The iPhone 5 News Blog

Because so many iPhone users were expecting a redesigned iPhone, the disappointment of the iPhone 4S’s form factor — a reappropriation of the iPhone 4 — and the lack of the larger screen has disillusioned and diminished the excitement for the new iPhone in some circles. But Steve Jobs famously said this about design: “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

That’s an important quote to consider while contemplating the coolness of the iPhone 4S — particularly when it comes to Siri.

Now, the early criticism of Siri is that it is little more than a catch-up to what Android has already featured with its voice recognition technology. But it’s important to note that, while Android’s ability to accurately recognize and display the words you speak — for instance, if you are composing a hands-free text message — is quite good, the ability to control an Android smartphone with voice command doesn’t even come close to the early glimpses of Siri.

I would argue that, from what I am seeing, Siri is the stuff that the future is made of.

It was not too many years ago that gesture control was a groundbreaking idea, and Jobs’ commitment to using our digits in stead of a stylus seemed like the wave of the future, when he proclaimed, “We’re going to use the best pointing device in the world. We’re going to use a pointing device that we’re all born with – born with ten of them. We’re going to use our fingers. We’re going to touch this with our fingers.” At that time, our fingers were the best pointing options. Who would have thought that, in 2011, we’d be pointing our iPhones in the right direction with our voice. This is a truly “futuristic” mobile technology.

And unlike Android’s voice command, Siri seems to have a similarly intuitive, artificial intelligence to Google’s own search algorithm, where it can discern your meaning — “catch your drift,” if you will. Google’s technology, known as Latent Semantic Indexing, or LSI, is able to crawl and index web pages so that it understands the meaning and crux of the page’s content. Siri operates in the same manner with what you say: you don’t have to make a perfect match of keyword phrases in order to successfully operate it.

This recent video illustrates what iPhone 4S users can expect from Siri:
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Google keyword searches for “iPhone 4S,” “iPhone 5″ drop off sharply as the new iPhone and Steve Jobs’ death bring a level of sobriety to iPhone mania.

It’s awfully quiet around here these days.

And that isn’t just an anecdotal observation: traffic and buzz all around the web for the iPhone is way down after the cathartic release of the iPhone 4S and subsequent disappointments of Steve Jobs’ death on October 5th — the day that an “iPhone 5″ media event maybe would have been scheduled had Cupertino lived up to expectations of a bold overhaul of the iPhone 4.

Many who have already experienced throngs of avid iPhone users clamoring to pre-order the iPhone 4S might find the news of a sleepy iPhone 4S/5 blogosphere incongruous, but it is indeed true. Google’s own data bears this out:

As you can see in this graph, taken from Google’s own AdWords keyword research tool, the search traffic for the “iPhone 5″ keyword, which reached a fever pitch the day of the media event, took a sharp tumble once it was revealed that the new iPhone was in fact the iPhone 4S. This wouldn’t seem surprising, until you see the iPhone 4S keyword search data side by side:

The red line, which indicates the iPhone 4S keyword search traffic, rose sharply on the day of the iPhone 4S’s announcement, and still more the day after, but then sharply declined after the 5th. Since that time, both the iPhone 4S and iPhone 5 keyword searches have bottomed out to some degree. It would seem that Steve Jobs’ death would have something to do with this phenomenon:

The orange line is for the search term “Steve Jobs,” which, as you can see, spiked the day after his death, which actually crossed the news wires on the night of October 5th. It appears that Jobs’ death did have an effect on internet interest in the new iPhone 4S, as keyword searches for it declined at the same time that searches for “Steve Jobs” spiked.

Another possible contributing factor to the sleepy pace of iPhone interest on the web right now is a sense of disillusionment and confusion for iPhone devoteés who were expecting an iPhone 5 but feel they were stuck with an undesirable iPhone 4S. Although the iPhone 5 rumor mill is attempting to churn out rumors of a January-released iPhone 5, those reports are feeble at best. At present, it would seem that the next possible release window for the iPhone 5 to be at the 2012 WWDC in June.

Finally, the question still remains: will we be looking at an iPhone 5 or iPhone 6 in 2012? If the sixth generation iPhone is numbered with a “5,” it would not be the first time that Apple ascribed the wrong number to a generational iPhone release — the iPhone 3G was in fact the second-generation iPhone. But the 3G was aptly named for being the first 3G iPhone — naming the sixth-generation iPhone “iPhone 5″ would bear little logic, with the exception of maybe not confusing consumers.

Still, it remains to be seen if the next iPhone will be given “iPhone 5″ or “iPhone 6″ as its working title. As the rumor mill continues to work that out, iPhone users remain uninspired.

