The Philippine Online Chronicles

How does a company like Apple top last year’s best selling smartphone?

At Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California, newly installed Chief Executive Officer Timothy Cook, and some members of his executive team announced the company’s line up for the holidays. At the center of that universe is the new world phone, called the iPhone 4S. And what’s great about it is the combination of hardware, software, and services that went into that new phone.

Let’s talk hardware

On the outside, it looks the same as iPhone 4. It has the same retina display, and the same front and glass frame. It has a similar metal antenna on the side as well. What iPhone 4S lacks in the outward appearance, it delivers a lot on the inside.

The new hardware that comes with iPhone 4S is amazing.

8-megapixel camera

The new iPhone 4S comes with a revamped camera system. It is an 8 megapixel camera. So you get 3254x2448 images. What’s great about this camera is that Apple added backside illumination that gets up to 73 percent more light into your photos. They’ve included a hybrid IR filter so you get more color uniformity. It also comes with a five element lens that is f/2.4 aperture that gets you 30 percent sharper images. And what’s great about the new camera is its integration with the dual core Apple A5 chip that comes with an image signal processor so your phone can do face detection.

This new camera also allows 1080p HD video recording, and with the power that comes with the new iPhone 4S, you get temporal noise reduction as well, so you get really awesome video on it.

World phone

Apple integrated both CDMA and GSM into this phone so it can automatically switch carriers, say you are in a country with predominant CDMA, and switch to GSM when you are a different part of the world. So there is just one phone.

Dual core A5 chip

Apple has brought the A5 custom chip they built into iPad, and put it into iPhone 4S. What’s amazing with this new phone is the ability to process 7x more graphics than the previous iPhone. It is so amazing that games on this iPhone is as gorgeous as the games people play on gaming consoles.

Thanks to A5, games like the up and coming, Infinity Blade 2 will have even more stunning graphics. The detail will blow you away. You could see fish and reflection swimming in a pond. Animation is rendered on the fly.

Airplay mirroring

Another great feature of the new iPhone is its ability to mirror what you see on your phone with a television, or a projector. So business people can simply plug in their HDMI cable and you can project images from your iPhone to a projector, just as you do with iPad. So you don’t need to bring that bulky laptop or an iPad for a sales presentation; just plugin in your iPhone.

iPhone 4S is available in the United States on October 14. It rolls out to a few countries like Canada, The United Kingdom, France, and Japan. By October 28 to an additional 22 countries, and to 70 other countries by December. Let’s talk software

iOS 5

The new iPhone will come with iOS 5; that’s the next operating system for Apple’s mobile devices. iOS 5 will be available for not just iPhone 4S, but also for the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, the iPad, the iPod touch 3rd generation and 4th generation, and of course, the new iPod Touch.

Apple of course revealed great things about iOS5. Things like their revamped mobile safari that lets you do tabbed browsing when on your iPad. Then there is the very deep Twitter integration. You can tweet just about anywhere on your iOS devices. Send photos, tweet a youtube clip. Anything.

Apple also revamped the way they present notifications so incoming messages no longer pop in and disturb you while in the middle of a game, and it automatically disappears when it does appear.

iMessenger

If you’re ever a fan of Blackberry Messenger then, iMessenger is the direct competitor of that app. It works with all iOS devices--- iPhone, iPad, iPod touch. It sends out encrypted text, to your friends on iMessenger. You can share photos, videos, and stuff like that over iMessenger. It is the messaging system for iOS devices. And it finally works over WiFi and 3G.

Finally PC-free

The best feature of course of iOS 5 is it finally makes your iOS device--- iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch a truly PC free device for a Post-PC world. You no longer need a computer to sync your device to get started, and no longer do you need a computer just to software update. So people who hate syncing have no need to think about it. You can even software update iOS, wirelessly as well.

Let’s talk services

iCloud

Apple announced that iCloud is going to be released alongside iOS 5. What is iCloud? It is a software service that allows you to get your data--- documents, music, photos, video, presentation on any of your devices, anywhere in the world.

Say you are composing a letter on Pages--- the word processor, but you are running late and don’t want to bring your Macbook Air for that bus ride to work. Well, you can simply pick up where you left off on your iPhone or iPad on the bus. Yes, you get your document on the phone so you could edit on the go.

There is no more thinking, “Did i save it in the right folder?” Or “Did I save it at all?” None of that. Apple made it so seamless that you don’t even have to think about saving, or where the document is put in.

It is that cool. It is that amazing.

But what about your music? Well, Apple is bringing all of your music into the cloud, so you can listen to that song you downloaded on your Mac, on your iPad, and if it isn’t on your iPhone, just as easily get to download to your phone.

Apple is giving each user 5GB, free. Need more space? Apple has pricing plans for those as well.

iCloud launches on October 12.

Apple also unveiled a service called iTunes match. What this does is it scans your iTunes library and so even if you didn’t get that music from Apple, it will make your music available to you. What’s great about is this. If Apple find out about a song you downloaded, it doesn’t upload it to their server. They simply send you a similar song, with high quality recording from iTunes. The downside is, the service isn’t free. It costs about PHP1,050 pesos per year (US$25 per year), and of course only available to US accounts.

Apple brings artificial intelligence to the masses

What Apple announced today was amazing. What’s great isn’t the new phone. The new iPhone 4S is great. The graphics on iPhone 4S is years ahead of the competition. The iPod line up is all right. And iCloud, and iOS 5 are awesome pieces of technology. The bow in the Christmas present from Apple this year is a piece of Software called, Siri. This is mind-blowing. In a nutshell, Apple brought Artificial Intelligence to the masses.

This is the huge, huge deal.

Today, you can talk to your iPhone, and it understands you. Siri makes you talk to technology, and it understands you.

Ask it a question like, “Do I need a rain coat today?” And your iPhone, powered by Siri looks up the weather and can respond, “It sure looks like rain today”. You can tell it to “Wake you up at 6AM”, and it automatically sets a reminder to wake you up, at 6AM, and lets you know, “OK, I set it up”.

You can ask Siri questions, and can be part of a conversation. Like if a text message came from John, asking you for a meeting, you go and ask Siri if you can schedule it on Friday at 12 noon. It replies back and says, you already have a meeting, and you reschedule. And then when you found your time, just tell Siri to go reply to John that you are free at 10AM, and Siri understands that you’re sending John the text message. That your conversation with Siri is in context with all that.

Siri can tell you about the conversation between currencies like how much the Euro is to US Dollar. Apple partnered with the guys from WolframAlpha, and together they are delivering this amazing Artificial Intelligence. And last year, I wrote that Apple should buy WolframAlpha, and they did the next best thing: partner with them.

The integration

Siri is still in beta, so don’t expect it work right, but this is a phenomenal piece of technology, and this is the best thing that Apple has announced today. This is an amazing thing that Apple is doing. It has integrated all these different things--- hardware, software, and services, and wrapping them up in a nice package. Technology actually works for you, and not the other way around. iPhone and Siri is just the first step.

Welcome to the future.

Photos and video credit: Courtesy Apple