Well, today Apple finally revealed the upcoming iPhone release, which proved to be just an upgrade of the current iPhone 4.  Ok, maybe just is a little harsh.  Granted, they did announce some cool stuff, but the only thing that I was interested in was the new Siri app that the iPhone 4S has.  It’s basically a built-in personal assistant/concierge to help you in your day-to-day life, whether it’s finding a new restaurant or answering text messages hands-free.  The cool thing is that it seems to be really good at voice recognition and understands what you are saying far better than any other application I’ve seen.  Not only that, it knows more about the meaning of what you’re saying so you can use conversational language like you would with a person.  You don’t have to memorize a list of simple commands that it can understand (like most other similar technology) – just talk and it will understand what you’re asking for.

What I’m looking forward to even more than that is the new iOS 5 and iCloud.  A lot of the updates with those two things make life a whole lot easier and the technology of iPhones, iPods, iPads, and Macs even more seamless.  I’ve been waiting a long time to be able to take a picture quickly and easily with my phone.  I always said that they should make one or more of the external buttons function as the shutter button when running the camera app.  It’s really hard to tap an icon on the screen to get a shot when you only have one hand.  They’re finally allowing that, with the volume up button acting as the shutter clicker.  Additionally, notifications and reminders are key organizational tools that I have other apps for, but will be so much better when it all easily integrates with the rest of the suite of tools in my device.  Now I can set these things and have them added to my calendar or pull from my contacts list.

I know that cloud computing is the new era, so I’m really glad to have iCloud coming soon.  It will be so nice to have all photos, contacts, and calendar updates automatically synced across devices and backed up on the cloud.  As it stands you have to set up syncs manually, which is a bit of a hassle.  I just hope that the introduction of iCloud also means my game progress will be saved across devices.  Right now when I play a game on one, it doesn’t update on the other, so I end up only playing certain games on one device, then having to switch to another device for a different game.  As of yet it doesn’t look like this is possible, but it’s got to be on the horizon.

I definitely would not consider upgrading my iPhone 4 to the 4S, but I’m looking forward to what iPhone 5 will bring.