Gadgetory

hey guys it's Branagh minimun from pocketnow.com I've been using the iPhone 4s for about eight days now and I have some tests notes to share let's get to it so in this video we're gonna cover five different areas some of which are specific to the iPhone 4s some of which are specific to iOS 5 in general let's actually start off by talking about the bumper the bumper has been redesigned sometime in the last few months it's been redesigned with lower quality materials unfortunately the bumper is a great case for people that want a minimalist cover protection something that looks good and maintains the curves and the thinness of the iPhone for what that provides a good level of protection if you drop it on a corner or if you rest it on a table and there's something there that that could scratch the screen however this downgrade of materials is very unfortunate the first generation of bumper had rubbery edges along the side now it's kind of like a low density rubber almost plastic and you can see what's happening after just eight days there's a little nick in in the corner here down near the charging port there's a nick the gray stuff is getting dirty and I'm pretty careful with the phone so it's very unfortunate that the iPhone bumper has gone down in quality they really need to reduce the price 29.99 for a case like this is insane of course Apple likes to charge more for everything the Apple tax but come on guys lower it to 15 bucks make it at least competitive with all of the other case offerings out there you can get a much higher quality iPhone 4s case that isn't going to great degrade on you after eight days so thumbs down for the bumper there let's talk a little bit about Siri we did a whole video on Siri and I'll put a link up here so you can jump back and see that is Siri useful well let's ask it are you useful no comment fantastic no comment so again we did a whole video about Syria about what it can do today and what it can do and hopefully we'll be able to do tomorrow meaning in the future where Syria is evolving you want to check out that video I will put the link back up at the end of the video in case you want to watch this video through and through now another big change with the iPhone 4 is the camera we got a bump from 5 megapixels to 8 megapixels from 720p video capture to 1080p video capture there's a lot of fancy stuff that's going on in terms of how they actually achieved improved optics including lens and aperture and all of that fancy stuff but most people just want to take a really good picture with their smartphone and the iPhone 4s takes incredible pictures in fact this is the best camera phone available right now previously the galaxy s2 was really really good in terms of taking macro shots and 1080p video but the iPhone 4s just takes it up a notch in every respect let me give you a couple of examples in terms of the photo quality so I was recently at a golf course I was taking some pictures of the golf course of some trees of some things on the ground and take a look at this I found the small mushroom on the ground very small and I wanted to see how the iPhone 4s did with macro shots those really close-up shots that would cause a most most smartphones or point-and-shoot cameras for that matter to go out of focus look at the picture I captured if we zoom in we can see tremendous detail from this mushroom it's actually kind of gross how wrinkly this mushroom is very tiny artifact on the ground about that high and yet look how clear and crisp this photo came out it's really fantastic let's go back to a couple of other photos here we've got a golf course photo everything is just exposed very very well the color looks fantastic the Retina display makes everything really pop and you can really see the detail so the sky is blue the contrast with the trees looks great the grass is a reasonable color green you can see some of the yellow and the changing leaves very accurate color and I tried the same thing with the flower here so here's another example of a macro a flower probably about that size and massive but it just focuses very very well on the flower to the point where you can see detail in each and every petal so the iPhone 4s gets very high marks for video capture and for photo quality if you want the camera with or the if you want the smartphone with the best camera the iPhone for us is definitely vote the one to get and also the combination of the photo stream makes it awesome I've got photo streams set up on my PC I've got photo streams set up on my home computer so that when I take a picture all of my photos are uploaded to the cloud and then down to all of my devices which saves a step that has plagued humanity which is plugging in your phone and transferring the pictures or emailing pictures to yourself or whatever you do this really softs the problem of course there are other technologies out there that you can get on Android for example that will do the same thing but it's all integrated out of the box here on the iPhone 4s which is very much appreciated the next thing we want to talk about is the notification system which in my opinion is kind of bad let's go into the notification system I was actually impressed with how many options you get so we can sort applications here in this list this is the new notification list by time or you can do it manually now because you're going to get a lot of notifications building up almost every app these days has a notification system Game Center New York Times I mean just every app has some way it wants to notify you when things happen and you have so much control now in iOS 5 over which notifications happen where they happen and how they happen and it's actually a little bit of a learning curve so if we go into any of these let's say this chess application there are three different things you can choose for the notifications to do one you can have it turn on and go into the Notification Center I've actually got that turned off and I'll tell you why in a sec number two you can set the notification alert type you can have the pop-up alert which is what we've been used to for a while now in iOS 5 the one that pops up in the center it interrupts you from what you're doing there very annoying you