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Friday, October 7, 2011

7 Things to Convince Me to Switch to the iPhone 4S [REVISITED]

I previously wrote about the possibility of switching from the Android world to the iPhone world.  Now that the iPhone 4S has been announced, and will be released next week, I figured it would be a good opportunity to revisit the demands I made in order to make the switch a no-brainer:

1) The iPhone 4S must be released on Verizon at the same time as ATT
Check.  Plus, it's being released on Sprint.

2) The iPhone 4S must be capable of utilizing LTE
Fail.  However, as I mentioned in my previous post, there was a little bit of wiggle room on this one, and now that I have seen what the current generation LTE chips do to battery life on the existing Android handsets, I'm happy to stay away from it for now.

3) The iPhone 4S must have a dual-core processor
Check.  It will include the A5, which will supposedly increase general processing performance by 2x and graphics performance by 7x.

4) The iPhone 4S must include an NFC implementation
Fail.  I must admit that I figured that NFC, in general, would have come a lot farther this year.  Google just recently introduced Wallet, which is currently only available on one phone on one carrier.  We have a ways to go before this really goes mainstream.

5) The iPhone 4S must use a better notification system
Check.  iOS 5 includes a notification system very similar to the existing Android implementation.  It looks good to me!

6) The iPhone 4S must have a dependable, free (or inexpensive) turn-by-turn Navigation application
Check (TBD).  I have discovered Waze and Mapquest to be two free options, and there appear to be a few not-too-expensive options.  I'd have to test them out to determine their quality though.  Any suggestions?

7) Along side the iPhone 4S, Apple must provide free MobileMe access
Check.  iClould will be free, and available this coming Wednesday (October 12th).

So, there you have it.  The only two fails were for LTE and NFC, which were definitely my least critical concerns for the new iPhone.  Without further ado...

iPhone here I come!