The student news site of Mountlake Terrace High School in Mountlake Terrace, Washington.

The Hawkeye

The student news site of Mountlake Terrace High School in Mountlake Terrace, Washington.

The Hawkeye

The student news site of Mountlake Terrace High School in Mountlake Terrace, Washington.

The Hawkeye

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iPhone 4S is only a stepping stone; the few updates it includes aren’t worth the price tag

The iPhone 4S released half a month ago on Oct. 14, but even before the release it racked up over 200,000 pre-orders in just 12 hours. This phone was so anticipated that people lined up fifteen hours before the release. But with the cost of the cheapest model running over two hundred dollars, this phone is not worth the cost.

Besides the “S” that they slapped on the title, they made very few modifications to make the new iPhone worth that two hundred dollar price tag. Only six major modifications were made to the iPhone 4S. First, a new A5 processor was added to allow graphics to reach your eye faster, yet the iPhone 4 had the same graphic quality that the iPhone 4S has, so it was somewhat pointless to add that to the new phone.

Also, a new operating system was added. All it does is make changes to what we can do on a certain screen and change the way we see things on the screen. It’s just a glorified update to the phone’s display. Like if you get a picture sent to you, you now have a new option to forward it instantly. You could already do that but now you can do it faster.

Apple says they have improved the camera by making the video camera 1080p software, which is the same as HD TV, yet the still camera was only improved by 3 megapixels from the iPhone 4, so that is a disappointment. While 1080p is impressive for a phone, that much detail will only be useful outside of a small-screened smartphone.

Another new feature that comes standard with the iPhone 4S is iCloud, an app version of the Cloud software for Macs. It takes all of your information such as music, photos, and apps and wirelessly transfers them to your other devices. iCloud does have one major flaw though. For most uses of iCloud, such as documents and apps, you can only push that content to other Apple devices. So unless you want to go buy a Mac or iPad to use iCloud with, you’re stuck with your iPhone as your cloud.

Finally, what Apple considers their best advancement of iPhone technology: the Siri app. It is a personal assistant that uses your voice to help you. It pulls up and runs apps based on your voice. If you want to find a good restaurant then tell it and it will run an app to find some. It does have some flaws. If you aren’t in a very quiet room then Siri is useless for the voice function. Also its fact checking mechanism is off a little. One review said that when Siri said that he needed a rain jacket it didn’t rain for 3 days. So until Siri gets the bugs worked out it really is not worth anything on the phone.

These modifications do not make the iPhone 4S worth trading up to. So instead of wasting your money on upgrading to the next cool phone, save your money until Apple puts out a product that is genuinely innovative.

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