We spent some time with the iPhone 4S last night, and it's shaping up to be a cracking mobile. While it may not have a striking new design that many people were hoping for, there is plenty here to keep you amused.
The standout new feature is Siri, which is Apple's take on voice recognition. This isn't the sort of voice recognition you might be used to on phones, where you say things like "call Fred".
What's different about Siri is that it can cope with relatively complex commands, and in the demos we were given it looked pretty cool, although we'll have to wait and see what happens when it's windy, or whether it can understand Geordie.
Otherwise, the inside of the iPhone 4S gets a refresh, with a faster processor and a longer talk time of 8 hours. The antenna has also been changed, with Apple saying the phone switches between two in-built aerials. This is supposed to improve call quality and increase the speed of data downloads, although we'll reserve judgement on that until we've had time to test the phone in the real world.
Apple is also making a big deal of the camera, which is now 8 megapixels and features a new lens that helps to sharpen the image. Apple says its new camera is much faster than the competition, with 1.1 seconds to take the first picture and 0.5 seconds to take the subsequent one. Video quality has also been increased, to 1080p.
The iPhone 4S comes with iOS 5, which includes new features like notifications, which works almost exactly the same as the ones you find on Android, although these look prettier.
Newsstand is an area you can easily download newsppaers and magazines if you so wish, iMessage is a free messaging system a bit like BlackBerry's BBM and Game Centre now suggests people to play games against.
The photos app will let you edit photos on the phone, removing things like red-eye just by touching the screen, and Cards is an new app that helps you design greetings cards to send through the mail.
This seems a bit strange, but it seems to work well -- select the photo you want to use and it's plonked straight on to the front of a card. Select an address from your address book and the app sends the envelope and card to Apple, where it's printed off and mailed out.
The iPhone 4S is not a revolutionary new product, and probably isn't worth upgrading to if you already own an iPhone 4, but it's a perfectly decent phone we're looking forward to putting through its paces in our full review.