"my wife" is Almost Certainly* explicitly flagged in his address book, either as an alias or through a "relationship" field. he didn't show you that part. (the same is likely true of the geofence, though a location-aware algorithm could probably do a better job inferring where your work is than who your wife is.)
I have no problem with that. This a great demonstration of what Apple does best - optimizing products to fit the needs of most users. Google already has the voice tech in place, but often fails to follow through on the usability front. A perennially annoying example for me is when I'm on the road somewhere, bring up Maps, and ask for directions from wherever-I-am to 'home'; it doesn't know where 'home' is. This is even more annoying, because there is a 'home' tag in Maps, but it doesn't get searched on. Likewise, there's no easy way to tell it that one person is my wife, another person is my business partner, a third person is my nemesis and so on.
Apple are leveraging a culture of paying attention to detail to overcome technical handicaps, but it's hard to quantify or A/B test that, and most firms aren't comfortable with a budget line item called 'magic.'
To add to the frustration, Google knows where "home" is for me, even without me telling - Latitude inferred it. Can't ask Google Mobile Maps for directions to home, though.
yeah. I'm just saying that the magic in the system is that it's a well-designed system with attention to detail, not that it's capable of leveraging anything approaching human intuition.
And when you leave the work radius at lunchtime with the cute coworker you're flirting with, you suddenly hear your wife over the in-vehicle bluetooth handsfree.
I wonder how many conditionals you can string together. "Remind me to call my wife before I leave work" is great, but "remind me to call my wife before I leave work at the end of the day, unless she calls me first" would be awesome.
In reality none of this stuff is even remotely useful, because I can't even begin to guess whether or not a given command will be interpreted properly. Natural language is hard, and reminders need to be 100% reliable.
According to the video, he said that Siri knew his wife's name from "a previous conversation". Which seems to indicate that Siri has some learning capability built in.
I agree, but it sure does feed the hype machine. Think about how many news sites are hosting live blogs, and how many incidental visitors are seeing front page articles about it, and have been seeing ads for the live blog for days leading up to today.
Now contrast that to a company where anyone can watch the announcement live. I think most places you'd just get an article or two at the end of a product announcement, because the people who really care will just watch the announcement themselves.
That one's updating much more quickly, though has fewer photos.
EDIT seems to be fixed now EDIT2 yet, there seems to be a darth of images again... engadget still has them EDIT3 OK, engadget is offline EDIT4 engadget is back (am I really blogging bloggers?)
Both GSM & CDMA. This is going to be one of the huge factors for the 4S & 5. If I can now play Verizon, Sprint, & AT&T off against each other then this may be a big, big win for US consumers.
Think Sprint may still be able to sell that big chunk of phones they committed themselves to. I can definitely see going back to Sprint, if they get reasonable roaming deals, particularly on international data.
Yeah. I wonder how things like carrier lock are going to work on this new model. If I have Verizon service in the US and go to Europe can I drop in a local SIM card and use that? If so what is to prevent me from using that same feature when I am back in the US? Hmmmm....
Verizon's other world phones (Like the Droid 2 World) have a 'US only lock'. It will lock out USA SIM cards, but it otherwise unlocked everywhere else. It's also subsidized. I think that is a very fair way to do it.
On a tangent: I miss Steve! These guys may be good but from the photos here most seem to be reading from a prompter screen and they just don't seem to have the look-into-your-eyes "believe me, this is the greatest thing ever" stare that Steve Jobs could do. Also, the black turtleneck may be untouchable, but rumpled blue shirt? Doesn't that shout blue collar corporate manager?
This upgrade reminds me of the upgrade from the Blackberry 9700 to the Blackberry 9780. In both cases: camera is considerably improved, processor and/or memory modestly improved, more interface eye (or ear) candy. It's no wonder that many people seem to be disappointed, given all the associated hype.
The iPhone 4 seemed like a huge step up from prior models to me thanks to a 326 PPI display, a much faster processor, and a variety of other reasons. I guess even Apple acknowledges this given the naming convention of going from 4 to 4s. Not enough of a change to warrant iPhone 5.
This is just like the iPhone 3G > iPhone 3GS transition. Doing a new enclosure every year would be pretty taxing, so they take a year off. Incremental hardware improvements meanwhile. The funny bit is they barely needed to do this much — iPhone 4 was still selling steadily.
I own a Blackberry 9700 which was a nice phone when it came out but have been underwhelmed by the 9780 and in some ways even the 9900 (no autofocus camera, no UMA). That's why it's the first thing I thought of.
