The iPhone is the first smartphone designed and marketed by Apple Inc. After years of rumors and speculation, it was officially announced in January 2007, and was released in the United States in June. Development of the iPhone as a product began in 2005 and continued in complete secrecy until its public unveiling. WikipediaFirst released: June 29, 2007; 14 years agoDimensions: 115 mm (4.5 in) H; 61 mm (2.4 in) W; 11.6 mm (0.46 in) DDisplay: 90mm (3.5") screen (diagonally); 480x320 pixel resolution at 163 ppi; 3:2 aspect ratio; 18-bit (262,144-color) LCDModel: A1203Storage: 4, 8, or 16 GB flash memoryBattery: 3.7 V 1400 mAh Lithium-ion battery.

The iPhone 3G is a smartphone designed and marketed by Apple Inc.; it is the second generation of iPhone, successor to the original iPhone, and was introduced on June 9, 2008, at the WWDC 2008 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, United States.
The iPhone 3G is internally similar to its predecessor, but included several new hardware features, such as GPS, 3G data and tri-band UMTS/HSDPA. The device was originally loaded with the concurrently launched iPhone OS 2.0. In addition to other features (including push email and turn-by-turn navigation), this new operating system introduced the App Store-Apple's new distribution platform for third-party applications.[11]

This iPhone was named "4S" where the "S" stood for Siri[a] an iPhone 4S-exclusive intelligent personal assistant that was later included in future generations of mobile Apple products. Retaining most of the external design of the iPhone 4, the 4S hosted major internal upgrades, including an upgrade to the Apple A5 chipset, and an 8-megapixel camera with 1080p video recording. It debuted with iOS 5, the fifth major version of iOS, Apple's mobile operating system, that introduced features including iCloud, iMessage, Notification Center, Reminders, and Twitter integration.
Reception to the iPhone 4S was favorable. Reviewers noted Siri, the new camera, and processing speeds as significant advantages over the prior model.[15][16][17] It was succeeded by the iPhone 5 as Apple's flagship smartphone on September 12, 2012. The iPhone 4S remained on sale, albeit being sold with reduced storage (from 16/32/64 GB down to 8 GB).
The 4S was officially discontinued on September 9, 2014 following the announcement of the iPhone 6, although production did continue for developing markets until February 17, 2016. During the course of its lifetime, the iPhone 4S was one of the best-selling iPhones ever produced and it is the first iPhone to support five major versions of iOS: iOS 5, iOS 6, iOS 7, iOS 8, and iOS 9 (the iPad 2 was supported from iOS 4 to iOS 9).
The 4S is the last iPhone to have the original 30 pin connector as the succeeding iPhone 5 replaced it with the all digital Lightning Connector.
The iPhone 4S had an issue where the Wi-Fi toggles would appear greyed out in both Settings and the Control Center, which was mainly caused by thermal shock of the Wi-Fi antenna.[18]

The iPhone 4S (retroactively stylized with a lowercase 's' as iPhone 4s as of September 2013)[9] is a smartphone that was designed and marketed by Apple Inc. It is the fifth generation of the iPhone,[10] succeeding the iPhone 4 and preceding the iPhone 5. It was announced on October 4, 2011, at Apple's Cupertino campus, and was the final Apple product announced in the lifetime of former Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs, who died the following day.[11]

Orders could be placed on October 7, 2011, and mainstream availability in retail stores began on October 14, 2011 in the United States, Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Japan. Sales peaked over its predecessor with more than a million sales in the first twenty-four hours of order availability and more than four million sales in the first four days of retail availability. Further worldwide rollout, including 22 additional countries on October 28, came during the next several months.[12]

Software

The iPhone 4S, like other iPhones, runs iOS, Apple's mobile operating system.[36] The user interface of iOS is based on the concept of direct manipulation, using multi-touch gestures. Interface control elements consist of sliders, switches, and buttons. The response to user input is immediate and provides a fluid interface.[37] Interaction with the OS includes gestures such as swipe, tap, pinch, and reverse pinch, all of which have specific definitions within the context of the iOS operating system and its multi-touch interface.

Internal accelerometers are used by some applications to respond to shaking the device (one common result is the undo command) or rotating it in three dimensions (one common result is switching from portrait to landscape mode).[37]

The iPhone 4S was first shipped with iOS 5, which was released on October 12, 2011, two days before the release of the device.[38] The 4S uses iOS 5.1.1, which was released on May 7, 2012.[39][40] As of April 2021, the device can be updated to iOS 9.[41]

It can act as a hotspot, sharing its internet connection over WiFi, Bluetooth, or USB,[42] and also accesses the App Store, a digital application distribution platform for iOS developed and maintained by Apple. The service allows users to browse and download applications from the iTunes Store that were developed with Xcode and the iOS SDK and were published through Apple.

