My previous phone was the 3GS (32GB). Overall it was an excellent phone. It had its flaws - mostly the more fiddly components breaking, such as the vibrate-only button and the power on/off button failing after 2 years. It also struggled with iOS 5 - clearly an operating system designed for the latest phone. However, in comparison to the 3GS, the 4S is much faster, much more responsive and in general a superior experience. This was the phone iOS 5 was meant for.

In this regard, if you're approaching the end of your contract on the older iPhones (and you like the iPhone in general!) then I definitely recommend this phone. The camera is a LOT better (higher resolution, flash, better image quality, better autofocus). The phone has more RAM than the previous generation versions - so no more random closures of Safari or other apps. (This was a more common occurrence with iOS 5 on my 3GS - presumably because it was more resource intensive.)

Battery life seems to be perfectly good - I'm definitely not charging it as frequently as my old phone. I use the internet (both wifi and 3G) quite a lot, and also listen to a lot of music from my phone. I used to have to charge daily to keep up. You can easily stretch out usage to two days with the 4S. The only thing you should make sure is that you disable some of the location services (e.g. automatic time zone checking). These are an unnecessary burden on the battery and I imagine it's because of this some people find the battery longevity unacceptable. You should Google this to read about it.

I have the phone connected to a wireless N router, and the higher speeds make syncing over wifi more feasible - (albeit a battery drain). I would definitely suggest your first sync (when you're bound to be transferring gigabytes of data in one hit) be done via a cable, but after that any incremental changes work fairly quickly over wifi. This was something I had abandoned on my old 3GS - it just wasn't worth the hassle. I believe updates to the OS are now delta-updates - this means that you shouldn't have to download the entire OS for every single update but just the extra bit that you don't have. Again, this makes wifi-sync more friendly too.

The only real grumbles I have with the iPhone are long-standing ones:

(1) Still no Flash support in Safari. It seems crazy now - especially when you can purchase secondary browsers (such as Skyfire) which do work with Flash. Apple's resistance now seems to be solely a reluctance to go back on their original decision. However, like I said for a few pennies you can circumvent this issue.

(2) The cost differences between the 16GB, 32GB and 64GB variants are nothing short of scandalous. In my particular upgrade deal, the difference between 16GB and 32GB was over 100 pounds, and from 32GB to 64GB another 130 pounds on top of that. Memory does not cost that much! It never has and it likely never will. I was hamstrung by my own finances in this case - I'm sure there are many others out there with an iTunes music/video library into the 50GB+ range now. I'm syncing a lean version of my music to this phone, and I'd rather spend the 100 difference on an actual iPod with plenty more space than any of these phones. If you have a big music collection, don't be duped into the larger versions, just go out and buy an iPod. Most of the time you can take your entire collection with you, and the rest of the time your favourites can be kept on your phone.

Barring these issues, I'm delighted with this phone. The only thing I can't talk to with any real knowledge is how useful an upgrade it is from the 4G, but from the 3G/3GS it is a no-brainer.

There's no doubt that from the moment you take the Iphone 4s out of it's neat and tidy packaging that it is a quality piece of kit. My 4s was an upgrade from a HTC Desire that I'd had and been reasonably happy with for about 2 years.
However, from the moment I switched the iPhone 4s on I was staggered by the difference in quality of the hardware. I do like my technology but am generally somewhere just behind cutting edge and won't pay a premium to be the first to own something but I find it hard to see how the display on a device this small could possibly be any better.
Touch screen operation is smooth and responsive, even with a screen protector and although the phone seems too weighty to be able to survive a fall, I've dropped mine many times over the 7 months I've had it and it's barely sustained a scratch.
Also worth giving a thumbs-up to are the camera (quick, intuitive, very good quality) and the loudspeaker sound - the clarity is a huge leap from the tinny noise from my 3rd gen Ipod Touch.
My brother and my girlfriend have the Samsung Galaxy S2, which is a fantastic phone, but in my geekiest of dreams, the Iphone 4s would have an Android operating system and no link with b*!@dy iTunes.
For it is the whole restrictive Apple policy/policies that tarnish my iPhone 4s experience. I want to use my phone almost as a micro PC, swap files between devices and operating systems and also have a tinker through root folders and see what I can play around with on MY hardware (yes Apple, I own this phone and would like to do what I want with it). Blatantly, Apples restrictive practices are not designed to enhance user experiences, they are strategically designed to make our other devices obsolete and the purchase of other Apple products more desirable, even practical. I'll stop short at having a rant at Apple - afterall, any company in their position of market dominance will exploit that position to stay there. But adding media content to your phone for instance can be frustrating - no dragging and dropping files into a folder on your phone from a PC, or even setting a song as your ringtone from your device.

