What do you do with your phone? If you’re like most Americans, you make some calls, take some photos, and send some texts. Maybe you kill time with some games, check Facebook or Twitter, and look things up on the Web. If that’s you, then the iPhone 4S is your phone: it’s the best cameraphone in the U.S. and the fastest Web-browsing phone, and it has finally licked the iPhone’s calling problems. Apple has killed the “death grip,” at least on the Sprint model. The phone switches between its top and bottom antennas
depending on which one is receiving a better signal, which means it’ll ignore whichever
one you’re covering with your hands. Call quality on Sprint’s network through the phone’s earpiece was excellent in my tests. The earpiece goes loud, there’s a touch of
side tone, and I didn’t hear any distortion at high volumes. Pour some data into this baby, and wow, it’ll go. As long as Adobe Flash isn’t a key part of your life, the iPhone 4S is the fastest Web phone ever. It benchmarks faster than any Android Gingerbread phone and faster than any Windows Phone.
The great browsing speed comes in part from the new dual-core A5 processor (the same one used in the iPad 2), and in part from the new iOS 5. A standout feature of iOS 5 is Siri, which, on the surface, appears to be a voice-command app. Hold down the home button and ask it a question, tell it to look up a number, make a note or search for a business. But here’s the real story with Siri: it’s not an app, it’s a service. The intelligence is on the server side, and it will improve. No actual processing is done on your phone. That means Siri doesn’t work when you’re offline, but it also means it can be continually upgraded, minute by minute, without touching your individual device. Apple addresses the two biggest problems with camera phones: speed and dynamic range. The 4S has a larger sensor, a larger five-element lens, and a larger f/2.4 aperture than the iPhone 4, along with a backside illuminated sensor and an IR filter to improve colors. The camera app loads in under two seconds, and it takes most photos instantly. Outdoor shots are better than bright; they’re uniquely well-balanced. The iPhone 4S makes simple tasks easy and does them very well. It brings most people what they want, very elegantly. For that, it earns our Editors’ Choice for Sprint phones. The iPhone 4S is a no-brainer upgrade from the 3GS. For iPhone 4 owners, it really comes down to how much you need the improved camera.
