely did in the past.
Good vibrations. The internal mechanism used to make the iPhone vibrate is different in the iPhone 4S. I'm not sure how to describe it except to say that it is smoother and, as a result, somehow more pleasing when it vibrates.
From Russia, with love. In addition to using the U.S. GPS satellites to determine where your iPhone is located, the iPhone 4S can also use Глобальная Навигационная Спутниковая Система (Globalnaya Navigazionnaya Sputnikovaya Sistema). GLONASS, as it is more commonly known (and not to be confused with GLaDOS), is a global navigation satellite system operating by the Russian government. According to Mikey Campbell of AppleInsider: "By combining location data from the two dozen Russian satellites with U.S. GPS's 31, accuracy and speed of determining a user's location are greatly increased." Also, including GLONASS support may help Apple avoid taxes on iPhones sold in Russia, an emerging and important market for Apple. Quickly determining your location is increasingly important on an iPhone, so it is nice to see that this feature is improved on the iPhone.
These three features are minor, but add them to the marquee features of the iPhone 4S, and the result is a very impressive device.
