iPhone 4S and all other Apple announcements...

Wow.. So Tim Cook took the stage for the first time ever as CEO of Apple and delivered the Keynote speech for the "Lets talk iPhone" event taking place today. The iPhone has, as he announced, seen a year on year increase of a whopping 125%!!! Wowza! Well it's still only 5% of the mobile phone market, so there is lots of room to grow.
iOS 5 updates again-
-The new Operating System will have iMessage, which will allow messages to be sent between 2 iOS devices.
-Reminders are location based reminders that will clue you in to do certain tasks in certain areas as well as added Twitter integration all over the OS.
-Newsstand allows for periodicals to be downloaded straight on to the device in the background
- The Apple Camera will now have in-app editing
iOS5 will be available for free on October 12th!

image courtesy of gdgt

"Find my friends" allow me to track the location of family and friends on my iPhone. Cool and all, but I REALLY don't want my family or my friends knowing where the hell I am!!! That's like my worst nightmare come true!!

iTunes Match: Allows iTunes to match your current library in the cloud. Cool feature. Available "end of October" for $24.99

Updates on 2 iPods-

Some very cool clock faces that now officially lets the iPod Nano be used as a watch! It also has bigger icons and now built in support for Nike+
The iPod Touch is also available in White now and here are the prices for all of them-

And now... The iPhone 4S!! That's right guys, there is no iPhone 5.
- The iPhone 4S will have the A5 chip and will be 7 TIMES FASTER than the iPhone 4! That's nuts!
- Increased battery life with 8 hours of talk time in 3G.  Damn now I can't even lie and say that my phone died which is why people couldn't reach me with the "Find my Friend" feature (yes, I'm still emotionally scarred by that)
- Has some new system that allows for antenna switch to download and receive
-Download speeds that are twice as fast as the iPhone 4
- Now both CDMA and GSM!!!
- The camera looks amazing!! It has an 8 megapixel camera!! 30 percent more sharpness in image quality
- Records 1080p HD video recording.

And as I had predicted on Twitter earlier today, "Assistant" was the show stopper at the announcement today. The idea behind it being that you can TALK to your iPhone and have it talk back to you. Asking it whether you will need the umbrella today, what time it is in Paris, and what Greek restaurants are around Palo Alto will all have it speak back responses, and show you appropriate data matching with your question. I can't WAIT to see the video of the event to just see how well this actually works on the live demo on stage.
- If you receive a message while driving, just hold down the button on the headset and say "read my message" and Siri (the software) does so
- You can ask Siri how many days are left until Christmas and she replies
- Set up a wake up call
- Look up stock and weather data
And of course, here is the catch- Siri will only work on iPhone 4S and will need data connection to work
When asked, "Who are You?" Siri responds, "I am your humble Personal Assistant." Ha! Cute.

And although this doesn't quite apply to us, for those in America the above is what the pricing of the iPhone 4S will look like. It will be available in the US on all the big carriers as Sprint is now included as well.
And as Apple Japan had already confirmed to us, the iPhone 4S will be available on October 14th in 7 countries including the US, 22 more countries on October 28th, and 70 countries by the end of the year.
And no, the UAE didn't make the list of those 22 countries, hence, as of now, no fixed date is known for it's availability... YET.
Watch this space.
-