iPhone 4S Review

The iPhone 4S is the best phone you can buy right now. That's been true of every iPhone, really.

The other thing that's been true about every new iPhone, except perhaps the iPhone 4: Most of the fresh magic is in the software. When Steve Jobs announced the original iPhone, he said the software is "five years ahead of what's on any other phone." It's kind of crazy that he wasn't far off, since it's taken nearly five years for other phone software to even come close, with the latest Windows Phone and possibly the next Android.

And it's really subtle, but perhaps the most important thing about the 4S—not to me or to you—is that it's the first iPhone that's truly post-PC, thanks to a couple pieces of software called Siri and iCloud. (I know Android was there first, but if you want to quibble over that, you're missing the point. I have an HP TouchPad I'd like to sell you, though.)
***

It doesn't look new. It looks the way you now expect a phone to look. Glass and metal and glass. The iPhone 4 was breathtaking because it was a radical reinvention within a radically constrained space, an utterly functionalist reduction of a touchscreen phone to its bare essentials. The antenna literally holds the phone together. It was unmistakably an iPhone. But it was unmistakably different. The 4S is very mistakably undifferent.