iPhone 4S vs. iPhone 4

In the past few months, rumors about the coming iPhone 5 or iPhone 4S were in flood. Now finally Tim Cook brought the new iPhone 4S. And it will come into the market on October 14th, 2011. To upgrade or not to upgrade? That is the question.

We’ve taken an in-depth look at the key specs and seen how it compares to its year-older sibling – the iPhone 4.

Processor and memory

The iPhone 4S boasts the Apple A5, which is the same dual-core processor as the iPad 2. Apple A5, based on the ARM Cortex-A9 microarchitecture, is said to have twice the speed of the Apple A4 chip in the iPhone 4.

Siri

Siri is one of the lightspots of iPhone 4S. It is a voice-controlled personal organizer of a sort which will translate your more human, sentence-based commands into actions. So, for example, it can set alarms, read and reply to your messages, find restaurants and the like. The point is that it only comes with the iPhone 4S and not the iPhone 4 or below.

Video

One of the many features announced on the iPhone 4S is 1080p HD video recording. This is a nice improvement over the iPhone 4′s 720p HD video recording. The goodness does not stop there, however. In addition to 1080p, the iPhone 4S is equipped with video stabilization to help steady those non-professional, bouncy video recording skills.

Camera

There’s a five element lens in the iPhone 4S instead of the four element in the iPhone 4, face detection and an 8-megapixel sensor. There’s 60 per cent more pixels, a larger f/2.4 aperture and an advanced hybrid IR filter that produces sharper and brighter images. The Camera app has also been improved and the shot to shot capability is twice as fast according to Apple.

Power and battery

The iPhone 4S has a slightly better battery life than the iPhone 4: up from 7 hours talk time on 3G to 8 hours. However, standby time is a cited 300 hours for the iPhone 4 but strangely this is 100 hours more than the iPhone 4S.

Storage

The iPhone 4S is still available at capacities of 16, 32, and 64GB. And the 16GB and 32GB version of the iPhone 4 line have been axed from this moment on, meaning that anyone who opts for the older model from new is limited to a rather small 8GB storage space only.

Wireless and data

The iPhone 4S boasts both GSM and CDMA capability, meaning it can be used on virtually any network across the globe. And iPhone 4 is separated into GSM version and CDMA version.