iPhone 4S priced and dated, coming to UK October 14th

Yesterday evening (our time), the next-generation iPhone was unveiled.

And it’s fair to say reaction was, on the whole, that of slight disappointment because Apple didn’t pull anything really interesting with its latest smartphone.

There was no iPhone 5 with a redesigned body, or two models of iPhone launched, or any of the other bits of speculation which have been heavily reported over the last couple of months.

Just a plain incremental upgrade to the iPhone, the 4S, with a faster processor, improved 8 megapixel camera, better antenna and a new integrated voice feature by the name of Siri. Oh, and it will have iOS 5 on board, naturally.

What we didn’t know yesterday was the launch details for the UK, but now these have emerged, and the good news is that we won’t have to wait any longer than the States to see the iPhone 4S on shelves.

The smartphone will be on sale on October 14th, a week Friday, and while we might talk of slight disappointment, you can bet there will still be queues of punters around the block overnight, desperate to have the latest Apple gadget in their hands first.

And the price? For the basic 16GB iPhone 4S from Apple, you’ll be looking at an outlay of £499. The 32GB and 64GB models will obviously be more, we’d guess £599 and £699, with a couple of sources on the net having indicated this is the case.

£700 for a phone, albeit with that chunky amount of memory, is quite the drain on the old wallet, though. However, these will be available on contracts – which will still be a massive outlay, of course, just without the up front sting.

We’d imagine many will be taking out the 64GB model on deals with networks.

Should you want it sim-free, you’ll be able to pre-order the iPhone 4S from the online Apple store from this Friday.

With the release of the 4S, Apple has cut the price of both the iPhone 4 and 3GS to offer a kind of budget pair of alternatives to the latest handset.

The iPhone 4 8GB version can now be had for £429 sim-free, while if you’re prepared to make do with considerably older tech, the 3GS now weighs in at £319.

Aside from the iPhone, there were other announcements made at the Apple press event yesterday.

One being the expected change to the iPod range. The iPod Classic and Shuffle are no longer, with the iPod Touch and Nano being the only two new models revealed. This unifies the range as an all-touchscreen and flash memory using line (the Classic had a traditional hard drive, the size of which some may miss).

As Apple moves towards the cloud, the idea is you wont need that big hard disk any more.

That was the other big announcement – iCloud launches on October 12th. This is Apple’s cloud storage locker for all your music, photos, documents and apps, which can be synced across all devices, from smartphones to computers.