Like many others this morning I picked up my new iPhone 4S and immediately stripped off the packaging to see if the iCloud feature on the new iPhone 4S would allow me to restore my backup I made to the iCloud last night from my old iPhone 4 equipped with iOS 5, without the need to use a computer or iTunes connection.
Have a look at our iPhone 4S reviewwhich includes videos, tons of photos and averything you need to know about the iPhone 4S, siri, and iOS 5.
After dropping in the micro sim in to the new iPhone 4S I powered it up and started going through the setup procedure to start the restore. After the obligatory language questions I was asked to then select a Wi-fi network. For the purposes of testing I skipped with and selected mobile network but soon discovered that a restore was not able to complete via a mobile connect and required a Wi-Fi connection.
Quickly I popped into StarbucksI settled down and jump on their new free Wi-Fi service and restarted the setup process this time selecting the Starbucks Wi-fi connection and the option to restore my iPhone from the previous iCloud backup.
The night before I had removed all the unnecessary clutter from my iPhone to keep the iCloud backup as streamlined as possible and reduce it in size to around 3.5GB which I thought would be small enough for the mobile restore to handle.
Everything went well to start and all my contacts and email accounts, SMS messages and recent calls from the backup dropped into place, and access to my phone was restored. After a quick flick through the pages of apps on my new iPhone 4S is was apparent that no apps had downloaded in the restore and I now needed to wait for each one to download. So if you are going to upgrade to your new iPhone 4S while out and about make sure you have a fast Wi-Fi connection or you might find yourself purchasing a few coffees while you wait.
After some time all my apps did finally drop into place and the restore/upgrade was complete, all fairly painlessly. However as you would expect there may be problems if you have a large amount of data to restore on a flakey Wi-Fi connection so be careful.
Have a look at our handy guide on the difference between the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S.
Apple has now announced the iPhone 5, have a look at our article on the difference between the iPhone 4S and iPhone 5to see all about the new iPhone 5.
Popular Geeky Gadgets Deals