iPhone 4S

Waiting is almost never worth it. Mobile tech moves faster than PC tech. A few months after you buy there will be so many choices that are much better than whatever you picked. Unless you are only considering apple, in which case they release one phone per year.

Even then, it really doesn't make sense to wait an entire year for a new phone. That's half a contract. If you can wait that long, it's probably not worth getting at all.

 

Its so when you make a phone call your face isn't smashed against the screen.

Overall experience is just that: overall sum of features a product provides. You can't say one product magically provides a better experience "overall" without saying why. For the iPhone it might be simplicity, style, but that's about as far as it goes for the 4S. Its a great phone, it just has nothing new or particularly inspiring on it. Its slightly more refined in the sense every feature has been done before, Apple isn't blazing a trail here. The 4S is on par or lagging in every other area.

The kicker is that if you want LTE, NFC, larger screen or any other future proof feature, the 4S provides none of these. There's no really exciting tech in the 4S that's usually present in most products Apple releases (which most of the time justifies the premium price). That's why people are disappointed. Its a good phone, just boring.

I'm somewhat invested/stuck in Apple's ecosystem, I'm sure a lot of people are, so the 4S is still good enough to sell extremely well.

 

In this case maybe it is. I am not convinced you will be waiting a year this time (Apple updated their MacBook Air in less than a year). If for some reason you want an iPhone now, definitely this is the phone to get.

If you are a 3GS owners, this is a nice phone to upgrade too. With the iPhone 4 only being offered US$100 less than a 4S, the 4S is the better choice being twice as fast, having twice the internal storage (which is important since it is not upgradeable) and better camera and will support Siri.

If you are a iPhone 4 owner, the dual core processor which might be useful for a few demanding games, but I would think developers would still be developing their games to at least run on the older 1GHz iPhones and iPads too and since the 3Gs is being retained, developer probably would want to support that too. The camera or Siri is probably the best reason to upgrade at this point.

Apple probably wont be supporting NFC, they will be trying to set Bluetooth 4.0 as the standard for that instead.

The larger screen size is subjective. Since Apple only releases one size, it needs a one size fits all solution. Not everyone wants a larger phone. For some people a larger screen would be too bulky to carry or too large to handle. So a larger screen for an iPhone might be just a marginal improvement.

In may case, well I like larger screens (tempted to give Windows Phone 7 and the 4.7-inch HTC Titan a try... well if it tanks and is sold cheap). No phone has a screen large enough to make me give up my laptop for web browsing but the larger the screen gets the less I carry my laptop around. Every phone I have purchased has had a large screen than the previous model.

What would have been nice to see was LTE, making it a bit slimmer and ligher (it is really heavy for such a small phone) and a little more customization of the user interface.

 

What about iPhone 4G (or 4GS)

... but my guess is they will go with the 5 or 3D xD

 

I think you might see two iPhones before the end of next year. The current 4S being updated with LTE and a new larger iPhone 5. Apple has several sizes of MacBooks and variants of iPod's sooner or later I suppose they will come out with two sizes of mobile phone displays.

 

I agree with this.

The iPhone 4S will become the cheap phone, the 4 the free phone and the 5/4G/[whatever] the new hautness.