I have a 4s.
I've had no significant problems with it. Here are the main impressions I have:
- CPU speed: Almost no one says the iPhone 4 is slow. Yet with iOS 4, there were small pauses where you could tell it was swapping memory in and out when launching memory hungry programs. iOS 5 sped things up so that the 4 didn't feel at all slow anymore. With the 4s, everything is instant. The web browser, especially on wifi, feels just as fast as my Core i7 laptop. I'm not saying it IS faster, I'm saying it just feels that way. Basically, the "waiting for the cpu," even for a fraction of a second feeling has been nearly eliminated.
- Download speed is better: The (AT&T) 3G download speed is definitely faster than the 4. I run Speedtest.net all the time just to see how reception is in different places, and my average speed is around 5 Mbps. It varies of course. With the old phone, my best ever record was 5 Mbps (happened only once ever at night in an office park when everyone was gone) and the average was about 3.5 Mbps. Now with the 4s I get 4.5-5.5 Mbps all the time. With 3 bars of reception, I get 3.85Mbps. I get the feeling AT&T's backhaul network connection is now the bottleneck since at some point, better reception doesn't make things faster.
- The battery life is worse than the 4, but still quite good. With very light use, you can go a couple of days with the 4s, but typical use will give you a day and a half. In standby, the battery drops by about 3% after 8 hours, with push email off and instead set to hourly fetch (which is what I do). Since people are also reporting iOS 5 makes their iPhone 4 battery life worse, I think part of the issue is software and will eventually get optimized further. I have also noticed after a few weeks of usage, the battery life has gotten better, indicating the battery is getting broken in.
- The color rendition of the screen, which some people say is yellow, is actually super accurate since everything is color corrected. I think home theater people would say it's "warmer." Taking photos in my office, then putting the phone right next to the subject and comparing shows the effectiveness of the camera in getting colors right and the display showing them. Of course, you can fool it, but in normal pictures, it works well.
The video stabilization definitely works, but in a subtle way. It's not like you are suddenly wearing a steadi-cam or doing dolly shots. It is the kind of thing where you don't realize the stabilization is there until you see it turned off.
Other than a couple of casual shots, I have not really taken a lot of photos yet, so I can't compare the overall quality of the camera compared to the 4, other than the aforementioned color accuracy.
- I can't tell much difference in the overall cell reception compared to the 4, except you can no longer do the "touch of death" thing with the antenna. The touchy antenna didn't affect me in real world usage anyway, so I see it as being the same.
- Siri is the most trumpeted feature, and it's pretty cool. I find myself starting to do simple things with it (like check the weather, ask definitions of words, make reminders). I see it as a platform that, IF they execute it right, can grow into something truly awesome over time. It also makes hilarious mistakes if you mumble too much. Not perfect by any means, but definitely a good start.
I think the rest of the differences are with iOS 5, which is not 4s specific.
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