Poor battery life on the iPhone 4S, released on October 14 to great fanfare and record sales, has been the new model’s Achilles’ heel in the minds of many users.

While complaints about the perceived problem haven’t reached the fevered pitch that last year’s iPhone 4 release saw about its so-called ”death grip” problem, they don’t seem to be going away.

There were, of course, the expected number of early-adopter quibbles with the phone: from troubles with new carrier Sprint, to a sometimes slow-moving camera, to limits on the voice-activated Siri “personal assistant” outside the United States.

But as most of those gripes either got sorted or users got used to the limitations, complaints about the phone’s battery life have persisted.

A post on the Apple support forums, begun on October 15 to discuss battery problems, was still active Tuesday — two weeks and 185 pages worth of comments later.

“I purchased what I thought was a top-of-the-line product only to be terribly disappointed,” one user wrote Tuesday. “This is my first iPhone and may well be my last.”

Battery life was a frequent complaint about the iPhone 3GS, but concerns about the phone’s short battery life seemed to have been addressed on the next-generation iPhone 4.

According to Apple’s official specs, the iPhone 4S should have enough juice in the battery for up to eight hours of talk time, six hours of Internet surfing, 10 hours of video viewing and 200 hours on standby. (All activities on a 3G connection — 2G and wireless have different figures).

All of those numbers are within an hour or so of the iPhone 4, except for one. The older phone’s specifications promise 300 hours of standby power: a full 50% more than the 4S.

Users complaining on the Apple forum and elsewhere say that their phones aren’t lasting anywhere near even that reduced length of time. Various independent tests of the new phone have suggested that some phones have problems with poor battery life, while others don’t.

The general consensus among tech-inclined owners is that the problem may not lie with the battery itself, but with the way the phone utilizes Apple’s latest mobile operating system, iOS 5.

Specifically, the theory goes, its location-based services are a power drain. If the phone is constantly trying to pinpoint where it is, it will suck power even when the user isn’t actively doing something with the phone. (For a comparison, think about how quickly your battery drains when you forget to turn off Wi-Fi searches while you’re driving.)

The new phone also has a more powerful processor — the same one that’s in the iPad 2. That could cut battery life, even though Apple CEO Tim Cook specifically said that it wouldn’t during the iPhone 4S unveiling event last month.

Apparently, reading from the well-worn Apple playbook, the company has not commented publicly about the battery complaints. Messages and e-mails to Apple seeking comment on these complaints were not returned.

It’s unclear whether the company acknowledges there’s a battery problem (although there have been reports that Apple is contacting iPhone 4S users to try to get to the bottom of it).

And while it’s too early for direct comparisons, the extended silence looks remarkably like the public-relations two-step that was Apple’s handling of the iPhone 4′s antenna issues. (As you may recall, Consumer Reports and others said the iPhone 4 had antenna problems that caused it to drop calls. People dubbed the situation “Antennagate.”)

First, the company refused to publicly acknowledge the issue. Then, there was a software patch apparently aimed at fixing it (although Apple never explicitly said so).

There would eventually be a news conference in which then-CEO Steve Jobs spent most of the time denying there was any real problem, then announcing that the company would give away free bumpers — minimalist iPhone cases — to prevent dropped calls.

But before that, there were the private e-mails and public statements saying, in essence, that users were holding their phones wrong.

Then, weeks after the free-bumper news conference, Jobs and others doubled back, saying that there was never really much of a problem and discontinuing the freebie program.

As Apple’s silence persists (the company has said in the past that it spends time researching potential problems before addressing them publicly), users and observers are complaining and speculating in the vacuum. And that’s not always pretty.

“It hits you when you least expect it. It slips away under a mask of dormant inactivity. And it can ruin your entire day,” TechCrunch’s Jordan Crook wrote Tuesday. “It’s your iPhone 4S battery life, and it sucks.”

Apple Stores and retailers Future Shop and Best Buy were opening two hours early across the country to kick off sales of the new model, the iPhone 4S.

An hour and a half later and 2,100 kilometres to the west, the Apple Store in Toronto’s Eaton Centre shopping mall opened to a queue of hundreds of people. Some were lounging or napping in camping chairs while others spread out on the floor with sleeping mats, laptops and fast food.

There were also pre-dawn lineups in Montreal, Mississauga, Ont., and Ottawa and an overnight campout by dozens of people in Edmonton. The first person in line at the Apple Store in downtown Vancouver arrived Thursday at 8 a.m. PT — a full day ahead of time.

Apple founder queues up

In London, nearly 1,000 people waited outside the Apple Store in Covent Garden to purchase the device, packing the street. About 200 people were at Apple’s Fifth Avenue store in New York as it went on sale. Steve Wozniak, who founded Apple with Steve Jobs in a Silicon Valley garage in 1976, was first in line at a store in Los Gatos, Calif.

Many said the event resembled a remembrance to Jobs, who died last week. Others joked that the 4S model stood “for Steve.”

