iPhone 4 U or not 4 U

Feature from Jae - Wednesday, 04 August 2010 @ 1:49am

Trying very hard not to be recognized, as one of the first adopters of the iPhone 4, can be pretty hard especially when a whole bunch of news sites and youtube clips have your face on their iPhone 4 midnight launch queues. Not that I’m ashamed of buying the new iPhone but more so the drastic measures of having to get one on launch day. It was a tiresome effort but the entertainment and company during the launch was an experience like no other. Now that I hold one in my hand, without covering the left hand corner, I can say whole heartedly that I was not mistaken. The iPhone 4 is here to stay.

That is because 99.45% of you customers lost reception before calling

Let’s dive straight into the main issue on everyone’s gripe with the iPhone 4, the antenna. Since its launch in the US, Japan, UK and other countries the iPhone 4 has been criticized for its reception issues when holding it in a certain way. With the antenna wrapped around the edges of the phone it had a sore point on the bottom left hand corner. This was commonly reported as an issue when you held the phone in your left hand. Immediately it spread like wild fire that Apple hated left handed people, so much negative press on the new phone forced Apple to provide a silicone bumper as compensation. I personally dislike silicone based covers or bumpers due to the dirt and lint in which you get stuck on them. I’d much rather a hard acrylic case that is relatively thin. Being only a week old those covers aren’t readily available so I’ll be using my bumper for a few more weeks till I find the right one. After trying out the phone for a few days I can confidently say this is a non-issue. Now this is all relative so considering I live inner city, in Sydney and that I hardly venture far away from a reception tower I may be a lucky guy. I took the phone out to the West, the North West and the South East with no issues behind reception testing. When deliberately holding the iPhone 4 so as to cover up the left hand corner the antenna bars on my screen did drop to only one bar. With this I was still able to make calls and hear clearly through the phone. So colour me an ignorant early adopter but the problems the whingy yanks talk about are non-existent in my little slice of the world.

Free bumper is ugly but FREE

The first thing you’ll notice when turning on the phone is the resolution. Going from a 480x320 in the last generation to a 960x640 is a big leap and it’s telling in the level of detail you get now in the iPhone 4. The icons for all your non-default apps now look pixelated, so a test on developer’s loyalties will be to see whether they go back and patch their icons to keep up with the higher resolution. I wouldn’t expect many of them to change, especially those apps which were free.

One disappointment for me is the new flash on the camera. It’s good that Apple has joined the norm and placed a 5 megapixel camera on the back of the phone but the use of flash in photography has been lame at best. I may need to play a little bit around with the settings but my flash photographs usually come out looking cloudy.
EDIT: I have been wrong when it comes to this feature. The reason why my photos were coming out with a bad glare was because I have a plastic sheet covering the lens. Make sure when you buy or use a protective cover that it does not cover up the camera. What can I say, I’m human!
When taking photos without a flash the camera had been working well. Now with zoom functions and an interior camera you can take all the MySpace photos that you desire. Speaking of the internal camera there is now the feature of FaceTime, Apple’s new video chat feature. One big thing to note here is that video chat is only available through the use of WiFi. The navigation for FaceTime isn’t well set up either. There is no separate app on your iPhone for its use, you either find a contact in your phonebook and send them a FaceTime request or you switch to FaceTime whilst on a normal phone call. Seeing as it’s a WiFi only feature it doesn’t seem to work the best out in public. Australia is still behind the times with free public WiFi, even Maccas has a shockingly slow connection. The feature will be underused in this country but so is video chat on the PS3. Until they place video calling on the 3G network they will never see its potential. As battery life is a concern Apple did make a conscious decision to keep it strictly WiFi. With the ability to make HD movies and edit them on the fly you will see many more youtube celebs and wannabe short film makers cropping up soon. Then the world will be filled with amateur porn or even worse, amateur singers.

Engadget's comparison chart between 4 and 3GS

Now for those who don’t like much on their desk tops for PCs there is a solution on the iPhone 4’s OS. Folders are now available so you can clean up that home screen to make it look as neat as you want. The fact that the phone has a new type of processor seems to have made a significant increase in the speed. Booting up the camera and taking a photo is just 2 seconds away, where as I remember on my original 3G that it could take upwards of 5 seconds to get ready for that first shot. As time moves on and I fill up my 32GB memory I’m sure the performance will degrade however things seem smooth right now. The addition of multitasking is great but I find myself still referring to the homepage as it’s my first reflex. It will take time to adjust but the feature is a welcoming one.

There isn’t much more to say about the iPhone 4, you could do much worse with a new smart phone purchase. You could argue that you could do much better too. If you’re looking to upgrade from what you already have make sure the iPhone 4 does what you want it to do. Talk to those that live and work where you do to see if anyone has reception issues with their iPhone 4. Or if you notice they stop calling you frequently it might be because they haven’t got any bars on their antenna. Be prepared to wait for a iPhone 4 too, the last update shows that the phone is on back order with a 6-8 week wait time. If all obstacles check out fine then consider the iPhone 4 worthy of your time and money. Just don’t post up all those self pics or I’ll come and turn your phone into an iPhone in 4 pieces.