Apple iPhone 4S: Thoroughly Reviewed
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Brian Klug on October 31, 2011 7:45 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Apple
- Mobile
- iPhone
- iPhone 4S
Siri
Apple can credit much of its success to not only delivering good hardware, but using the hardware to develop new software experiences. With the 4S and iOS 5, most of the software experiences are available on older hardware - the sole exception being Siri.
The expectation that Apple will always deliver more than just a hardware upgrade is likely what made Siri a 4S exclusive (that and controlling the rollout as to not overly burden Apple's servers). The work carried out on the phone itself is minimal compared to what’s done server-side. A quick look at CPU utilization while running a simple Siri query (how many meters are in a mile) reveals the most stressful part of the process is animating the results on the screen. The display process is multithreaded but even then peak usage rarely steps above a single CPU core, in other words - this could have been done on the 4.
Siri is the logical next step from after the existing voice engine on the iPhone 4, which I doubt many people used on a day to day basis. Functionality was limited to a small laundry list of operations, and if you wandered outside the confines of those voice commands, you were left out of luck. I can count the number of times I did anything with the iPhone 4 voice commands on one hand.
Siri originally started as a standalone application, where it initially impressed with the ability to take a conversational approach to voice commands. Apple quickly acquired Siri, built it into iOS 5, and enabled the feature on just the iPhone 4S. At present, the feature only works for English (US, UK, Australia), French, and German, though in 2012 the language engine will also be compatible with Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Italian, and Spanish.
Hold the phone up to your head when not in a call, or long press the home button (which was the previous voice command action) and you’ll get Siri’s purple microphone and a circle button. If you’re familiar with Android’s voice dialogs, this visualization is pretty similar, though the functionality is very different.
Siri also works with bluetooth headsets and normal headsets, including the Apple-supplied button plus microphone earbuds. Normally Siri doesn’t read text messages or emails, but if you have a headset, it then reads everything back to you and becomes a much more powerful hands-free tool. Hold down the action button on a bluetooth earpiece or on the Apple earbud cable, and it will toggle Siri mode the same as holding the home button down. Bluetooth functionality works pretty well, though there’s added latency each time the earpiece audio link is established and torn down that can be unnerving.
Siri leverages Yelp for businesses/restaurants and Wolfram Alpha for any queries that require computation. It is interesting to think of Siri as Apple’s foray into search. Siri isn’t designed to monetize search, but any queries run through Siri definitely don’t line Google’s pockets. Given how much Google depends on search for its revenues and the growth of its businesses, Siri may be viewed as a competitive threat. Perhaps that’s why we don’t see Siri using Google for search?
There are two components to every Siri interaction: your query, and the results it returns. Where Siri is truly impressive is in its ability to understand your queries. You can ask it to tell you the closest Italian restaurants, or just utter the phrase “I want cake” and get a list of options in the area. For the former, Siri just looks for restaurants classified as Italian, for the latter it looks for restaurants whose Yelp reviews mention the word cake. Siri’s ability to dissect and handle the query is impressive, unfortunately its usefulness is gated by how active Yelp users are in your area. Yelp use in Raleigh is disappointing overall, which in turn hurts Siri’s ability to recommend what I’m looking for.
When it works, it works very well. There happen to be a lot of burger options where I live and simply asking Siri “what’s the best burger joint” returned a fairly accurate ranking of my options. The same goes for pizza, but my cake query didn’t really give me useful results either in Raleigh or Durham. Siri is only as smart as the databases that it relies on, and unfortunately simply looking for reviews that mention cake isn’t the best way to direct you to sugary goodness.
The computation aspect of Siri is pretty useful. You can ask Siri simple conversion questions like “how many quarts are in a gallon” or something more complex like “how much is a 15% tip for $247 for five people”. In the case of the latter you’ll get the total tip amount, the per-person share as well as other tip amounts (e.g. 10%, 20%). Take it one step further and ask Siri to tell you when it’s customary to tip and you quickly run into a wall. In this case it’s not the data but Siri’s awareness of the question that’s limiting you.
Given how frequently I’m in meetings, one of the most useful aspects of Siri to me personally is its ability to schedule meetings. I can tell Siri to schedule a meeting with AMD at 2PM Pacific and it’ll offer to create the appointment in my calendar for me. If there’s a conflict, Siri offers resolution options. Combine that with seamless calendar syncing via iCloud and you’ve got a pretty powerful tool. Siri also handles US time zones very well. As you may have gathered from the line above, I can tell Siri to schedule a meeting in a different time zone without having to do the conversion myself. The time zone support breaks down once you go beyond the US unfortunately.
Siri is similarly great for reminders. Using iOS 5’s location based triggers and by simply giving Siri some information ahead of time (e.g. telling it where home and work are in your address book), you can have Siri remind you to buy milk when you leave work or buy a cat when you leave home.
