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However underwhelmed the initial response to its launch may have seemed, the iPhone 4S just broke Apple's sales records. The company's latest smartphone, which was unveiled last week, sold over 1 million units in its first 24 hours of being available to pre-order.

To put things in perspective, when the iPhone 4 launched last year, it set a record for Apple by racking up 600,000 pre-orders in a single day. Even though it's not the dramatically overhauled iPhone 5 many were hoping for, Apple's latest gadget has smashed the company's previous single day sales record by more than 66 percent. In terms of first day pre-orders, the iPhone 4S is the most successful product Apple has ever released.

With all the hussle and tussle over the iOS5 and iPhone 4S announcements earlier this week, we thought we would take our own unscientific and idiosyncratic poll of our RWW staffers and see whether they would be ready to plunk down their own hard cash money (we have to pay for own phones here, don't you know?) and upgrade. The answer was a resounding No. Now granted, many of us have the regular 4 models, so an upgrade to a 4S isn't as compelling. But read on for yourself what everyone has to say.

Apple slipped in a quieter announcement today amidst the iPhone 4S chaos: The launch of a new app called Cards, which lets you create a real, physical card from your iPhone by taking a photo on your camera and choosing from a simple selection of 21 different designs. Then Apple mails for $2.99 (U.S.) or $4.99 (elsewhere). You receive a push notification directly to your iPhone as soon as the card arrives at its destination.

The Apple and iPhone rumor mills have long been a standard feature of tech reporting and gadget fandom, and their intensity has only increased in recent years, especially when it comes time for a new iPhone.

This time around, we heard dozens of rumors, some which were supposedly substantiated by anonymous sources, hardware suppliers and other clues found in the wild. While many turned out to be true (faster processor, better camera and Siri-powered voice controls), quite a few of them were false.

After months of media speculation and rumors, Apple officially unveiled the latest version of the iPhone at a media event in Cupertino today.

The iPhone 4S will come equipped with a faster, dual-core A5 processor, better graphics processor and an 8 megapixel camera. Unlike previous iterations, the new device will work on both GSM and CDMA networks. The device will also come with hardware improvements that improve the quality of phone calls and the speed of data usage.

Apple announced a new in-house app called Find My Friends today as part of the forthcoming free update iOS 5 - and it sounds a lot like what other services already offer. The service will allow iPhone owners to selectively and for a defined period of time share their location on a map with their friends and family. But apparently it's just for finding other iPhone owners. Who else would you want to find, anyway?

Persistant location sharing on demand is clearly a growing trend, witness Google Latitude, Glypmse and startups like Geoloqi and EchoEcho. What has Apple brought to that party? Maybe improved usability, ease of installation, accessibility for everyday iPhone owners - but also a feigned ignorance about all the other options and all the other phones on the market. Imagine how many more friends I could find if Apple released something that was interoperable with other services and other devices. Just like I can call them by voice. But no...it's just for Apple Friends to find Apple Family. I love Apple devices, but this is just obnoxious. The time for siloed, single-vendor, location sharing apps has passed.

The market is hungry for today's iPhone launch. Existing iPhone customers are ready to upgrade. Nearly a third of Android users are would consider switching to iPhone, but only 11% of iPhone users would give it up. Sprint is making a big bet to become the third major U.S. carrier.

Apple just announced the iPhone 4S, a significant update to the iPhone's existing design. The iPhone 4 far outshone its predecessors, and a bump to that phone will surely prove popular. More importantly, the iPhone 4S is now a "worldphone." It contains both GSM and CDMA radios, so all carriers can now support the same hardware. Furthermore, the old iPhone 3GS is now free with a contract. But several Android phone manufacturers are neck and neck with Apple, and most of the mobile world doesn't even have a smartphone yet. Amidst the world's many phones, smart and dumb, where does the iPhone stand?

The next version of Apple's mobile operating system, iOS 5, will be available for download in just over one week, Apple announced today.

Apple's Senior Vice President of iOS Software told the crowd at the company's "Let's Talk iPhone" media event today that iOS 5, a significant upgrade that was first unveiled at the WWDC in June, will go live on October 12.

There's no doubt that Apple's iPad sales are growing faster than the iPhone. At Apple's event on Tuesday, newly minted CEO Tim Cook announced that 92% of Fortune 500 are testing or deploying iPad in the course of less than 18 months.

Meanwhile, Cook also announced that, in schools, iPads are "helping kids learn," and "pilots replace 40 pound flight bags with iPads." In medicine, 80% of the top hospitals in the US are testing or piloting the iPad.

App developers have been working on iOS 5 since it was announced in at Apple's developer conference in June. That encompasses most of the summer and the start of autumn. iOS 5 officially drops about a week from today, on October 12. Was it enough time to deal with the new features and APIs that Apple has baked into iOS 5?

We want to know: what was the most difficult or important aspect of iOS 5 to develop for? From Game Center to Notifications to the new graphics APIs or iCloud, there are several new moving parts of iOS 5 to deal with. Check out some comments from prominent iOS developers below and take this the ReadWriteMobile poll.