Camera

Full review of Apple's 2011 iPhone 4S: Faster, better camera, smarter antenna, and Siri

iPhone 4S is minor spec bump over last year's iPhone 4. Except it's not. It's a full on assault of the senses, with eyes, ears, and feel far beyond any previous mobile device. Yes, the hardware bumps specs to be certain -- faster chipset, better camera -- but it's what Apple's iOS 5 software and iCloud services do with that hardware that makes iPhone 4S so compelling, including one feature in particular that makes it the biggest leap forward in mainstream computer interfaces since multitouch on the original iPhone -- Siri.

One of the new features of the iPhone 4S is an 8 megapixel camera equipped with a fast f/2.4 lens. Without question, this was the feature I was most excited about, and I almost immediately started snapping pics.

For sample photos and a summary of my thoughts, follow along after the break! (All photos are original; none have been edited in any way beyond being resized to fit the page.)

Apple has announced that the new iPhone 4S, set to be released on October 14, is equipped with an 8-megapixel camera - well, that's what people keep referring to it as, anyway. In fact, this camera is so much more than a simple 8 MP camera; Apple sums it up great as:

The you-can’t-believe-it’s-on-a-phone camera.

The biggest thing that wowed me about the iPhone 4S camera is that it is equipped with an f/2.8 lens. This has many great benefits:

Pocket Now has found what they think is an iPhone 5 camera test photo taken by an Apple engineer. What makes them so suspicious?

This (very attractive) photo claims to have been taken by an iPhone 4, but the rest of its EXIF data tells a different story: although the image has been cropped to 2235x2291 (5.12 megapixels), the original picture was a much larger 3264x2448 -- or just shy of eight megapixels. What's more, the lens was recorded as a 4.3mm f/2.4, which is closer to that of a point-and-shoot than the iPhone 4's actual 3.85mm f/2.8.