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  (Photo: REUTERS/Robert Galbraith)
  Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, speaks about iPhones, including the iPhone 4S, at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California October 4, 2011.

Apple has announced the upcoming release of the iPhone 4S for Oct. 14, with pre-orders beginning on Friday.

The next generation iPhone will come in three memory capacities including a 16GB version for $199, a 32GB version for $299, and a 64GB version for $399.

The new device is said to have an incredible battery life, capable of eight hours of 3G talk time and 10 hours of video.

Its download speeds should double that of the iPhone 4’s and should rival handsets running on 4G thanks to the new antenna Apple will be including on the device.

The iPhone 4S will also come with an 8 megapixel camera which the company claims will rival most point and shoot cameras.

It also captures video in 1080p HD.

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The iPhone 4S has been rumored to be coming out for quite some time now.

Early in the summer, tech site 9to5Mac reported on an upgraded version of the iPhone 4 to be released when Apple launches its next generation smartphone.

The iPhone 4S was rumored to look identical to the iPhone 4, but sport more powerful hardware including an upgraded processor and an 8 megapixel camera capable of shooting video in 1080p.

Other rumors circled the internet for quite some time regarding an iPhone 5 which would take on a radically new design.

The iPhone 5’s new look was supposedly based off of a prototype that went missing in the Shenzhen district of China.

The prototype was actually an iPhone 4 stuffed with guts for a tear-drop shaped iPhone 5 which Chinese manufacturers used to create silicon cases for.

Another prototype supposedly went missing in a bar in California this past summer.

That model was never recovered, but did stir up a great deal of controversy over the device.