Apple iPhone 4S review

After all of the hype and plenty of speculation, the iPhone 4S is finally here. If you were to judge the device from its looks alone, you might be slightly disappointed, as outwardly it looks exactly the same as the iPhone 4.

That would be unfair, as inside is where Apple has made all of its changes, including a brand new operating system, iOS 5. Perhaps the greatest thing that this brings is that your new iPhone does not need to be connected to iTunes before you can use it. Now, you can get up and running straight out of the box. It's a small, but much needed improvement.

Dual-core processer
As well as upgrading the OS, Apple has upgraded the hardware. As we'd now expect from any new smartphone, there's an A5 dual-core processor, which Apple claims offers two times better performance. It's faster, even in single-threaded applications, and we found Safari rendered web pages faster, and apps were quicker to start.

Apple claims that graphics are seven times faster on this model, too. The racing game we played certainly felt smooth with only the occasional slow down, and graphics are of an excellent standard. You can hook the iPhone up to your Apple TV and use it as a games controller. Apple said it has also added the ability to play iPhone games as multi-player, with up to four players displayed via a split-screen mode on your Apple TV.

Voice control
New and exclusive to the iPhone 4S is Siri, the voice-activated control that Apple says will respond to natural English sentences.

To talk to Siri, simply hold down the home button on your iPhone 4S and wait for the microphone icon to appear. If you start by asking Siri ‘What can you do for me?’, it will list all the different features, including reminders, sending texts and looking up information.

We managed to get Siri to send texts and emails, call contacts, and set alarms and reminders. Siri worked better for short messages for us, as we found when dictating long sentences it would often create the message based on the first few words. Apple has also added dictation to the Notes app.

We tried out the British and US English language versions, and found that Siri recognises commands much better if you select your own language. Americans will hear a female voice, while Brits will converse with a very well-spoken man.

At present, Siri can only search for US businesses such as resturants. Apple could not confirm when UK location services will be added to Siri.