iPhone 4S Arrives at Apple Store Today

After a week during which Blackberry users experienced widespread service interruptions for at least the second time in two years, and following the much-discussed death of the much-eulogized co-founder of the company, Steve Jobs, Apple today begins selling its much-anticipated fifth edition of the iPhone in , including the one at : the 4S.

The model has been available to order since last Friday.

The “S” is for “Siri,” a futuristic virtual assistant which tech critic David Pogue of the New York Times called “a crisply accurate, astonishingly understanding, uncomplaining, voice-commanded minion.”

“No voice training or special syntax is required,” he wrote. “You don’t even have to hold the phone up to your head. You just hold down the phone’s Home button until you hear a double beep, and then speak casually.”

In addition to the speech recognition, the iPhone 4S has a much faster microprocessor, identical to the one in the iPad 2, using the iOS 5 system and iCloud.

And it has what Pogue calls a “much better, faster camera—among the best on a phone. It has a resolution of eight megapixels, which doesn’t matter much, and a new, more light-sensitive sensor, which does.” The 1080p high-definition video is also impressive, he added. “There’s still no zoom [for the video] and only a tiny LED flash—but otherwise, this phone comes dangerously close to displacing a $200 point-and-shoot digital camera.”

(Clarification: The Apple Store opened at 8 a.m. Friday, two hours earlier than normal hours—an earlier verision of this story did not not that.)