iPhone 4S boxed and released - fanfare and criticism
Sunday, 16 October 2011
iPhone 4S with box image courtesy angelcandy.baby/flickr (CC BY 2.0)
The iPhone 4S hit retailers October 14 around the world. Excited Apple consumers have been anxiously waiting for days to snatch up the new phone, the last Apple device to be unveiled before the passing of co-founder Steve Jobs. The launch also came just after serious network problems for Blackberry-maker Research In Motion last week. People are starting to find out what the new iPhone provides for the smart phone industry.
Owners can speak to it, and it responds. It boasts a dual-core CPU, making it faster. And it has a better camera and video recorder. Many claim that the highly talked about 8MP camera on the iPhone 4S was made by Sony, while some have inferred that OmniVision may have participated in the camera's development.
Technology evangelists say that features such as the voice-command, called Siri, provide innovation to the smartphone industry. Perceived as the leader of mobile innovation, Apple does still work hard to catch up with various features on their own product as well. That doesn't matter to many.
The craze began when Apple made the phone available for pre-order, resulting in a new record of a million purchased in the first 24 hours.
Although there were hundreds in line when doors opened at retailers around the country, most lines faded away by early afternoon.
The adventure was not flawlessly slick for everyone. In an echo of prior launches, AT&T had glitches when activating some devices, leaving a few early adopters waiting for online congestion to fade before they could complete the process.
With one corporation's fortune comes another's hardship. Blackberry-maker Research In Motion had network problems last week, which spanned five continents. RIM co-CEO Michael Lazaridis apologized to customers on Wednesday. "I apologize for the service outages this week. We've let many of you down, but let me reassure you that we are working around the clock to fix this," said Lazaridis. "You expect better from us and I expect better from us."
For some Blackberry users the words arrived too late. The iPhone 4S now boasts a prominent feature that has historically sold potential buyers on Blackberry: an internal messaging system that incurs no charges for users of the smartphone.
Research In Motion has seen a drop in its sales by three percent for each of the last three quarters. RIM will need to come up with something new and enticing if they seriously intend to remain a mobile leader.
But though its sales are down, Blackberry is still attractive to some users. It's good for people on a budget. But both Blackberry and Apple are facing serious competition from the other smartphone giant, Google's Android, which currently commands 50 percent of the market share and continues to grow.