Siri’s voice recognition engine works pretty well out of the box, but also learns individual voice characteristics and dialects on a larger scale. This individually trained language data can optionally be reset as well by just toggling Siri off and back on. I trained Siri for about a week, reset the data, and went through a few commands - it’s obvious that it does tailor a voice profile after a while.
Siri is surprisingly good at following along in conversations, but ultimately it’s still limited to a certain set of tasks, though the list is pretty big. Things like emailing a contact, sending text messages, responding to messages, setting alarms, reminders, and appointments, playing music (based on artist, album, or title), looking basic things up, and then features that are enabled through ties into Yelp and WolframAlpha. Much of what I ask Siri that isn’t an obvious phone function (text, call, email) ends up being directed into a Yelp search, and the depth of interesting redirects here are impressive - everything from telling Siri you’ve soiled yourself (which sends you clothing stores), that you need drugs (which finds addiction treatment centers) to specific things like wanting a certain genre of food nearby. It’s clear that the team responsible for Siri had a lot of fun, and by now the number of interesting easter eggs have been pretty well documented all over the web.
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ados_cz - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
I have the 4S now and the problem is gone but once my girlfriend comes with her 4, I will make a video and post it to prove you wrong. People have no problems only in areas where signal is really strong. Why would I possibly want to lie?wonderfield - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
What's of concern here is not whether the issue (signal loss) can be demonstrated but whether the phone is, in Brian's/Anand's words, "usable" with the defect or not. It's certainly possible for the GSM iPhone 4 to be rendered unusable in a low signal strength area with a natural, right-handed grip just as it can be rendered unusable with a death grip. That's not to say the phone will be unusable in most scenarios, however, because in most scenarios the phone should function properly. There are certainly edge cases, and the issue is more significant for those who're left-handed and for those who live/work in very poor coverage areas (where it can become an issue), but, again, that's not the typical use case. It's why I categorize Brian's claim that the GSM 4 is not usable without a case as being disingenuous.Realistically, you don't need a "really strong" signal to have not have any problems with the phone, you only need a signal great enough to overcome any attenuation introduced by making contact with the antenna. The extent of the attenuation, as demonstrated in another Anandtech article to which you might refer, is not as significant as portrayed by some media outlets.
ados_cz - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
As far as the need for good signal went I needed to use the case all the time otherwise I would always have to hold the phone in unnatural way. iPhone 4/S is a really beautiful piece of hardware and It was really upseting that I had to use the case and spoil the desing. My close friend living just 15 miles next to me in Perth does not use the case and when he does not care to not to hold the phone in sensitive area, the call drops. It happend to me with him on the phone on few occasions. Few of my friends at uni need to use the case for iPhone 4 as well. The problem was not overstated. Either learn to hold the phone unnaturaly avoiding joining those two critical antenna strips or use a case. I opted for a case. My friend in the London got on well without case, but he learned to hold it by the to when calling. Anyway, I am glad that I have the 4S now and I think my girlfriend does not mind the case on her (former mine) iPhone 4. It so well made piece of hardware and so affordable here in Britain. You are being ripped off in US. Check the deals for iPhones on www.three.co.uk I got mine iPhone 4 for 69 pounds 5 months ago with two years contract for 35 pounds a month (2000 mins any network, 5000 mins mine network, unlimited 3G data with no fairu user policy). I paid 189 pounds for girlfriends (now mine) 4S for 32GB white version just few days ago and she got the same 35 pounds contract.Tetracycloide - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
"I have hundreds of friends who have iPhone 4's who've never had any issue with signal loss at all."Really? Name them. Numbered from one to at least two hundred if you please.
Overstating the strength of your anecdotal evidence doesn't make you look right it makes you look biased.
For what it's worth, I think you're a huge tool for, well, being such a huge tool.
doobydoo - Wednesday, November 2, 2011 - link
Don't be ridiculous.To label someone a 'tool' for stating that their friends don't have issues with signal loss on a phone, is quite frankly ironic.
To suggest I would list my friends names in a bid to convince such a low level individual is even more ridiculous than the rest of your comment (which is a lot).
If you really need hard evidence, I'd point you in the direction of the millions of iPhone customers who gave the iPhone 4 the highest satisfaction ratings of any phone, full stop. Bit hard to imagine that happening if they cant make calls on it, don't you think?
To claim I'm overstating my quite logical claim doesn't make you look right, it makes you look biased.
Tetracycloide - Wednesday, November 2, 2011 - link
I labeled you a tool because your response to another commenter saying they experienced an issue you and 'your friends' never saw was 'your a liar' or more literally "For what it's worth, I don't believe you anyway." That's where you were a tool, that part right there.Your 'hundreds' comment was absurd and you know it. To obtusely pretend I'm actually asking you for a list of names and act like that's absurd (it was obviously rhetorical) is to miss the point which was: you do not actually have 200+ individual examples from 'friends' to draw from. That's absurd.
