iPhone 4S, iOS5 & iCloud

Iphone 4S, iOS 5 & iCloud - What you need to know

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What a tech week!

• Oct. 12 (TODAY – Global release from midnight PST) – iCloud gets turned on for users & iOS 5 is released as a FREE update on iTunes
• Oct. 14 – iPhone 4S release date

Since the announcement of the iPhone 4S on Oct. 4 and the subsequent death of Steve Jobs, Apple has received MILLIONS of pre-orders and have in fact sold out of initial supply for Oct. 14.

Telstra has been registering consumer interest for the last week and has today announced their extremely competitive iPhone Consumer Plans. PF Systems is also taking registrations of interest for our initial shipment of iPhone 4S, so if you’re nearing the end of your contract with Telstra, let us know via our website.

If you sign-up with PF Systems, we’ll also offer a free 20 minute basic setup of your iPhone valued at $33.

What do you get for you money with the iPhone 4S?

The Hardware

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The iPhone 4S is an evolution, not a revolution, over the iPhone 4. Almost identical in appearance, the real hardware changes are the geeky stuff under the hood:

A5 processor	Dual core 1.2GHz and 7x Graphics performance. Same processor as the iPad 2. Webpages and other applications will run 68% faster on the new phone. Games will run up to 7 times faster.
Dual antenna system	Implemented mostly due to “Antenna-Gate” on the iPhone 4 launch, the antenna system is split in two so that the reception is optimized between the two, making the 'death-grip' less likely to occur.
8MP camera	More advanced features, quicker to start using and support for 1080p high definition movie recording.

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Summary: same but better!

The Software

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iOS 5 has 200 new features over iOS 4 and is ramping up to be the most significant update yet. The most important features:

Siri	Only available on the iPhone 4S. For those of you who ever used the voice commands on the previous iPhones you would know that it was fairly limited. You needed to select from a short list of commands to do things such as ring someone (sometimes the wrong person) or play some music. We've found it useful and reasonably reliable. Siri promises to take things to a whole new level. You will be able to command your phone to do a large range of things using normal sentences without a pre-learned iPhone syntax. Apparently this feature is not a gimmick and is like something “straight out of science fiction”!
Social	The headline is Twitter, but this should be read ‘We were too annoyed with Facebook at the time but now we are not and there will be tighter Facebook integration, also”. iOS will make whatever you are doing easier to share on Twitter & Facebook.
Over-The-Air Updates	Your iPhone will update over WiFi/3G. No more plugging your iPhone into your computer to get it running the latest incarnation of iOS.

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Summary: Some unexpected features and some long overdue ones.

The Cloud

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iCloud is Apple’s answer to the fragmented cloud-services approach of players like Google & Microsoft. It will aim to seamlessly sync and support all your devices (iPad, iPhone, Mac, PC) without complex and error prone syncing/updating regimes. Your desktop computer is no longer the centre of your digital universe, iCloud is.

Exchange-Like	For those of you paying for a hosted exchange service which syncs your email/calendar/contacts across all your devices, you know what this is. Now, if you have an ‘@mac.me’ email address (which you get for free), you can do the same thing. You may even be able to use your @mac.me account to collect your other mail and send on its behalf as with Gmail.
Photos	Take photos and see the sequence of photos taken appear on your other devices.
iTunes	Sync your purchased music and apps over all your iCloud connected devices eg. buy things on your iPhone and see it in your iTunes on your PC and on your AppleTV. Also, although a US-only service now, iTunes Match will cost around $30 a year and will 'legalize' your entire collection of songs by integrating them into your iTunes account. So if you’re someone with many CDs and many illegal downloads, this could be your chance to come 'clean'.
Documents	Work with Apple productivity software like iWorks (and other third party apps) and access your documents where you left them on any other device.

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Summary: Excellent (in concept) if you want to be 100% Apple, but be careful about selling your soul and watch your data allowance!

