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How do you make the point that the iPhone has changed the
world? The easy answer is “use statistics”—100 million sold,
500,000 downloadable programs on the iPhone A pp Store, 15
billion downloads…. Trouble is, those statistics get stale almost before
you’ve finished typing them.
Maybe it’s better to talk about the aftermath. How since the iPhone came
along, cell carriers (AT&T, V erizon, Sprint, and so on) have opened up the
calcified, conservative way they used to consider new cellphone designs.
How every phone and its brother now have a touchscreen. How BlackBerry,
Google (Android) phones, and Windows 7 phones all have their own app
stores. How, in essence, everybody wants to be the iPhone.
The thing is, they’ll never quite catch up technologically, because A pple is
always moving, too. I n O ctober 2011, for example, it introduced the fifth
iPhone model, the iPhone 4S. I t looks identical to the previous model, the
iPhone 4—but the guts are quite a bit different. The processor is much
faster, the camera is much better, and there’s speech recognition. Not just
dictation—you can actually tell the phone what to do.
More importantly, there’s a new, free version of the iPhone’s software,
called iOS 5. (Why not “iPhone O S” anymore? Because the same operating
system runs on the iPad and the iPod Touch. I t’s not just for iPhones anymore,
and saying “the iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch OS” takes too long.)
iOS 5 adds all kinds of new features people have been pining for: direct
access to the camera from the Lock screen, a Notification Center that lists
your messages, calls, and appointments with one finger-swipe, and so on.
Why is it so important? Because you can run iOS 5 on older iPhone models
(the 4 and the 3GS) without having to buy the iPhone 4S. This book covers
all three phones that can run the iOS 5 software: the iPhone 3GS, the
iPhone 4, and the iPhone 4S.
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