Follow-up review on the iPhone 4S

My iPhone 4S arrived from the UK yesterday and so I managed to spend more time with the device and now have a few things I want to highlight, mostly the negatives.

Reception
According to Apple they’ve improved the reception on the iPhone 4S. I never had any issues with the reception on the original iPhone 4 but I do have an issue with the new “improved” reception on the 4S. Although the phone signal now spends most of its time with full signal bars which is great for people who use the phone to call people, another problem has come up instead. The phone now spends a lot more time on Edge instead of 3G internet. I hadn’t seen the little “E” icon on my iPhone for ages but now it’s popping up all the time. I first noticed it in my underground parking, I used to get a weak phone signal before (say 2 bars) but would have 3G. Now I have full signal bars but Edge instead of 3G. I figured it’s not an issue since I don’t spend too much time in the basement checking email or tweets. Once I got out of the parking it swapped back to 3G, but then once I hit the traffic light near Corniche Club on the Gulf Road it was back on Edge. It swapped back to 3G again before going to Edge once I got near TGIF. I even got the Edge signal at the Kuwait Stock Market traffic light. And I’m not talking about Edge appearing briefly and disappearing again, I’m talking about Edge being there the whole time while I’m waiting at the traffic light.

Edge SUCKS. I might as well not have internet since Edge is that horribly slow. I don’t know what Apple did to the reception but I hope this is just a bug that will be fixed in the next software update because I would rather have 2 signal bars and 3G instead of full signal bars and Edge.

Siri
She’s great but I have an issue and it’s not that she doesn’t understand me sometimes (check above). In my previous post I mentioned how I wanted to use Siri to remind me of stuff when I get home or get to work. For example “Remind me to walk my dog when I get home”. Siri is supposed to know when I get home and remind me to walk my dog. Problem is because we are in Kuwait we can’t teach Siri where home or office is. Siri uses Google Maps address to learn our home and office locations and right now Google Maps addresses only work in the US. What I don’t understand is why Siri won’t learn the locations using GPS positioning. If you use the Reminder App without Siri you can teach it locations using your GPS position. I already has a saved location in the Reminder App called “Work” and I can tell the App to remind me to do something once I get to the location “work”. Why can’t Siri use the already saved location information or why it can’t learn locations using GPS instead of street addresses doesn’t make any sense.

Finally another issue with Siri and I don’t know if this problem is only happening with me or not but Siri refuses to make phone calls. If I tell her for example to call my wife or call my brother, she will start the calling process and show me she’s dialing the number but then she replies back apologizing that she can’t call them. I’ve tried it with a bunch of different people in my contact list, I’ve removed the +965 from numbers, I tried everything and Siri will keep telling me she can’t call them. Again a strange issue which hopefully will be fixed in the future.

Speed
The phone is fast, for day to day operations it’s not noticeably faster than the regular iPhone 4 but just run any game and you’ll instantly see a huge difference. Most games were loading and opening instantly and even games like Rage were loading in just a couple of seconds. If you’re a gamer you’re gonna love the 4S.

The only thing really left to test is the battery life and I can’t do that right now since I’m too busy playing with Siri and the new features. Maybe once my phone use goes back to normal in a weeks time I’ll be able to compare it to my previous iPhone.

If anyone has any questions or anything they want me to try just ask in the comments below.

Update: My guy at Alghanim just called to tell me they’re selling the iPhone 4S 16GB for KD289 and they already started delivering the phones to people from yesterday. I purchased the phone from the Apple Store in the UK and with shipping it ended up costing me around KD230. But I guess if you want the phone right now and don’t want to wait 2-3 weeks for it then this is probably your best option.