Iphone, Electronics | featured news

Apple's latest iPhone arrived in stores Friday in the U.S. and a half-dozen countries, as the company hoped to cement its position as the world's leading smartphone maker.

Early reviews of the iPhone 4S may have been uniformly great, bordering on glowing. But the best part of Wednesday’s coverage of Apple’s latest has been reviewers’ transcripts of their conversations with Siri — the personal assistant.

If you're reading this story on your iPad or iPhone, perhaps searching for "iOS 5 release date," well -- it's now, says Apple. Apple has reinvented its operating system, promising 200 new features, and, in the process, changing the way users relate to the online world.

Apple Inc received orders for more than one million iPhone 4S phones in the first 24 hours, topping the previous record of 600,000, the company said on Monday.

If you had any doubts that Apple (AAPL) would be able to beat the record 1.7 million iPhones sold in three days in June 2010, you can put them to rest.

The iPhone 4S -- Apple's newest creation -- quietly went on pre-sale at 12 a.m. on Friday... The phone, which has been panned by some critics who say it's more of a facelift to the iPhone 4 than a new product, features a faster dual-core processor and a camera with 8 megapixels of resolution.

Apple unveiled its iPhone 4S on Tuesday to a lot of fanfare and quite a bit of disappointment. In our not-at-all scientific poll of more than 4,000 respondents, 57 percent of our readers said that they were expecting to see an iPhone 5 and 21 percent said they weren’t that excited by the new features.

Steve Jobs, the mastermind behind Apple's iPhone, iPad, iPod, iMac and iTunes, has died, Apple said. Jobs was 56. "We are deeply saddened to announce that Steve Jobs passed away today," read a statement by Apple's board of directors. "Steve's brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives. The world is immeasurably better because of Steve. His greatest love was for his wife, Laurene, and his family. Our hearts go out to them and to all who were touched by his extraordinary gifts."

Samsung Electronics said it would try to stop the sale of Apple's iPhone 4S in France and Italy, aiming to use the product's rollout as leverage against Apple in a broader fight over the design of smartphones and tablet computers.

Usually a cause for techno-euphoria, Apple's iPhone-a-palooza event on Tuesday had an unintended and unlikely effect: It made some corners of the Internet mad.