The iPhone 4S can play music, movies, television shows, ebooks, audiobooks, and podcasts and can sort its media library by songs, artists, albums, videos, playlists, genres, composers, podcasts, audiobooks, and compilations. Options are always presented alphabetically, except in playlists, which retain their order from iTunes.[43] The iPhone 4S uses a large font that allows users plenty of room to touch their selection. Users can rotate their device horizontally to landscape mode to access Cover Flow. Like on iTunes, this feature shows the different album covers in a scroll-through its photograph library. Scrolling is achieved by swiping a finger across the screen. Alternatively, headset controls can be used to pause, play, skip, and repeat tracks. On the 4S, the volume can be changed with the included Apple Earphones, and the Voice Control feature can be used to identify a track, play songs in a playlist or by a specific artist, or create a Genius playlist.[43]

The iPhone 4S introduced a new automated voice control system called Siri,[26] that allows the user to give the iPhone commands, which it can execute and respond to. For example, iPhone commands such as "What is the weather going to be like?" will generate a response such as "The weather is to be cloudy and rainy and drop to 54 degrees today." These commands can vary greatly and control almost every application of the smartphone. The commands given do not have to be specific and can be used with natural language. Siri can be accessed by holding down the home button for a short amount of time (compared to using the regular function). An impact of Siri, as shown by Apple video messages, is that it is much easier for people to use device functions while driving, exercising, or when they have their hands full.[24] It also means people with trouble reading, seeing, or typing can access the smartphone more easily.[24]

On the iPhone 4S, texting can be aided by the voice assistant, which allows speech-to-text.[24] In addition to regular texting, messaging on the iPhone 4S is supported by iMessage, a specialized instant messaging program and service that allows unlimited texting to other Apple iOS 5 products. This supports the inclusion of media in text messages, integration with the device's voice-controlled software assistant, and read receipts for sent messages. Input to the computer comes from a keyboard displayed on the multi-touch screen or by voice-to-text by speaking into the microphone. Entered text is supported by predictive and suggestion software as well as a spell-checker, that includes many regional dialects such as Swiss spoken French.[44]

At the announcement, plans were in place for the iPhone 4S to support many languages. Different features have different language requirements, such as keyboards compared to the word predictor and spell-checker, which needs a large dictionary of words. Language support is related to the iOS 5 operating system that the device launched with, although not always. The Siri digital assistant supported French, English, and German at launch.[15] Since it uses a software-based keyboard supported by the multi-touch display, it can support many different keyboard layouts without having to change physically. The iPhone 4S can display different languages and scripts at the same time.[45]

On September 19, 2012, iOS 6 was released to the iPhone 4S among other compatible iOS devices as an over the air (OTA) upgrade package.[46] According to Apple the update contained 200 new features and tweaks, which included a new maps app, dubbed Apple Maps, Facebook integration and Passbook, an application that allows users to store their coupons, boarding passes, and tickets digitally.[47][48] On September 18, 2013, Apple released iOS 7 and the iPhone 4S is among other compatible iOS devices that also received the update without any lagging issues compared to the iPhone 4. Although the device improved performance over iOS 7, some newer features that were released to newer models such as AirDrop and CarPlay were not supported. The iPhone 4S can also run iOS 8, which was released on September 17, 2014. Given that the device was supported for more than three years, some newer features of the software such as Apple Pay were not supported. It is also unable to work with Apple Watch, due to the relatively aged hardware. In fact, some users often reported that performance on the 4S is very slow, similar to how iOS 7 ran on the iPhone 4, and suggesting that they should not upgrade due to battery draining issues and hanging up on calls. Meanwhile, Apple released iOS 8.1.1, which brought slight improvements to the phone and the iPad 2, but it still did not run so fast as newer models.

iOS 9 controversy[edit]

See also: Batterygate

On June 8, 2015, Apple announced at the WWDC that the iPhone 4S would support iOS 9. This makes it the first iPhone to support five major versions of iOS, and the second iOS device to support five major versions (iOS 9 will support the iPad 2 as well, bringing its total up to six major versions of iOS supported). On December 22, 2015, Apple faced a class action lawsuit for crippling the iPhone 4S with the iOS 9 update with slow and buggy software or to pay hundreds of dollars on a new iPhone.

On June 13, 2016, Apple announced that the iPhone 4S would not support iOS 10 due to hardware limitations.

It was briefly possible to downgrade the iPhone 4S from iOS 9 to iOS 6.1.3 following a signing window, which opened in January 2018 [49] and closed in November 2019. The option to downgrade to iOS 6.1.3 also allowed an over-the-air update to iOS 8.4.1 due to technical limitations preventing a direct update from iOS 6 to iOS 9.

2019 GPS rollover update[edit]

On July 22, 2019, Apple released iOS 9.3.6 for the iPhone 4S to fix issues caused by the GPS week number rollover. The issues would impact the accuracy of GPS location and set the device's date and time to an incorrect value,[50] preventing connection to HTTPS servers and, consequently, Apple's servers for activation, iCloud and the iTunes and App stores.