If you just want a phone to talk and text, get a basic handset that will cost a fraction of an iPhone 4s.
If you want a phone, photo album, MP3 player and portable PC in one, maybe look at a Galaxy S2/3.
If your phone is some kind of status symbol, get an iPhone. It may be the most impressive looking phone on the market, but it's potential means little if you can't unlock all of it.

iOS 5.1 UPDATE: I updated both my iPhone 4S and my 1st Gen iPAd to iOS 5.1 five days ago (I also updated my wifes iPhone 4). This update came to the phone directly via wifi and installed quickly on the 4S. The same update took much longer on the A4 powered iPhone 4 and iPad. This is perhaps the first time I have seen a big speed difference between the iPhone 4S and the older 4. Battery life has improved but only slightly. the 5.01 update made a bigger battery life difference for me. However this update has given you the ability to switch of 3G, leaving the phone to use 2G. Doing this can substantially increase battery life, and it is easy to re-enable 3G if you need to browse on the go away from your wifi. The other significant improvement is the camera is easier to access from the lock screen. The map app seems to have had an upgrade as well (although perhaps I had missed this function before), but now it will rotate the map as you turn making it more useful for navigation.

THREE MONTH UPDATE: I have been using the iPhone 4S for just over three months now. I thought that it would be good to give a general update as I have been using the phone long enough now for that initial shine that new purchases have to have worn off. I am happy to say that the phone has performed almost flawlessly during those three months, and having experienced all the smartphone systems except Windows, I am still more than happy to say that this is the best smartphone available. My only regret is that I opted for the 16GB rather than 32 or 64GB versions. Still given how much you can trade in even an old iPhone 3GS for compared with other brands, I feel it likely that I will get enough for my 4S in two years to allow me to get a 32 or 64GB iPhone 5(S) without feeling guilty. One tip if like me you use your phone calender, is that I would recommend the 'Week Cal' app which has a week view that the native calender does not. It also allows you to individually colour entries (say a different colour for different types of events) in the way you can in MS Outlook. It is fully compatible with all calenders that the iPhone can synch with. Highly recommended as a significant way to improve the iPhone.

The first thing I need to say is that the Apple iPhone 4S is the best smart phone in the market at present, and unless something radical happens will probably be the best smart phone until the iPhone 5 is released. I am not going to labour all the features, these have been well covered in the description and the previous reviews. However I will say that this phone is definitely not worth upgrading to from the iPhone 4 and even if you have an iPhone 3GS I would say it would be better to wait until the next generation iPhone comes out. The reason I say this is that this phone has really only two differences from the iPhone 4 - Siri and a higher resolution camera. I will discuss these first.

Siri - this is a novelty, it is worth a few minutes of fun when you just get the phone, but like all computer speech recognition I have tried, it really does not work. No matter how often I tried to get it to set a reminder it insisted I was saying remainder. I asked it to phone Alison Allen and it thought I said phone Linda Robinson! Strangely it did understand when I asked it to open the pod bay doors!

Camera - Great much much better than any other mobile phone camera I have used, better even than the camera on my old Nokia N95 and N97 phones which were head and shoulders the best phone cameras at the time those phones came out. This is a clear advantage over the iPhone 3GS, but in truth the iPhone 4 camera is also very good. More mega pixels is not the be all for digital cameras. Until they build in an optical zoom lens all I would ever see the phone camera as being for is taking a snap to use as the wall paper for the phone, and for this the 4S camera is no better than that on the 4. It is however faster which could allow you to get a picture of a dog or child that tends not to stay still for too long.

Processor Speed - the 4S is faster than the 4, but you only see it with the very biggest apps. Pages opens noticeably faster on my iPhone 4S than on my wife's iPhone 4, as does the novelty app Talking Tom. However with smaller apps it is very hard to notice any differences. Once running I can see no differences in any app (other than the camera) in terms of speed. Therefore I would conclude that in terms of speed it would not be worth upgrading from an iPhone 4. May be from the 3GS, but I also compared the speed of my 4S against my 3rd Gen iPod Touch which has a similar processor to the 3GS and again for most apps there is no obvious advantage speed wise. Therefore I am not convinced that in terms of speed this is worth upgrading to even from the 3GS.

However this is my first iPhone, and as such I am delighted with it. If they had kept the iPhone 4 16GB model... Read more