By Michael Nace

There seem to be three (at least) schools of thought regarding yesterday’s iPhone 4S announcement. There are those who embrace it as a solid and substantial advance performance-wise over the iPhone 4 — the dual-core A5 processor displacing the single-core A4 — lots of power to run the new Siri Assistant voice command function; a new 8 Megapixel camera with better physical optics and a lot more software bells and whistles plus improved video, better antennae (yes, plural – the 4S supports both GSM and CDMA), as well as smaller engineering enhancements like Bluetooth 4. Some folks also preferred the existing 3.5″ Retina Display as being practical for a compact handset, so were not displeased that Apple retained it, and the iPhone 4′s general form factor still has an elegant, classically tasteful look, so if it ain’t broke…..

Photo Courtesy AppleThen there’s the folks who had been hoping for a radically redesigned iPhone 5 — curved glass, bigger display, and so forth, but on sober second thought have decided that even with the carry-over enclosure, the iPhone 5 really does represent a substantial advance and will quite happily buy one to replace their 3Gs, 3GSs, perhaps even well-used but battered early 4s.

Thirdly, there are those who were disposed to settling for nothing less than a complete redesign and version name transition, some who evidently wouldn’t have been satisfied with less than an quad-core A6 CPU and full LTE/4G support, and who say they’ll jump ship to Android.

Now, none of these perspectives is “wrong.” These are matters of taste and personal priorities, and we’re talking about mobile telephones here. Personally, I’m more of the first-mentioned persuasion, but that’s just me. I understand the desire for a larger screen, but it’s always a compromise in this sort of device, and there’s no way to (substantially) increase the screen size without the phone having a bigger footprint, which has objective drawbacks notwithstanding the advantages of more display real estate. Hoping for an A6 at this point was always unrealistic, though. It’s coming, but simply won’t be ready until next year, and will likely appear in the iPad 3 first, just as the A5 CPU first appeared in the iPad 2.

Having been in this game for a long time, I can’t help but discern a strong analogy with the reaction that greeted the unveiling of the Apple PowerBook 2000 FireWire at Tokyo Macworld Expo in March, 2000. For many months leading up there had been widespread speculation in the Apple-oriented blogosphere about the forthcoming “Pismo” PowerBook — a G4 CPU was expected by many, as was a radically new form factor. There was also dismay when the new Pismo wasn’t unveiled in Steve Jobs’s Macworld San Francisco keynote in early January — shades of the reaction of many at an iPhone 5-less WWDC last June.

Then when the new PowerBook finally was rolled out 2 1/2 months later, it still had a G3 processor, only mildly speedbumped from 333MHz to 400MHZ and 400MHz to 500MHz respectively for the entry-level and high-end models. And it looked virtually identical to the preceding Apple PowerBook G3 Series USB Bronze Keyboard (AKA “Lombard”) with the same 4:3 aspect ration 1024 x 768 14″ display that dated back to the PowerBook G3 Series WallStreet of 2008 when many had been hoping for a widescreen PowerBook. Never mind that the “Pismo’s” internals had been completely re-engineered, with a new motherboard design, “New World” dynamic ROM architecture replacing the erstwhile hard-wired ROMs of earlier PowerBooks, and the eponymous FireWire hot-pluggable high-speed data I/O interface taking over from the notoriously cranky SCSI. Nothing short of a widescreen G4 PowerBook would do.

But know what? The Pismo turned out to be one of the best and most beloved Apple notebook computers ever — the last of the classic black PowerBooks. I’m personally of a mind that it was at least the best PowerBook ever. I still have two of them in active service and in fine fettle well into their 12th year of use. They’ve both been hotrodded with G4 processors, DVD-burner SuperDrives, RAM upgrades, and the one I’m typing this blog on right now has a hard drive five times the capacity of the one it originally shipped with, but the basic machine has stood the test of time well.

Its prodigious goodness notwithstanding, the Pismo had one of the shortest Mac notebook production lives, being available for just eight months in 2000 during which Apple sold tons of them. That’s something it will likely share in common with the iPhone 4S, which will now most probably be replaced with an iPhone 5 (or 6) come WWDC in June, 2012, analogous to the Pismo PowerBook’s replacement with the revolutionary PowerBook G4 “Titanium” with its astonishingly thin, widescreen, metal-skinned form factor in January, 2001.

The TiBook was spectacular to look at, and the somewhat larger display had its advantages, but it proved fragile and far less robust than the Pismo had been, and if someone offered me a choice of a brand-new example of either model, I’d go with the Pismo in a heartbeat.

Perhaos someday there’ll be folks who think of the iPhone 4S like that.