The new camera is enough

If the only change Apple made to the 4S were the camera enhancements, that would be enough to make me want the 4S.

The conventional point and shoot camera is dead to me. It’s not so much the quality of the iPhone 4’s camera that I love, it’s the camera plus app plus internet experience the iPhone offers.

Maybe I’m overselling the iPhone’s camera, but remember that I’m the parent of a five-month-old. My iPhone is much more camera than phone… at this stage in my life.

Being able to constantly capture moments with my ever-changing son—no matter how mundane—and then instantly share them with distant family is an experience that a conventional camera can’t rival.

I still take high-res photos with my DSLR, but I bet 75 percent or more of the total pictures I’ve taken this year were taken with my iPhone. So, so many moments that would never have been captured, much less shared, with an “offline” camera.

Every second Apple can shave off of the camera's time to first photo and time between shots is huge. The extra light sensitivity and crazy-wide-for-a-phone aperture (f/2.4!) will be seriously welcome, too.

Siri

iOS just got even flatter. I think this is both the continuation and beginning of great things.

A5

Any time a faster processor can shave off of picture taking and video capture is valuable to me, as I said above.

Not 4G

Not a big deal. To me, 4G is a lot like 1080p HD was in the mid to late 2000s. I knew people that paid huge premiums for 1080p over 720p when, in reality, all of the available HD content from cable and satellite providers was limited to 720p—something that changed only recently.

At this point in time, 4G is much more of a marketing device than a practical feature.

When 4G is thick enough that you can't walk in and out of it and when battery technology has caught up to the energy demands of 4G/3G switching, I'll be more interested in 4G.

For now, I'm doing just fine with 3G that works everywhere. (I'm usually near WiFi most of the day anyway.)

Am I buying?

I think so. My wife will be trading her Blackberry in for an iPhone in November, when she’s eligible for a discount. She doesn’t have much interest in the 4S, and she may just take my iPhone 4, which, being a Verizon iPhone, is less than a year old.