So, it is not a 5

Apple announced their latest iPhone incarnation last night, well, yesterday morning, at Cupertino. And it disappointed a lot of people. Haha. Well, they were expecting iPhone 5 or BOTH, the 5 and 4S. Hmmm... Am I disappointed?

Well, yes and no. Yes, because I'd been reading (and believing) all the rumors. I make a note to myself not to do this again. On hindsight, I'm surprised that none of the rumor mentioned that iPhone can make dinner for you. I was frustrated at first that the announcement did not :

1. Introduce iPhone 5. But then, what if apple were to name this iPhone 4S as iPhone 5? Would I be less disappointed? Haha

2. No new form factor. Hmmm... I always thought that the design for iPhone 4 is a classic. Johnny Ive has done a tremendous job. So why the rush to change it? Considering that ip4 is only 1.5 year old? And apple doesnt change the case design for it's MacBook pro annually isn't it? But hey, they did change the iPad's!

3. Err... That steve was not on the stage :(

Otherwise, I'm happy with the announcement. To me, the change in speed and camera alone is impressive. The changes are :

1. A5 chip. Dual core and almost double the performance. Faster graphics!

2. Faster Internet. This would be cool, if maxis could keep up.

3. Auto antenna selection. Err... I don't know what this is but it sounds cool :)

4. iOS 5. Of course

5. Better camera :) a lot of people say that this is given and almost all the rivals have better spec, thus the disappointment. But hey, improvement is improvement. The ip4 camera is a very good one, Im sure the 8mp, the additional lens element (now there are 5), the bigger aperture (2.4), the IR filter, face detection and Apple's own processor would make this an awesome camera. Btw, ip4 is the most popular camera on flickr. Figure that out.

6. Better video. Now can support 1080p! Cool! and there's anti vibration too.

7. And the killer function? SIRI :) the personal assistant. It's really cool but im sceptical of this until I have my hands on it. Just because I'm not a native English speaker. Im always having problem with speech recognition because of my Malaysian English slang. I hope that Siri is not that fussy and way smarter than the existing technologies. Otherwise, I'm impressed and proud since it's better than Google's Voice Search hehehe.

8. And now it's 64g!!! Yea!!!!

So, the 60k question... am I buying this 4S? Definitely! But only after amassing 2k. Because maxis is expensive. No matter what flavor of iPhone that you want to buy and what kind of contract that you want to sign up for, you still need to fork out around 2k. Unless Ananda received an epiphany of some sort and maxis became more generous in the next few months. Btw, the roll out for Malaysia is not on Apple's calendar yet :( only Singapore. Why! Argggh!! Maybe I should consider other telcos? Hmmmm... Interesting.