At its iPhone Event, Apple revealed the iPhone 4S with retina display and the A5 chip.

View more coverage of Apple’s announcements here.

That means it’s up to twice as fast as the previous iPhone 4, and has dual-core graphics that are supposed to be 7 times faster.

According to Apple, battery life is as follows:

3G Talk Time – 8 hours

2G Talk Time – 14 hours

3G Browsing – 6 hours

Wi-Fi Browsing – 9 hours

Video – 10 hours

Music – 40 hours

It also has better call quality, the company says. Presumably no antenna issues this time. It switches between two antennas as needed.

Apple is making the case that this will be great device for games, and demoed “Infinity Blade II” on the device. The game comes out December 1 in the App Store.

Downloads are supposed to be 2 times faster than the iPhone 4.

The 4S is both GSM and CDMA, and it has a new camera with an 8 megapixel sensor (3264 X 2448 – 60% more pixels). It also has backside illumination for 73% more light and 33% faster capture. There’s a hybrid IR filter, better color accuracy and more color uniformity, as well as a five-element lens, 30% more sharpness and f/2.4 aperture.

Then, there’s an image signal processor designed by Apple itself, which enables face detection and 25% better auto white balance.

It has 1080p HD video recording, video image stabilization and temporal noise reduction.

It also comes with AirPlay of course, where you can get stuff on on your TV. Apple plays up the gaming aspect once again.

It also comes with the rumored, awesome voice controls from Siri, where you can simply ask it questions and tell it things and it understands and gets you what you need accordingly (at least in theory).

Here’s a past demo of Siri:

It’s releasing with black and white versions (amen, we won’t have to write about waiting for the white version!).

Pricing is as follows:

16B – $199
32GB – $299
64GB – $399

They call this “the most amazing iPhone yet.”

No iPhone 5? What do you want? It’s just a name isn’t it?

iOS 5 will be released on October 12.

Those are two-year contract prices. The iPhone 4 will now be $99 for 8GB and the 3GS will be free with a contract.

Pre-orders for the 4S will start on Friday. It will be available on October 14th. It will be available in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, France, Germany and Japan.

In the US, it will be available for AT&T, Verizon, and even Sprint, giving Sprint its first iPhone. That should be good for business.

It will hit 22 additional countries on October 28th, and will be in 70 countries by the end of the year through 100 carriers, according to Apple.

More to come. View more coverage on Apple’s announcements here.