Apple, who has been accused of content price gouging in Australia, has failed to deliver with the hyped new iPhone 5 turning out to be more an upgrade of the current model iPhone 4 than a new model.
At what turned out to be “dud” event at Apple headquarters in the USA, the Company unveiled an upgrade to its iPhone, featuring a faster processing chip, better camera and voice-command capability.
The new iPhone 4S will come in two versions including a 16 gigabyte version and a 32 gigabyte version.
As soon as the announcement was made Apple shares fell 5.0%.
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Recently appointed Apple CEO Tim Cook spoke at the event, “This is my first product launch since being named CEO–I’m sure you didn’t know that,” Mr. Cook said at the event’s start. He noted the company “has enormous momentum” and spoke about the success that the company has had with its retail stores and devices.
This was followed by a demonstration that the Wall Street Journal said “underwhelm[ed] investors and online tech bloggers”.
While Samsung is launching sleek new Android Smartphones with bigger screens and longer battery life, Apple it appears is sticking to their small screen iPhones.
The IPhone 4S is Apple’s first overhaul of its popular smartphone in 16 months and comes weeks after Steve Jobs stepped down as CEO of the Company.
The new iPhone, which comes in black or white, will have an Apple A5 processor, the same chip found in Apple’s iPad 2 tablet.
The new chip can download data twice as fast and can handle graphics seven times faster, making it better for videogames, Apple said. It also has an 8 megapixel camera sensor, which is 33% faster at taking photos, a complaint with older iPhones.
The phone also includes a new antenna system, which automatically switches between two antennas to transmit and receive. More importantly, download and upload speeds have jumped to 14.4Mbps and 5.8Mbps respectively, and the device is a world phone, capable of handling both GSM and CDMA networks.
The camera features an IR filter which is meant to produce more accurate and uniform colors, and a five-element lens is said to produce sharper images with a maximum aperture of f/2.4. Apple has even implemented its own image signal processor, and the company claims to have one of the quickest time-to-first-photo speeds at 1.1 seconds. AirPlay mirroring, 1080p video recording and video image stabilization have been implemented.
Also new is Siri, an intelligent voice assistant based on the iPhone app of the same name. Users can hold down the Home button to speak plain-language questions and commands. In response iOS will present the relevant data from sources like Weather, Wikipedia or Wolfram Alpha, or in the case of commands execute functions in apps like Calendar, Reminders, SMS, Maps, Mail and Phone. A new Dictation function will let people speak instead of type when keyboard prompts are available.