Una Chen, a 24-year-old banker, said she was just happy to swap out her BlackBerry Bold for the new iPhone, particularly after a BlackBerry outage affected her phone this week.

“It’s not good to have a phone and not be able to use it,” Chen said.

Wozniak came out to the California store even though he already had two new phones on the way. He told television station NBC11 on Thursday that while he waited for the store’s opening Friday morning, he planned on getting caught up on his email and chatting with fans.

Torrid sales forecast

Apple sold a million of its latest smartphone on the first day of pre-orders last Friday, easily beating the 600,000 first-day pre-orders for the iPhone 4 last year. Based on those numbers, analysts are predicting the company will sell between three million and four million of the devices on its opening weekend.

All major Canadian wireless operators — including Telus, Rogers, Bell and Virgin Mobile — carry the iPhone 4S.

The phones also debuted Friday in Australia, France, Germany, Japan and Britain. They are coming to 22 more countries by the end of the month.

The base model of the iPhone 4S costs $159 in Canada with a three-year contract. Customers have a choice of white or black. Without a contract, it costs $649.

The phone — Apple’s fifth — has a faster processor and an improved camera compared with last year’s model. However, some customers and investors were disappointed that Apple didn’t launch a more radical new model. It’s been more than a year since Apple’s previous model was released.

Even those of us who aren’t Apple fanboys were watching with a keen sense of interest. This was the world’s most valuable company, and its most idolized, stepping up to the plate. Did they bring their A-game? Would they hit it out of the park? Would they make our jaws drop with delight, and push back the frontier of the possible?

Answer: no. Clearly, the iPhone 4S was a single rather than a home run. But that’s good enough for Cook, a low-key manager if ever there was one (and a stark contrast to his predecessor in that respect). Cook will take singles all night. He has his eye on the pennant, rather than delighting the fans.

The plain truth is that Cook is an inventory guy. That’s how he made his name at Apple: understanding the life cycles of products, and making sure his stores weren’t saddled with too many of them. Keeping inventory low, unsexy as it sounds, is a big part of what makes companies wealthy. And from that perspective, there’s one major reason to release the iPhone 4S now: making sure all your iPhone 3GS customers, who have just left their two-year contracts, upgrade to a new device.

And the iPhone 5? For all we know from the famously tight-lipped Apple, there may well be an iPhone 5 prototype ready and waiting to roll into production. Not all of those endless rumors had to be made out of whole cloth; one thing we know about Apple is that it works on every product years in advance. If the iPhone 5 will launch in 2012, you can bet your life it exists in some form now. Perhaps it’s just waiting on one thing, like a better, slimmer battery that can handle energy-intensive 4G signal. Or perhaps it is only waiting for the go order from Cook, and designer Jonathan Ive sighs wistfully every time he looks in its direction.

Cook, like the honey badger, just don’t care. (Indeed, with $75 billion in the bank, Apple can afford not to care.) The product cycle is now firmly established, and it’s all that matters. The iPhone 4S is for 3GS owners and curious newbies. The iPhone 5 will arrive in time for iPhone 4 owners to upgrade and lock themselves into another two-year contract, and another set of curious newbies can sign up then too. The Earth spins on its axis. Everything is in order.

Is it a risky strategy? Does it provide an opening for Android phone makers to produce ever-more advanced 4G handsets, based on the hot new Ice Cream Sandwich platform, in the meantime? Yes, and yes. Cook is betting on two things: that Apple’s current customer base is rabidly loyal enough that they won’t leave, and that the Apple name, marketing and word of mouth will pick up a steady stream of newcomers, swelling the company coffers and pleasing Wall Street. From the bleachers, those look like pretty safe bets in the long run, even if Wall Street was jittery at first.

We only wish that Cook had acknowledged the crowd somehow. Just one sly joke about iPhone 5 expectations would have gone a long way towards placating the fans; you get the feeling that’s what his predecessor would have done. But that isn’t Cook’s style. This unexciting bottom-line focus is the new normal at Apple. Better get used to it.

The hype surrounding Tuesday’s Apple iPhone event is at an all-time high. But most of the hype is focused on the hardware that Apple will announce. What will the iPhone 5look like? Will there be an iPhone 4S? Will it have 4G capabilities or a bigger screen?

The real star of Tuesday’s show will not be the hardware, though. This event will focus on software, specifically one piece of software that Apple: the iPhone Assistant.

Assistant is the successor to Siri, the iPhone app that helped users with their daily tasks with natural language voice commands. Ask Siri to find a restaurant for you, and it could not only complete your requests, but it could also help you book a reservation. It could grab movie ratings, find you a taxi, perform Google searches and much more. Most of all, it learned from your actions and refined its recommendations accordingly.

The technology that powered Siri was born from SRI’s CALO project, the largest artificial intelligence project in U.S. history. It’s complex technology that linked machine learning to natural language. In other words, it’s technology that made artificial intelligence accessible and useful to the regular person.

Two months after its launch, Apple acquired Siri for more than $200 million.