I think I would prefer an iPhone if it were on T-mobile or if not that, at least the option to buy an unlocked iPhone at a reasonable price that worked at reasonable speed on T-mobile. Not so with today's announcements. An iPhone 3G can be purchased unlocked for $375, or an iPhone 4 for $549 but both are very slow on T-mobile at EDGE data speeds.
An exciting announcement for me personally would not have been a new enclosure, but rather the ability to run on T-mobile at fast speeds, all at a reasonable price. Wishful thinking, I guess.
It has what I want. Improved camera (especially image stabilization in video mode), and faster at loading games (and probably useful apps too). I don't care much about Siri, but then I didn't realize how amazing Maps was on a mobile phone until I had it myself.
I suppose I also had a good idea about what would be announced thanks to MacRumors accurate reporting, so I wasn't let down that the phone is called 4S instead of 5 (besides, I love the iPhone 4 external design).
I never used voice recognition on mobile until my wife picked up an Atrix and there was a little mic button on the home screen, I clicked it and said direction to Hatteras Flats and it pulled up Google's turn by turn navigation. From that day on, I have been waiting for that level of voice recognition to come to the iPhone. I would have never though that it would have been such a killer feature and now I feel like I am in the stone ages without it. To the point that I was considering switching if IOS 5 did not have it.
most people bought the iPhone 4 on a 24 month contract, those people probably wont by the iPhone 4S due to the high cost of early termination fees for little gain. (of course some people will which is just a bonus).
This cycle is pretty clever as it pretty much guarentees majority of iPhone 4 holders will upgrade to iPhone 5, whilst simaltanously giving a decent bump in sales to people who have had there friends talking up the iPhone 4 for a year a chance to one-up them.
But what about the 3GS people that are coming off their 24 months and were waiting for the 5? Those people might start looking to see what Android has to offer.
I'm one of them and I don't see a compelling enough reason to upgrade at this point (iPhone or Android). Siri looks interesting, but it's not a feature worth locking myself into another 24 month contract for.
All the Australian networks are moving to 4G, so IMO it's a good time to wait for the next gen of LTE handsets. As with the original iPhone, I suspect it was just too early for Apple to switch.
Is Siri specific to iPhone 4S, or will it be a part of iOS 5? It sounded like it is only a part of iPhone 4S, but it seems like it's all software. Perhaps the iPhone 4 isn't powerful enough to do the voice recognition seamlessly?
From what I hear the A5 in the 4S has some hardware components not available before - including a hardware DSP and image processor. That's what's powering Siri and the newfangled fast-camera features.
"2:02PM Phil's taking a shot against the Atrix, Thrill, and Inspire 4G. "The iPhone 4S is just as fast as these phones.""
Wow. "Guys, this is awesome! Our new phone is just as fast as an Android phone that came out a year ago!" (The Atrix, about to be supplanted by the Atrix 2).
> Wow. "Guys, this is awesome! Our new phone is just as fast as an Android phone that came out a year ago!" (The Atrix, about to be supplanted by the Atrix 2).
He was pretty clearly using them as examples of "4G" phones when it comes to data transfer speeds and nothing more.
Yeah. I remember the Wolfram Alpha video demo - it looked amazing and natural, but when you got to use the real thing 95% of your queries didn't work at all.
a) Siri won't work at all, or will degrade to something like Voice Control, if the server is unreachable or you're out of coverage;
b) all of your dynamic data (address book, calendar, etc.) needs to be synced to iCloud for Siri to see it;
c) third-party extensibility won't be available until iOS 6+.
Does anybody know if the GSM concept of unlocked has an analog in CDMA? IOW, if I buy my new 4S factory unlocked, can I use it on Verizon OR Sprint? I'm assuming yes, because it really looks like a single SKU, but I don't know.
The unlocked iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S will not work with CDMA-based carriers such as Verizon Wireless or Sprint.
Sounds like that's a no-go for the 4S. Which sucks because my wife wants to replace her Android phone, but we're not upgrade eligible from Verizon yet. So that means I'm going to have to pay same price as the unlocked phone, but it's going to have the GSM side locked out if I ever want to sell it.
Much worse, AAPL is going to take a big plunge - no matter how awesome and flashy the 4S features are. After the HUGE pre-event hype and blabla, everyone is only going to take "What, NO iPhone 5????" away from this, sadly.
Unfortunately, I have to agree, I am a 3GS owner and was waiting for the 5. The thing that I keep thinking is with this being the first big announcement since Steve left the company they really needed to show the world that they where going to keep hitting home runs. While the 4S is an nice upgrade, it is in no way the home-run I would have expected to show that they are no worse for wear without Steve. I was very surprised when I learned that it would not be a 4G phone, that would have at least been an easy win for getting people to make the upgrade decision. My wife picked up an Atrix almost a year ago and it was 4G. I know the coverage is still growing and there are areas that do not have it, but it is not like 4G is not standard equipment on the higher end Android phones. To me that was the biggest miss.
