We've recently witnesses a great presentation from a major brand on their new device that wowed critics. Who'd have expected it to be the one from Amazon with their Kindle Fire and not Apple with their new iPhone announcement.
I'm not an Apple fanboy but I do have an iPhone 3GS which I really, really like. I stop short of loving it due to a number of minor issues (I'll blog about them another day) but I was still planning on upgrading to the all singing, all dancing iPhone 5 when it came out. But it didn't.
When Apple CEO Tim Cook took the stage yesterday to talk us through Apple’s new offerings, the majority of bloggers and pundits were expecting him to reveal 2 phones. A major upgrade to the iPhone 4, namely the iPhone 5, and a cheaper, feature-lite phone, probably called the iPhone 4S.
What we got was a single new phone, the iPhone 4S. The outside looks the same as the iPhone 4, but apparently the inside is all new. ‘Cos we all know how much Apple fanboys care about the inside over external appearance (I know, cheap shot). So, what can this phone do that the older model couldn't?
Camera. The camera is now 8MP, with a 3264x2448 pixel resolution and able to capture video at 1080p, so on par with existing phones such as Motorola Droid Basic, 3 and Bionic, and the Samsung Galaxy S II, HTC Sensation, and LG Optimus 2x.
You can now take your first photo in 1.1 seconds. Mr Cook accompanied this particular feature with a shot at the slow camera on Android phones. Well Mr Cook, with my iPhone 3GS I could become fluent in French in the time it takes the camera to load. And I'm *really* bad at French.
AirPlay. AirPlay mirroring to Apple TV device. That's the 2 people with Apple TV happy then.
World Phone. It's now a "world phone", supporting both GSM and CDMA. Finally.
Siri. This is the big one. Siri is a voice assistant that responds to your instructions. Book appointments. Get directions. Set an alarm. Now, I know it has its problems, but the voice recognition on Android that's been out for a while now is pretty good. Without using Siri (fun fact, Siri means ass in Japan! I <3 Masi Oka) it's hard to see what it has over Android. Now I'm willing to be proved wrong and find it's the greatest thing since Verity Lambert and Sydney Newman sat down and thought “You know, I've got a great idea for a show”, but right now it's not got me rushing to an Apple store. Or even ambling. Mainly I'm shrugging.
That's pretty much it.
Essentially, Apple have brought the iPhone up to spec with other manufactures current handsets and little else. Oh, you can now make calls with it as they do something clever with the antenna. You know, like having them work.
The best part of the whole presentation was the iCloud, and we were told about that back in the Spring. At least we've got a release date. 12th October. Yes, I'm going to pay the £25 to get my entire music library on there. No I'm not going to tell you want’s in it. It's all cool stuff, honest. Okay, you can stop laughing now.
In short, it was a disappointing launch and a underwhelming start to Tim Cook’s tenure Apple CEO.
Apple are notorious about security, so you could argue we've no one to blame for our disappointment than ourselves. That's a fair point. What I would say it that it's been almost 18 months since the iPhone 4 launched and the disappointment reflects the fact we all thought and expected Apple to have made major advancements to one of their major product lines. It's simply so much less than we've come to expect from them.
As to the secrecy, it's worth noting that rumours that we'd see just one phone and it would be the iPhone 4S started emerging 24 hours before the actual presentation. Unusual for an Apple launch. A cynic might suggest Apple deliberately wanted this to leak to lower our expectations in time. But that would be very cynical...
We're now left with some big questions. Will this affect the Apple share price? (My guess yes, but it'll drop slowly and stay low for longer than we usually see with Apple) What about the wider audience who can't afford the expensive iPhone? (The reason we thought there'd be a cheap version. Tough luck kids, you'll have to get the new, cheaper and potentially more feature packed Android instead) Who will buy the 4S? (Why upgrade when we're all now expecting the iPhone 5 in the New Year)
So was this Apple's New Clothes Moment? Did we finally get a peak at just how little has been going on beneath the surface? That Apple expect us to pay high prices for a phone that does little its competitors can't already, and it should have been doing a generation back? That it harks back to the notorious major iTunes announcement that turned out to be the Beatles?
After all that, I'm going to say no. We've heard enough bits and pieces on the iPhone 5 to expect a major overhaul is still coming and that, as they're famous for, Apple aren't going to tell us about it until it's good and ready. But this is one of those times when the legendary Apple security most definitely worked against them. We'd better see what they've been working on soon, and it better blow our minds. Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us twice, shame on us. Three times is enemy action.