can have this a new kind of banner notification which is actually pretty horrible and I'll demonstrate it in a sec or you can turn off alerts all together and number three the third thing that you can control here as you can turn on the notifications for this particular program in your lock screen and of course in the lock screen you'll get the new slider so you can jump right into the program that's trying to notify you of something that is happening so I've got the Notification Center turned off because I just don't find it as useful as say Android especially Android 4.0 where you can selectively remove certain notifications in iOS 5 you've got to either have a big stack of mail notifications for example or you can clear out all your mail notifications and have 0 it's either it's an all-or-nothing kind of thing and I really don't like that let me demonstrate why I hate the banner notifications so for email right now I've got banner set up so when I get a new email you'll see something roll in from the top there's a big problem with it so I'm going to send myself an email then jump into another app give me a sec and we'll show it off so watch what's gonna happen here I am in iMessage or the message notification see how the notification rolls down and covers up these UI buttons and it really sucks because you can't swipe off the notification you have to wait a full 30 seconds which is a very long time if you're trying to send an email and iOS buttons are always up here to be able to go back and forth for example imagine being in this group message and a banner occurs and it covers up this back button well you have to wait the full 1 2 3 seconds before it goes away or you can't press the message button unless you try very very hard to get the bottom half of the button that is exposed and sometimes you miss you hit the notification and you go into the email or whatever was notifying you Apple could fix this so easily if you could swipe notifications off the screen Windows Phone 7 does it awesomely and hopefully iOS 5 in the next update will fix this because it it's a big problem next up let's talk about the web because with a faster CPU we're hoping that checkerboards are a thing in the past if you had an iPhone 4 over time it got slower not only that but it didn't have that much processing power to start with so you get checkerboards see if that has been fixed in iOS 5 and on the iPhone 4s thanks to the dual-core a5 so here on Engadget we get blank space for a second but then everything fills in very quickly let me show you that again let's go to a different part of head and gadget in case we're being cached here so we get a blank screen and then everything gets filled in very quickly no checker boards to be found checker boards are a thing in the past with iOS 5 and in the iPhone 4s which is very very fortunate because it can really slow you down when you're browsing and pinch-to-zoom is as you would expect it extremely smooth buttery smooth bouncing around on the web is a great experience as you would expect on an iOS device coupled with the dual core processor and things are extra smooth now hopefully sometime soon they're going to update this silly tabbed interface for iOS in the phone application because we want to have tabs like a computer not this button and then you've got a flick and there's no way to close all the tabs so I mean you have 8 resource intensive websites open you have to go through and tab it and tap it the tab system really needs an overhaul in iOS 5 add that to the pop down notifications for the 5.1 update which is hopefully coming in the near future but in all seriousness the web browser is extremely fast on the iPhone 4s and finally let's talk about iMessage those of you that have been using a blackberry for a while I've been using vbm blackberry messenger which is basically the same thing you can do group SMS you can send pictures and you can also send a video over a data connection it's all free so you're not charge five cents or whatever AT&T Verizon Sprint and t-mobile want to charge you and it is awesome for example for making plans so I've got some friends I'm having a conversation it's me and three friends at the same time we're having a conversation so no more texting one person than texting the other it's like a chatroom in your pocket and it's super awesome and you can add photos you can add video not only that there's a typing indicator so you can see when someone else is typing so you don't interrupt them and again it's free and iMessages keenly turn up blue whereas typical SMS turn up green which is nice because you can instantly see whether the person receiving the message has I Oh s5 if the message will be free or if they're just on a standard text messaging plan really cool with the color coding there so I message big thumbs up for that it works on the iPad it works on all iOS 5 devices it's really super cool now they just need a PC client so you can follow along the conversation when you're on your PC so most of the grapes that I've had about the iPhone 4s in the last eight days our software related things that can be fixed in a software update of course we'll see iOS continue to above what is still unfortunate is that the iPhone 4s is still an iPhone 4 there's nothing different about the hardware the screens not bigger it's not anything significantly different it's not tremendously faster it's a very incremental upgrade which is a good thing the iPhone 4 was a great phone but you look at a phone like the Droid Razr and the Galaxy Nexus and you think wow bigger screens thinner form factors higher resolution screens Super AMOLED displays multiple cores and you got to think how long will the iPhone 4s stay relevant in 2012 when we're going to see Tegra 3 quad core phones 720p screens it's going to be pretty epic and hopefully notification hopefully the iPhone 5 isn't too far off it's obviously going to be a pretty dramatic departure from the iPhone 4 because Apple is not going to stick with the same design for two generations we've got the four of you coming up on pocketnow.com soon check back for that we'll put a link down in the description if you like this video please give us a thumbs up and thanks for watching that's it for now hmm