I'm having a hard time separating the wheat fromt the chaff in all that camera talk, is anyone familiar with these changes/sensors (since I suspect they're not unique to Apple devices)?
I'm an amateur photog, and I'm excited about the camera:
- backlit sensor = better low-light pictures, with dramatically less noise
- faster lens, hopefully with better clarity (less haziness that's characteristic of phone cameras)... but we'll see how well it actually works out
- and most importantly, fast. I know I hate using my phone's camera since by the time I pull it out and the phone lets me take my first picture, the moment's already passed. The whole "1 second to first picture, 0.5s between shots" I think is going to be HUGE. It's going to get people using their cell phones as cameras a lot more than than they are now.
It's still a phone camera. It's better than it was, but image quality is still not going to be as good as a dedicated camera, even one of a few generations back. It should blow away the ipad2/ipod touch cameras. It may be a noticeable difference from the iphone4, but I wouldn't bet on it.
The best camera is the one you have with you. And on that front, it's a good camera.
The "iPhone 4S" name was a pretty common rumor, so it is not unexpected. Given the iPhone's "tick-tock" release schedule (3G->3GS->4->4S), I was not surprised.
I guess with all the toddlers supposedly owning iPods/iPhones/iPads, this has some valid use cases. But actively supporting personal surveillance systems seems like a weird move to me after the media hubbub about the location cache.
Yes, this is something people legitimately want. There are lots of occasions where I will go somewhere with friends/spouse and want to wander but occasionally sync up or know where someone else is. It sure beats SMSing "where R U" messages back and forth.
I guess I edited my posting while your were answering, sorry about that.
I clarified that I am actually more worried about the public reaction to this rather than legitimate use cases. Not really worried, just, why not leave it at a third party app?
To answer my own question, Apple's solution has probably both more polish and more lock-in power, just as with iMessage vs WhatsApp & Co.
The killer feature Glympse appears to have in comparison with iOS 5: it's cross platform. Not everyone you're going to want to sync with will have an iPhone or iPad.
I've got an app that does real time location sharing:
http://convoyapp.net/ aimed at people driving in groups. I wonder how well this location sharing feature will compete against it, and if it makes it obsolete?
Damn, I have never heard of glympse. I actually made my own app for this six months ago: http://l.oc8.me . Glad I'm not going to spend time creating native versions, and can move on to my next pet project. :)
Once Apple can put the tech that would justify a jump from 4 to 5 and retain their (50% of ASP!) margin, they will.
Idly, I wonder if they're getting a sufficient cut from the carriers to make the 3GS at no cost profitable, or if rather this is what they mean to do with their cash hoard: chase market share AND increase profitability.
DISCLAIMER: I used to work for Apple. I have no specific knowledge about the phone.
The prices you saw are the carrier subsidized prices. The carriers buy the phones from apple and then subsidize the cost, and try to make a profit over the length of the contract.
The presentation was a little bit sloppy, because previous presentations would have footnoted that these were with a new 2 year contract prices, not "we're selling these phones at these prices".
I understand that part. I'm just amazed that the demand for the 3GS is sufficient, and AT&T desperate enough, for Apple to retain the tooling to build them.
Lots of AT&T 3GS owners just out of contract, though. They'll probably go for the 4S. And Apple gets to save the iPhone 5 for another big announcement in 6 months.
kinect was the one of the first device to sucessfully use natural language processing for controllerless entertainment which already works pretty well in the context but MS never thought of probably extending and integrating the tech with other products.
Strong point of MS was integration of different technologies but ever since Gates stopped taking interest in MS they have lost it.
Now they have uncapitalized half assed implementation of technology laying around in silos.
Note: I am well aware of when Gates stopped working with MS. Even before stopping to work, he stopped taking interest in MS's future vision atleast years before that.
nerds haven't been all-about-the-Windows-ecosystem for a decade or more, if indeed they ever were.
Microsoft has had dominance over personal computing for so long because people aren't by and large nerds, and computers weren't fashion statements until recently.
and Microsoft's still trying to catch up with "computer fashion."
Do you seriously think the issue is that "MS never thought of integrating the tech with other products" and not that there's a huge difference (and inevitable time lag) between having the abstract idea of "integration" and working out concrete, compelling use cases, a concrete design, a concrete business model, and implementing a concrete product plan?
