Apple iOS 5 Mobile Review. It seems like every time a major software revision comes along, it’s described as the “biggest ever.”
In the case of iOS 5, though, that might not be hyperbole—there’s hardly a part of Apple’s mobile operating system that isn’t altered in some way by the latest update. Don’t think that this is just change for change’s sake, however. By and large, iOS 5’s changes are for the better, spackling a number of shortcomings and gaps in functionality that have existed since day one. Tempting as it may be to dub iOS 5 the “Snow Leopard” of iOS, though, it’s clear there’s a lot more to this than simply filling gaps. iOS 5 marks the first major revision of iOS to be simultaneously released for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.
It also finally brings feature parity between the CDMA (Verizon) and GSM (AT&T) versions of the iPhone. And that page isn’t exactly what you think it is, either. PC Free, with every purchase Other places where Apple is shucking the bonds of the PC include backups. Notify this. What’s So Great About Siri? Apple announced speech recognition for the next iPhone.
Big deal. Android’s had it for more than a year. Apple is just playing “catch-up” and the feature’s not really earth-shattering anyway. Right? Wrong. In fact, Siri is the most important thing to happen to mobile in this decade so far. Siri naysayers fall into two camps: 1) those who say it’s no big deal; and 2) those who say Android has had it since August. Siri is a Very Big Deal As I detailed in this Cult of Mac post, Siri traces its lineage directly back to the largest artificial intelligence project in history, the Pentagon’s CALO project. The entire Pentagon project was headed by Adam Cheyer, who is now director of engineering for Apple’s iPhone group.
Speaking to MIT Technology Review, Cheyer said that CALO sought to integrate “dialog and natural-language understanding, vision, speech, machine learning, planning, reasoning, service delegation and integrate them all into a… human-like assistant that can help you get things done.” Okay, Now I Get It: Here's Why Apple Launched The iPhone 4S Instead Of The iPhone 5. Oh, ye of little faith.
When Apple launched the iPhone 4S instead of the iPhone 5 last week, I initially thought it was a disappointment and a mistake. If Apple had launched the actual iPhone 5, I thought, they'd have sold more of them. And that's probably right. If Apple had launched a radically new iPhone 5, more of the folks who currently own iPhone 4s would have upgraded, so Apple would have sold some more 4S units. As it is, the iPhone 4S is likely to appeal primarily to iPhone 3G and 3GS owners, non-smartphone owners, and non-iPhone owners, most of whom (like me) are presumably stoked to buy the iPhone 4S. But viewing the 4S as disappointing ignores Apple's likely thinking behind it, which Asymco analyst Horace Dediu explains very clearly here. So the 4S isn't aimed at these folks. Pre-iPhone 4 iPhone users (~70 million of them)Non-smartphone users (1+ billion, who can now get a 3GS for free, if price is an issue)Non-iPhone smartphone users (Blackberry, Android, Nokia)