iPhone 4S(eriously)?

Much rumored, much awaited iPhone event happened today and the show was totally boring and dull. It definitely missed the action. It missed the energy. Ok, Tim Cook did a good job and portrayed himself as a true leader and let his team members who are good in their respective areas to speak. He called his team members to do the job in presenting the iPhone 4S, iPod Nano, Touch and Shuffle to the world. He started the event and let the things to his team members and made iPhone 4S to speak for itself, which is definitely good. Well that sounds more like any enterprise, but this is Apple, here things should work differently from rest of the industry. Steve Jobs set that expectation with people who follow Apple.

Now coming to the point, The rumor mill suggested there would be two iPhones targeting different lifestyles and demographics, feature rich iPhone 5 with NFC, 4G/LTE support, 4”+ screen, Proximity Charging, integrated AM/FM radio, Thunderbolt connectivity and tapered or tear drop shape and an upgrade to current iPhone 4 with some of the features of iPhone 5 as iPhone 4S. To support these rumors the blogosphere including top gadget review sites showed the cases for those two types of iPhones. At the last moment it was rumored that Sprint paid Apple 20Billion to have iPhon5 exclusively on its network leaving Verizon and AT&T to iPhone 4S.

Well, today’s Apple’s show, even though it is a lull,  busted all those rumors totally out. Of course, I don’t say all of the speculations (yes, these iPhone next gen speculations are always just like the ones that happen in Wall Street) have gone down. Things like iPhone 4S, adding Sprint as one of the carriers here in the USA, true world phone that supports CDMA and GSM, dual-core processor A5 replacing the current chip in iPhone 4, dedicated camera button, 8 MP Camera, higher resolution IPS, dedicated orientation lock, more speedier, battery life (debatable – talk time Vs. Standby time) integration to Facebook along with Twitter, Cloud Sync, notification center etc. have been definitely proved to be valid. Of course, I know the iOS 5 features like social integration, cloud sync and notifications on the lock screen etc. have been presented during the iOS 5 Beta days. Thus, not all the rumor mill is invalid though. But still the major rumors like two types of iPhones, two iPhone 5 exclusively on Sprint Network, HSPA+ version of iPhone are proven complete wrong. And Apple can really keep secrets well even in post Jobs era. .

The interesting part of this is Apple is selling various iPhones to different demographics, iPhone 4S, iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS. I am surprised Apple still is selling iPhone 3GS. In my opinion, they are targeting iPhone 3GS to the cheap Android phone market. This is an interesting strategy and the question boils down to how many would choose 2 generations old iPhone over a cheap Android in that segment of market.

Now it is interesting to see how many people would flock to Apple stores early morning to line up to get their iPhone 4S on its release date.

One thing for sure, this presentation of iPhone 4S is no match to the previous iPhone releases. It lacked thunder. It lacked the strong punch by just creating an atmosphere that thinks this is the next best thing to sliced bread. It lacked the force. It clearly shows Apple is Steve Jobs. This show definitely missed the “wow” factor. Period.