Your claim was hardly 'logical' it was an absurdly overblown statistic that, even if it was accurate, would still be anecdotal. As are you're 'millions of iPhone customers' by the way. The phone looses signal if held incorrectly. That is the objective reality, full stop.
doobydoo - Friday, December 2, 2011 - link
How ironic that your justification for calling me a tool, is that I essentially disbelieved someone else, after that's all your comments to me are based on.Not only that, but how ridiculous and illogical to say someone is a tool for not believing something. Grow up?
'Hundreds' is not absurd at all, perhaps it sounds absurd to a social recluse? But I can actually name at least 200 friends of mine who use iPhones. Sorry if having friends is a strange concept to you. How dare you claim that you 'do not believe' my 200+ friends claim - that makes you a tool (it's a definition handed down to me by someone special).
Even if my claim was anecdotal, so what? Your criticism of my claim wasn't that it was anecdotal, and I never masqueraded it as anything other than what it was?
The 'MILLIONS' of iPhone customers is not anecdotal at all, by the way - they HAVE factually given the iPhone 4 the best user ratings of any phone of all time. That's reality, fact, pure and simple. They wouldn't do this, if they couldn't make phone calls, don't you agree?
I own an iPhone 4, and it doesn't LOSE (wtf is 'looses') signal in any meaningful way (as in, it never affects call quality or causes calls to be dropped) if held in any way I want. Unbelievable that you make such claims then try to define them as 'objective' - exactly the criticism you levy at me.
gcor - Monday, October 31, 2011 - link
Reading the specs on a lead acid 12v battery I have, I discovered that the higher the load in amps, the lower the total amp hours the battery will output. For example, the spec's say that a particular model can deliver a max of 1 amp hour over 20 hours, but only .5 amp hour over 12 hours.I'm guessing this is also true for the batteries in smartphones and laptops. This assumption seems to be supported when looking at the 3D gaming battery life results in the review, where a 10% increase in power consumption on the 4S, resulted in a 25% drop in battery life.
I assume this has implications for the "race to sleep" concept, as an increase in amp draw by the device may reduce the battery efficiency enormously, as well as actually using more power.
Anyway, just a thought to add into the mix when estimating a % speed increase required for a pay off in additional sleep.
Pliablemoose - Monday, October 31, 2011 - link
Your recommendations mirror my own thoughts, picked up 3 iP4's in the last month, 2 ATT models to put on Straight Talk for $499/year each with unlimited talk text and data (yes, I know it's not really unlimited data) for my kids, and a Verizon iP4 for me. I actually replaced a ThunderBolt with an iP4, got tired of the poorly executed radio software and the constant reboots to keep it connected. The ThunderBolt is a heck of a 4G LTE modem, sort of a poor phone, and definitely a brick with the extended battery it needs get me through a day of web surfing and stock trading.Saving my upgrade next year for an iP5, and keeping my fingers crossed for at least a 4" screen.
ltcommanderdata - Monday, October 31, 2011 - link
"Furthermore Apple even seems to be ok with combining a process shrink with a new architecture as we saw with the iPhone 3GS. It's generally thought of as a risky practice to migrate to both a new process technology and a new architecture in the same generation, although if you can pull it off the benefits are wonderful."I don't believe Apple has actually pushed a new process and architecture simultaneously. Up to now, the iPod Touch was generally the test platform for new processes as a shrink on an existing architecture.
The full evolution is:
iPhone 2G/1st gen iPod Touch/iPhone 3G 412MHz ARM11 90nm
2nd gen iPod Touch 533MHz ARM 11 65nm
iPhone 3GS 600MHz Cortex A8 65nm
3rd gen iPod Touch 600MHz Cortex A8 45nm
iPad 1/iPhone 4/4th gen Touch 1GHz/800MHz Cortex A8 45nm
iPad 2/iPhone 4S 1Ghz/800MHz Cortex A9 45nm
It is curious that we haven't seen a shrink of an existing chip as a pilot for a next gen process, either Samsung 32nm or TSMC 28nm, although the iPod Touch not being updated this year didn't leave many options. It would no doubt be too risky to put a new process pilot chip on the iPhone 4S. I believe iFixit did find some different markings on the 2011 iPod Touch, but I haven't heard about any size difference so that makes a large shrink unlikely. Is there any chance the 2011 iPod Touch could be piloting the A4 on a TSMC 40nm process as a means of getting that relationship off the ground? Is there enough commonality in the tools for the 40nm and 28nm processes to make piloting on 40nm a worthwhile interim step?