I’m surprisingly not an early adopter type. I have my conventions for doing things, and I don’t like to change my patterns very often. So it’s pretty rare that I find some gadget that makes me feel like I’m going to change the way I do things. I think the iPhone 4S might just do that.
Speed: it’s not eye-poppingly fast, but it is intrinsically fast. You don’t notice it at first. But as you move around and play, you begin to notice that everything flows with you in a way that it didn’t before. It doesn’t look faster, it feels more intuitive. And that’s pretty subtle but important.
Siri: amazing first try, nowhere near its potential, but still quite useful. As with most AI systems, it’s the odd quirks that get you. It asks you if you want to send, and you say yes or okay or yes please and it does nothing but give you an error. But if you say send it, it works. There are also problems with the conversation flow. It’s hard to tell if we’re done with one conversation or not. And there have been several times where I’ve thought we were starting a new conversation but Siri thought I was still continuing the old conversation. I’m hopeful that they’ll work out a lot of the kinks during the beta period. And the fact that it’s in the cloud should help make it easier to develop iteratively.
Speech recognition: this is the killer feature. I’ve never used speech recognition that didn’t annoy the hell out of me. But speech recognition on the iPhone 4S delights me. It’s amazingly accurate and way more efficient than thumb typing. My only complaint is that I haven’t found a way to cancel if you get tongue-tied midsentence. So far, I love it and I plan to use it a lot. In fact, I used it to write this post.