The market for new technology hits a peak at Christmas time due to the release of an array of new devices and gizmos. It’s also a peak time for the mobile market with many people buying mobile phones for Christmas presents, or spending their Christmas cash on a new phone. There is always a host of new phones entering the market in the lead up to the New Year with some raising more excitement than others. One of the most sought after mobile phones this year will undoubtedly be the new iPhone 4S.

Each new edition of this revelatory piece of technology seems to offer an exciting new gimmick, although Apple could rarely be accused of gimmickry. Their product range seems to offer genuinely useable new features that raise the bar for the rest of the market to follow. Apple’s technology seems like a real glimpse into the future of practical technology.

One of the most enticing new features on the iPhone 4S is a piece of voice recognition technology called Siri. Voice recognition technology has, in the past, been something of a gimmick without much practical purpose. Siri seems to be the real deal due to its referencing of built in Apps as the basis for its responses and its well programmed methods of understanding.

The recognition of simple commands appears to be fairly intuitive according to the adverts. It will understand command such as “Tell Dave I’ll be ready for 5” and will send the relevant text to Dave. “Will it rain today?” will glean some kind of weather report. Reminders and general information are all available.

The iPhone 4S is described as pro-active in its response mechanism; so if you ask it something it can’t quite understand, it will talk back to you as a human might. The conversation seems to be two ways instead of just from the operator.
The iPhone 4S will be one of the most popular mobile phones for Christmas and should be available at reasonable rates from stores like Phones4U.

No discussion of current mobile phones would be complete without mentioning the newly released iPhone 4S. As with any new Apple release, there is an insatiable public appetite to be the first to own the latest gizmo. We have become familiar with queues outside the Apple stores, and the frantic clamour from Apple fans to experience the newest technological advances. The iPhone 4S is no different, with the iPhone being a cornerstone of Apples product range and a flagship for their innovations.

It would be easy to pass off some of the advances in mobile phone technology as a passing fad, but it would be difficult to level this accusation at Apple. Apple’s hallmark is intuitive technology; practical technological advances with genuine uses. Siri is the latest of these advances – the name of Apple’s groundbreaking new piece of voice-control technology.

Many of us remember the naive thrill that voice control used to have. Its success rates were hit and miss and it was so primitive as to serve no real purpose beyond a vague auto dial function. Siri is set to revolutionise this market. It is labelled as being pro active in its response mechanism; if it doesn’t understand a command it will respond by asking questions to deduce what it is you want.

A text can be sent simply by a command such as “tell Dad I’ll be home by three.” “Will the sun shine today?” will also be answered using online resources. Siri seems to be the genuine article due to its well programmed methods of understanding the user, and its ability to reference in built Apps as the basis for responses. The iPhone 4S is ready with reminders and diary information like a robotised personal assistant.

Siri could signify the first truly interactive voice-controlled robot available to popular technology. Due to its pro-active ability not just to hear but to intelligently interpret user commands, a genuine dialogue between user and phone can take place.

The specs for this new iPhone N94 has been given that it will carry Apple’s dual-core A5 processor, 1GB of RAM, Nuance Dictation speech-to-text, 8 Megapixel camera, voice recognition features and it will come out in three versions 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB and some of them say it will be 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB capacities. Don’t forget that recently there was a new dish which stated the new iDevice would be called iPhone N90A. We know that everyone is keen to find out what is the next generation Apple iSmartphone is going look like and what functions and features would be like.

Despite the fact that the iPhone 5 has been long rumored to be a CDMA/GSM world phone, Verizon’s iPhone all the time had this capacity, though it’s not activated. Teardowns of the device unveiled that it features the Qualcomm MDM6600 chip; the similar chip that is used in the Droid Pro world phone. On the other hand, the Sources which grabbed the info concluded that a dual-mode phone would suggest that the iPhone 5 would not support LTE. Yet, according to other sources which are familiar with Apple notes that Apple’s most recent developer builds for iOS 5 include a snippet of code that refers to LTE, prompting conjecture that Apple may perhaps be testing 4G internally. The long-anticipated next edition of Apple’s smartphone is predictable to be released in October.

Web pages load at speed and there’s seldom any appreciable lag. The upgrade to iOS 4.3 has added Personal Hotspot capability for tethering up to five devices over Wi-Fi, USB or Bluetooth. It connects smoothly but you need a pricey tethering account; currently Three and O2 are the only UK networks not to charge extra for it. Also included is AirPlay, allowing you to stream video, music and pictures to compatible docks or Apple TV. It’s a breeze to set up and works very well, though the list of compatible devices is considerably shorter than your arm. Show a little restraint and you’ll eke well over a day’s battery life. With 16GB and 32GB storage options, excellent sound and video quality and a camera that’s still as good as any you’ll find on a smartphone – the Nokia’s is just a smidgeon better, but no more – the iPhone 4 remains the best smartphone you can get. Some will resent the way it lies you to iTunes but to be honest, we can live with that.

It seems that white is rapidly becoming the new black and Apple is one of the trail blazers. However, it was not an easy decision for Apple to come up with a white release of its only smartphone; the company had been procrastinating releasing a white model for over a year before they actually released one.

So what was the reason for the delay? Was it the marketing executives worrying about changing the image of the iphone4, concerned that the existence of a white version would detract from the sophisticated style of the black?

It seems that such speculation was well off course and that the real reason for the reluctance to launch a white iPhone was technical. The big difference between white and black is that white reflects all the light that hits it whilst black absorbs it. A technical advantage of a white phone body is that it has less of a tendency to heat up than does a black one when placed in direct sunlight. This is generally an advantage as sophisticated electronic devices can cease to function if they get too hot. But in the case of the iPhone the ability to reflect incident light was a decided disadvantage, especially when taking flash photographs.

The white case did not adequately prevent ambient light leaking into the body of the phone’s camera and reaching the sensor, where it caused exposure problems. The flash photographs were thus of very poor quality compared with those produced by a black iPhone.

Before Apple was able to release a white iPhone it had to carry out a number of modifications to the camera which included a slight repositioning of the camera lens.

Did these modifications do the trick? A number of comparative tests of the cameras of both phone colours do show up noticeable differences. In fact the clarity of shots taken with the white iPhone are even better than those taken on the black, but the colour rendition of the images is slightly better on the black iphone. The conclusion is whilst there are differences, some people prefer the shots taken with the white model and others prefer those taken with the black.

The Peel app has a couple of cool features that don’t rely on any Peel hardware. Tell it the kinds of shows you like to watch, and mark shows as your favorites, or cut them so they’re never shown to you. As you watch TV, your recommendations get better and better thanks to Peel’s algorithm. With the Peel Universal Control, the app becomes even better. Find programming you want to watch, such as a basketball game, and a Watch on TV button shows up. Tap the button, and since the Peel knows your channel lineup, it flips straight to the game. Unfortunately, the Peel Universal Control won’t let you throw all your other remotes away—for some functions, it’s just not capable enough. But what it lacks in power, it makes up for in convenience—it’s incredibly easy to set up and intuitive to use, and once you’ve personalized it a bit, it’s an excellent way to find stuff to watch.