Mixed emotions on the Apple 4S rollout today. The 4S is a nice evolutionary bump up in technology, but it is not a revolution.

* Dual channel communications is cool and promises to double download speeds. Apple is quite right that "4G" is more of a buzz word than a reality. The 4G providers don't even agree amongst themselves what "4G" means and there is no definition, so Apple has focused on throughput rather than technology.

* The new camera optics and software should be a real plus. There is far more to good photography and video than ratcheting up the Mega Pixel count, and Apple seems to be focusing on the right factors- Optics, software and integration.

* Siri voice recognition shows great promise, but it is still beta. Nothing like faulty voice recognition to make you want to fling your phone violently out the car window, so we'll see how this works. Apple led the voice recognition revolution a good fifteen+ years ago, and then didn't keep moving on it. Hopefully they can make good now. Siri's parser seems to be quite amazing, but it is probably picking out certain key words and ignoring the grammatical markers like determiners in the stream. This will work fine for voice command but not so well for the voice recognition needed for true dictation. As someone who has engineered a few parsers in the past, I don't envy Apple/Siri the task of making a true natural-language parser based on audio recognition!

* I am speechless that they are integrating Twitter deeply into the system! How bizarre is that? To me Twitter is a footnote in digital history. The only reason they chose Twitter is because, frankly, it isn't Google+

* iCloud should be an excellent OS layer for personal users. It would be great if it had a seamless conduit to the more robust Microsoft SharePoint. Gearheads might like Google Docs/Sites integration as well.

* The new dual-core chip sounds great.

* Turn-by-turn navigation is the 800 pound gorilla in the room, and Apple doesn't have an answer. They rely upon Google for base layer maps, and their contract states that they can't use it for GPS navigation (or legalese to that affect). Since this is Google's main advantage in the marketplace, I don't see Google sharing any time soon.

* HOPEFULLY Apple will at least leave the Siri API open so that third-party turn-by-turn navigation vendors can smoothly integrate their apps into Siri's voice command system.

I am definitely an "early adopter" when it comes to innovative technology, and I doubt I will use one of my Verizon upgrade credits to move from the iPhone 4 to the iPhone 4S. I mean "Twitter?" Seriously?