iPhone 4S

Reviews / Utilities
Cydia

Siri The Way It Should Be

With the announcement of Siri came high expectations for the future of what is, and will be possible with Apple's artificial intelligence assistant.  It was exciting. Many people (including myself) had thoughts of launching Apps, adjusting system settings, placing calls, composing texts, searching the internet, and more. While the former was available strait out of the box with iOS 5 and the iPhone 4s, the latter was left to be desired… until now. With the release of Absinthe Jailbreaking tool for the A5 processor devices running iOS5, and the introduction of SiriToggles in the Cydia store, we finally have the functionality that we want with Siri!

Adjustments With Voice Commands

Like I said, I wanted to control the functionality of my iPhone with Siri not just place calls, and make appointments. SiriToggles adds that and more! With SiriToggles you can control the brightness of your iPhone by simply saying "change backlight brightness to X%".  It doesn't stop there though! If you want to know how much battery that you have left, ask Siri "how much battery do I have left?" and Siri will display as well as tell you the % of battery life left.

Beyond adjusting brightness and displaying the battery percentage, SiriToggles allows you to toggle a bunch of functions like the name implies. Toggle on/off bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Airplane Mode, Celular Data and more!

 

Launch Your Apps!

Toggling settings is nice, adjusting brightness is useful, but where SiriToggles really shines is launching Apps! That's right, launch your Apps right from Siri now! Just as you can see in the shot above, tell Siri "launch Facebook" (or any other App) and it launches! This is a feature that many people considered to be a "must have" to make Siri truly useful. Well it's here, now. All that is required is jailbreaking your phone, and installing this wonderful free App.

 

The Bottom Line

While I know that jailbreaking isn't for everyone, this is just one more reason to jailbreak your device. If you are interested in jailbreaking your phone, see the amazingly thorough guide here on the process. Once you have completed the jailbreak, be sure to install SiriToggles to unlock Siri's potential!

App Lists
Top 20

20 “Best” Apps for the New iPhone 4s Owner

Here at Best App Site we regularly review and recommend the "Best" Apps on the App Store. The team thought it would be a good idea to give you some recommendations for some of the Best Apps for your New iPhone 4s. These recommendations are especially handy if this is your first iPhone.

 

Terry Recommends

 

CardStar

iTunes

CardStar is an App that I use several times a week. It lets you store all of your frequent buyer club tags electronically on your iPhone. Once you arrive at the checkout line of say a CVS drugstore, just launch the App tap on your CVS card and the cashier can usually scan the barcode right on your iPhone. Also if you goto that location often you can even have CardStar remember it  based on the Location and it will automatically bring up the right card.

 

Skype

iTunes

Your iPhone 4s has a front facing camera and FaceTime. While I love the quality and integrated nature of FaceTime, I find that I don't use it as much as I would like to because it requires that both parties be on WiFi. If you're out and about and want to do a quick video chat and there is no WiFi you're out of luck. That's why I highly recommend Skype! Skype is universal, let's you talk and see other Skype users for Free, is great for making international calls to regular phone numbers and best of all it works over WiFi or 3G. You can of course Skype with people that using Skype on their computers or other platforms. 

 

Reeder

iTunes

Reeder is hands down my favorite RSS Reader for my daily news feeds. It syncs with my Google RSS feeds so that when I read a post on one device it's automatically marked read on all my other devices. Great sharing options built-in too.

 

(more…)

News
app_store

iPhone 4S and what you need to know…

(image courtesy of Apple.com)

Happy iPhone day! Well actually, happy day after iPhone day. By now most of you know that Apple was releasing a new version of the iPhone on October 4th and for those of you who don't, welcome back from under the rock (kidding). So what's new and why do you care? I'll share all of that and more so read on.

Bring On the Power!

There are many, many new features on the new iPhone 4S. Even though the outside looks the same, inside it is a much improved, much more refined, and a whole lot more powerful!

Lets jump right into the most important improvement in my opinion. The dual core A5 processor. This will be the first iPhone with a dual core processor. Also included is 1Gb (up from 512Mb) of ram. These two things coupled with the dual core graphics translate into a much faster, more robust iPhone. Games are going to fly, videos will have a smoother playback, and photo editing possibilities will grow tremendously. It's an exciting time to be both and iPhone user, and an iPhone developer. Along with the other performance improvements, the Addition of the 64Gb model doubles the largest previously available model.

 

The Good Gets Better

The camera on the iPhone has been, hands down, the most well received and most used of all of the smart phones on the market. With not only the impressive quality of the image files, but also the quality of the Apps available, the iPhone has become the mobile camera of choice for people world wide. Mashable reported recently that the #1 camera used to produce images on Flickr is the iPhone. Apple realizes all of this and has really outdone themselves with the iPhone 4S. It has a completely new 8-megapixel camera taking 3264×2448 pixel pictures. It is supposed to be 30% faster and sports a new backlit image sensor allowing it to take in more light. Along with this is a new f/2.4 lens to go along with the image sensor.

 

Get It Faster!

Everyone remembers Antennagate. You know hold the iPhone4 just so and watch your bars drop down until you lose signal. Not wanting a repeat of that fiasco, Apple has a new antenna system that not only ensures no signal loss from holding the phone a certain way, but also adds some much needed features. The new antenna system allows the iPhone 4S to switch between two antennas for better sound quality and a much faster download speed. This new system allows for a speed increase double of what it is with the standard iPhone4. Remember that these are theoretical speeds so the actual speed will most likely be much lower. Still, there will be a noticeable speed increase. While this isn't quite 4g speed, it's a whole lot better than standard 3g.

 

iPhone Gets A Personal Assistant

Named Siri, Apple also released it's new personal voice assistant for the iPhone 4S. Able to understand natural voice commands, Siri is the new voice assistant that allows you to interact with your iPhone on a whole new level. As a demo, Scott Forstall (of Apple) asked Siri "what's the weather like today" to which the iPhone responded with what the weather was like. It's not limited to weather however. Siri is able to transcribe text messages, search Wikipedia, Google Maps, and much more. Siri is referred to as in "beta" however this only means that Apple will continue to add features and languages as they go.

 

The Bottom Line

I love the new iPhone. Not so much because I have to have the latest and greatest, but because I could really use the increased performance, and better camera. There were some other notable announcements today including iOS 5, iPod Nano, and Cards (not so sure about the usefulness of this last one personally) but the big announcement was the iPhone 4S. So what do you think? Is this enough of an update for you to upgrade from your current phone? Let us know in the comments section.