iPhone 4S's Siri Is 'Crazy Good'

The iPhone 4S comes out Thursday, and The New York Times’s David Pogue is doing his best to gin up excitement: the new smartphone is “sheer magic,” Pogue writes. The best upgrades are the new digital camera, which he says “comes dangerously close to displacing a $200 point-and-shoot digital camera,” and the virtual assistant Siri, which he calls “crazy good, transformative, category-redefining speech recognition.” Pogue says Siri “saves time, fumbling and distraction, and profoundly changes the definition of ‘phone.’” The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg is less effusive: “[Siri] has great potential and worked pretty well for me, despite some glitches.” He adds, “Despite Siri, the iPhone 4S isn't a dramatic game-changer like some previous iPhones.”