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SAN
JOSE, Calif. — If you’re an iPhone fan, you’re
going to really like the iPhone 4S.
If
you’ve got an older iPhone or are considering buying
your first, the 4S is a great device to get. If you’ve
got an iPhone 4 or if you’re an Android fan, though,
it’s not a must-have.
The
headline feature of the iPhone 4S is its Siri voice
control system. With Siri, users can do things like get
directions, call and text friends, get restaurant
recommendations, set countdown timers and find out
metric-to-English conversions all by just talking to the
device.
Users
activate Siri by pressing and holding the iPhone’s
home button. After that, you use Siri by just talking to
it naturally. You don’t have to use any special
commands; instead it is able to glean what you want from
what you say. So, you can ask Siri, “How do I get to
the California Academy of Sciences?” and it will give
you directions to the museum in San Francisco from where
you are.
The
Siri technology is neat. I used it to look up
directions, to find out how many milligrams are in a
pound and to find nearby sushi restaurants. In many
cases, it worked without a hitch.
But
not always. When I tried to use it to call my wife,
whose name is Tara (pronounced TAR-uh), it kept hearing
“tart.” While I was amused, my wife wasn’t.
It
also had a difficult time understanding me when the
iPhone 4S was connected by Bluetooth to the hands-free
system in my Prius. While driving, I tried to get it to
give me directions to my house. But it couldn’t figure
out my street name no matter how many times or how
slowly I repeated it. I ended up turning off Bluetooth
and holding the phone in my hands so I could use its
microphone rather than the one in my car. That finally
worked, but it didn’t give me a lot of confidence
about using Siri legally while on the go.
The
Siri feature has other shortcomings. Right now, it only
understands three languages: English, French and German.
Given the number of Spanish speakers in the United
States alone, it seems a big oversight that Siri
doesn’t understand that language. Apple says that Siri
is officially a beta product, and that it plans to add
other languages in the future.
Also,
Siri only works with a select number of applications,
mostly those that come pre-installed on the iPhone. So
when you ask for directions, it pulls up the iPhone
4S’ native Maps program; you can’t use it to get
point-to-point directions on a GPS application that you
may have installed, such as AT&T Navigator.
Siri
is also subject to the limitations of those native
applications. The iPhone’s built-in countdown timer
will only time things in hours and minutes, not by
seconds. So you can’t ask Siri to set a timer for,
say, four-and-a-half minutes.
One
other cool aspect of Siri is that it allows you to enter
text by speaking it, rather than by typing on the
iPhone’s virtual keyboard. So, using Siri, you can
dictate an email or a text message. The voice
recognition was reasonably accurate, although I did have
to go back from time to time to correct certain
mistakes, but not any more than I tend to make with the
virtual keyboard.
You
can use the dictation part of Siri not only in native
applications such as email, but also in third-party
applications, such as Twitter or Facebook. When the
virtual keyboard comes on the screen, one of the buttons
has a microphone symbol on it. Press it, and you can
start to dictate.
I
found myself using this feature a lot and wishing it was
available in even more places. For some reason, Apple
doesn’t let you use the dictation feature to enter a
Web address or to input an email address when logging
into applications such as Facebook. Instead, in those
cases, you have to go back to using the virtual
keyboard.
Besides
Siri, the other big upgrade on the iPhone 4S is its
camera. The new rear-facing camera sports 8 megapixels,
rather than the 5 megapixels on the iPhone 4. That
allows it to take bigger pictures, finer-grained still
pictures, and videos in 1080p resolution, rather than
720p. You may or may not notice the difference. I
didn’t really in my quick tests.
What
I did notice was that the camera is much, much faster
than before — and much faster than other smartphone
cameras I’ve used in the past. As long as you have the
flash off, you can take photos in rapid succession,
almost as fast as you might with a standard
point-and-shoot camera.
I
loved how quick the camera was. I take the bulk of my
pictures these days with a camera phone, just because it
tends to be the device I have on hand. But because their
camera tend to be slow, my pictures frequently and
frustratingly turn out blurry or out of focus.
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