Apple has officially announced its latest iPhone and it’s not an iPhone 5. The latest upgrade to the iPhone family has been dubbed the iPhone4S. The highly anticipated announcement came on October 4^th from Apple Headquarters in Cupertino, California in front of a packed auditorium full of high level executives and members of the press.

Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, was the first of several Apple executives to address the eager crowd.  Cook’s portion of the presentation was a bit lackluster it focused mainly on the history of Apple since introducing the iPod 10 years ago, public reaction to the launch of Lion OS X, and the integration of iPads in educational and workplace settings.

It was a testament to how far Apple has come in such a brief time span; while truly extraordinary this was not the  story people were interested in. Cook’s presentation was oddly void of anything iPhone related, with the exception of an off the cuff hint that iPhone news would come later in the presentation.

The logical guess would be that Cook in his first keynote address as CEO would deliver news of a new iPhone. However Cook threw a curve ball and deferred to Phil Schiller, Senior Vice President of worldwide product marketing, to usher in the iPhone 4S. Schiller, a regular presenter at Apple keynote addresses, very subtly broke into the new iPhone news after reeling off some updates about the iPod Nano and iPod Touch.

There were several new but otherwise bland features introduced for iPhone 4S they included an 8 megapixel camera, 1080p filming capability, and inclusion of the A5 processing iPad2 chip into the iPhone. Each new feature is a technological step in the right direction, but none are close to being “blow-away”, the term used by Apple presenters several times during the presentation.

There were some more impressive upgrades as well, including a new antenna system which intelligently switches between two built-in transmitters to optimize call quality and data transfer speeds, boasting faster download and upload speeds on par with 4G, and the inclusion of CDMA and GSM chips which allows the 4S to be compatible on all networks across the globe making it a “world” phone.

Even these failed to possesses that familiar Apple wow factor that leaves you wondering how in the world did they do that. With the iPhone 4s presentation coming to a close, Apple had one last chance to blow our collective minds. The job of showstopper was left up to the highly rumored voice recognition feature, Siri.

Siri is being marketed as having your very own interactive intelligent personal assistant in the palm of your hand. Scott Forstall, Senior Vice President of iOS Software, demoed the new feature by saying, “What’s the weather like today?” and Siri spoke the current forecast in Cupertino; this garnered a huge applause from the crowd.

Even more impressive than being able to tell you the weather Siri can compose and dictate email, set timers, look up contacts, create notes, search the web, and search Wikipedia. Siri is definitely an impressive feature, but at the same time it’s not Apple jaw dropping impressive.

It’s destined to be a feature that it is cool for a while, but not one that makes scores of people camp outside of Apple stores the week before launch. The iPhone 4S will be available for pre-order on October 7^th and hit retail stores on October 14^th. It will be available in black and white, 16GB for $199, 32GB for $299, and 64GB for $399. It will also be available on AT&T, Verizon, and for the first time Sprint.

This puts some validation in reports made by the Wall Street Journal that Sprint purchased 30 million iPhones over the next four years. It is interesting to note that Cook shied away from former Apple CEO’s Steve Jobs trademark “One More Thing” statement, a move that is being preemptively being dubbed the “Cook-tease”.

Who knows, maybe this keynote was one big Cook-tease for what we really want, an iPhone 5.

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Apple may finally reveal the much talked about iPhone 5 to the world on October 4^th. Tim Cook, the new CEO of Apple, has sent out cryptic invites for members of the press to join him at the Cupertino campus for an iPhone event.  The simple message showed four iPhone app icons one with the date set for October 4^th, one with the time 10:00 A.M. PST, one with a pin on a map hovering over the Apple campus, and the phone icon, with the red number one.

The widespread belief among the tech world is that the conference will be the arena for the announcement of the iPhone 5 due to compiling evidence.  Apple has a steady track record of announcing new iPhones at conferences held in their Cupertino campus. A few weeks ago former Vice President Al Gore, a board member for Apple, let slip that Apple would be releasing iPhones in October.

Some stake has been put into Gore’s comments because it was dropped on stage during a plan speech followed by the line, “…that was a plug.” An internal document from Best Buy was leaked on to the net in early September and revealed, “iPhone 5 product introduction expected, pre-sales begin for expected October week 1 launch.”

The October 4^th announcement date would coincide with October 14^th predictions form the tech world; Apple has consistently had a launch date “a few weeks from now” when revealing an iPhone. The last bit of evidence is that sources from inside Apple report that employee vacation time has been blacked out from October 9-12 and October 14-15.

This insinuates that something big is happening at Apple and needs all hands on deck. However there is speculation that this invite could not be about the crown jewel the iPhone 5, and more to do with presenting new speech-based features for the iPhone.

Apple acquired voice-based personal assistant service, Siri, about 18 months ago, and hasn’t developed anything with that acquisition that the public has access to yet. Also the tag-line that came with the invite “Let’s talk iphone” could be a play on words. Instead of meaning let’s talk about iPhones, it could translate into having a conversation with your iPhone to access several features.

If the iPhone 5 is announced at the upcoming conference, Cook needs to have an ace up his sleeve if wants to wow the crowd like his predecessor Steve Jobs. A lot of upgrades and changes have already been predicted and seem expected such as a higher resolution 8 megapixel camera, the installation of the faster processing A5 chip, a thinner and tapered body, and the ability to access 4G networks.

Whatever is eventually launched at this event, one thing is certain: the whole world will be watching. If only our current iPhones could predict the future and tell us. Unfortunately there’s no app for that, yet.

Image Courtesy of   http://www.flickr.com/photos/elisfanclub/

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