Tuesday, October 4, 2011

The iPhone Not-Quite-5

By now, you're probably aware that the Big Apple Announcement was not an iPhone 5, but an iPhone 4S. That "S" stands for, "So ... that's all you got for me?"

What's this mean for gamers? It means an A5 chip, same as the iPad 2, which adds up to a significant performance bump for games. 

The bigger news was the central role played by Siri (click this link to watch the video of it in action) in the presentation. Siri is voice recognition software, and it isn't new at all. Apple bought Siri and is integrating an improved version of it right into the OS. You can already use voice commands to do searches and the like, but the new Siri integration seems to take that the next logical step, with almost complete voice automation. It can read your emails aloud in that creepy GlaDOS voice, and then let you dictate a reply. If I asked it to open the pod bay doors, do you think it would?

It's certainly a more robust integration of voice recognition, but hardly the stuff of Apple's legendary press conferences. On the other hand, it was probably a smart move not to call it an iPhone 5, because if they did people would say, "Well, really, this doesn't feel like a generational upgrade, more like an iPhone 4 with a random letter after it."

Skynet goes online in 5...4...3...2...

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