As a consumer, PF Systems does not recommend anything other than an iPhone as Apple has continually proved its ability to deliver on its promises. We offer a full set of iPhone services including the full range of Telstra plans and configuration solutions.

All new iPhone 4S purchased through PF Systems will include a one-on-one basic setup service (30 minutes max ;))

SSDs: an explosion of speed

Solid-state hard drives have been a long time in coming to mainstream PCs. They have been kept at bay by the increasingly cheap cost of normal HDDs which have a cost per GB of less than 10c compared to over $2 per GB for SSDs. Thus, SSDs are still too expensive to store your video collection on. They are, however, a viable option to boot your operating system from. The solution is to put your Operating System on a solid-state hard disk drive and store your other stuff (documents/videos/movies) on a normal HDD. In general you'll see a 10x increase in boot-up speeds and application loads: GAME-CHANGING.

For those with an ageing laptop (especially those on Vista), a modest decrease in storage size coupled with an external drive for storage will see an exceptional improvement.

For those with a desktop, PF Systems can separate just your OS onto the SSD and you'll immediately see a 10x explosion of speed. An added benefit will be the ability to back your OS drive up to your mechanical drive regularly without the need for an external drive.

This offer is especially targeted at people with middle-aged computers (2-4 years) who are considering replacing their device due to boot-up and operational speed. Even the performance of high end current computers using a mechanical HDD will not come near the general system performance of a middle-aged computer with an SSD.

Prices are as follows for the Corsair Force Series 3 SSD:

60GB Corsair 60GB Force Series 3 SSD (R/W: 550/490 MB/s): $159 (RRP $219) - $2.64/GB

90GB Corsair 90GB Force Series 3 SSD (R/W: 550/500 MB/s): $220 (RRP $289) - $2.44/GB

120GB Corsair 120GB Force Series 3 SSD (R/W: 550/510 MB/s): $247 (RRP $339) - $2.05/GB

Labour: $49/$99 Laptop/Desktop (PFS Silver/Gold discounts apply) with 3 Year PFS warranty on parts and labour.

News, blogs, shops: how to keep up with the updates!

The internet has drastically changed the way we communicate, receive news and access information. With lives becoming busier and internet content growing exponentially, we need to filter the information we are interested in to minimise our time spent browsing or searching. This is where web syndication becomes your ally.

Here are some tools that should help you read online efficiently and not miss out on updates.

By liking a page on Facebook, you will get notified whenever the page is updated. For example, you can click on the "like" button on our PF Systems Facebook page and you will be notified whenever we post bits of news on our wall. Of course, you need a Facebook account for this one.

If you have a twitter account, you can follow people to get their tweets and news. For news updates, you can follow ABC news, Reuters news... By following companies/brands you like, you get updates on promotions, special products, new stock, one day discounts. This is handy if you don't want to miss out. You can follow us on twitter, we will share with you some tips about computer use, interesting news about technology and everything we think is worth a tweet.

If you read blogs, you can use Google Reader to subscribe to their RSS feeds. Then, you will be able to read new articles posted on all your favourite blogs from Google Reader, rather than having to go to each individual blog. In order to use Google Reader, you need a Google account. Once you sign in, on the top menu under the "more" tab, click on Reader to get started.

First of all, you add subscriptions to blogs or websites (they must have RSS feeds). Then, all the latest articles are shown in "All items". You can choose to have them displayed within a list (it just looks like an inbox with read/unread items) or if you click on expanded, you will have a view of all the full articles, just like a parent blog with all the children being your subscriptions.

You could subscribe to pfsystems.blogspot.com to be notified of our latest articles or subscribe to theage.com.au to follow the news.
Blog Lovin is another website allowing you to manage the blogs you follow. You have to create an account, log in, and then you will see all the articles from your subscribed blogs.
And don't forget that you can use Google Reader and Blog Lovin on your phone too (download the apps to read on the go).

So don't waste your time, let the news come to you.