Last Friday the iPhone 4 was released in Brazil and I was lucky enough to get my hands on it before it was sold out. I honestly don’t know why there was such a hype around this iPhone, since it’s probably the worst iPhone Apple has ever released. Don’t get me wrong, the phone is great and it’s better than the iPhone 3GS overall, but it doesn’t add much more to the experience of 3GS owners. Let’s take a look at it and see why.
iPhone 4: The Design
For this part, I’ll do a side-by-side comparison of both models. The iPhone 4 box changed a bit from the old design. It’s smaller and the white sides make it less bulkier to the sight. The contents are still the same: USB cable, headphones, AC adapter and manuals.
As for the phone itself, it has a new, less-round design, which some people find beautiful and I don’t. I like the chrome gone, but I miss some round edges. Anyway, the new design makes it a bit less comfortable to hold when you’re using it as a phone, but much better for everything else – which is what most of us do 99% of the time, right?
From the box photo, you can see that the button design also changed and the SIM card tray is gone from the top – it’s moved to the right side of the phone. On the top we now have a second noise-canceling microphone where the SIM card used to be.
The new iPhone 4 is thinner (see the picture below) and made of metal and glass. No more plastic, which is good. But this brings up another issue: the glassy back is very, very slippery, so be careful where you leave it!
Although I miss the round edges, it’s better designed than the old one overall, I must admit. But the most appealing visual part is the new display, so let’s take a look at it.
iPhone 4: Retina Display
This is the feature that makes the iPhone 4 great. It isn’t the A4 processor (which is the same as the iPad’s, but clocked down a few MHz), nor the 512MB of RAM (double compared to the iPhone 3GS or the iPad). The first time I looked at this phone in the store I thought it was a plastic mock-up because the screen was too sharp to be a LCD panel. At a distance, it looks the same:
But when we look close, dammit! It looks like the iPhone 3GS screen is blurred! And by “close”, I mean at normal use distance, not under a microscope.
The new screen is a LED-backlit IPS LCD, with 960×640 resolution at 326 ppi, and IMHO, it’s now the benchmark for all displays – and not only mobile ones. If I had to choose one feature that makes this phone worth buying, it’s this display. It’s just awesome! The only bad thing is that most apps aren’t prepared for this new resolution yet, so some may look very ugly.
iPhone 4: The Camera
The new 5 megapixel camera is a nice addition as well. It can take some good photos on its own. Here’s an unedited sample:
The new backlit CCD is very good and makes the new iPhone’s camera a good one. Also, in iOS 4.1 there’s a new feature: HDR, to correct light balance in photos. So here’s a radical, against the sunlight shot with HDR enabled:
With HDR disabled, the foreground would be blacked out, since the light metering is done in the sky, which is very bright. The HDR feature corrects that.
There’s also a LED flash in this camera, but it’s so close to the lens that the only thing it’s good for is to create a lot of red eyes. So, I’ll skip it.
The camera also shoots video in 720p, so we can record and edit HD videos on the iPhone (using iMovie – $4.99 at App Store). I wonder who is gonna edit videos on the iPhone, though. Ah, by the way, this is why the phone has 512MB of RAM. It isn’t because of multitasking – each app can only allocate 32MB of RAM, so multitasking isn’t a problem in devices with 256MB of RAM, like the old 3GS. But 720p video recording requires some serious buffering space, so they had to increase memory for that.
iPhone 4: The other camera
A lot of fuzz was made about the front camera added to the iPhone 4. It’s supposed to be used with FaceTime, Apple’s new video call standard. The idea is very interesting on paper, but on practice, it’s not that bright. It only works over wifi, which makes it borderline useless. Plus, it requires a lot of new ports open in our routers and firewalls, making it a sysadmin nightmare. I wonder if Apple will let others play around with this camera, like Skype for instance. That’d make the front camera more useful to us all.
The other stuff
The new iPhone 4 is equipped with an A4 processor, the same as the iPad, but clocked down a bit. This makes it faster than the 3GS. For most apps, it doesn’t make any difference. But in some games, the performance gain is welcome. The “Epic Citadel” Unreal engine demo runs smoothly on the iPhone 4, when compared to the 3GS. And it looks beautiful because of the Retina Display. Check the screenshot below, and remember: that’s a game running on a phone. These things must make Sony and Nintendo cry, I guess…
Antennagate
There was a lot of talk on the internet about the iPhone 4’s antenna problems, which made Steve Jobs go on stage and give some explanation. The problems are there indeed, but they aren’t so bad. First, if you never heard about it, here’s the deal. The metal framing on the side of the phone is actually the structure of its antennas. There’s a small black, plastic band that isolates the cell phone antenna from the other on the lower left corner of the phone. Since our hands aren’t known as very good electrical isolators, when you grab the phone using your left hand, you short-circuit the antennas and the signal drops. Here’s some visual aids. Leaving the hot-spot alone, we get 4 bars:
Gripping it the “wrong” way, we get 2 bars:
Losing signal is bad, but this is only a real problem in areas where the reception is already poor. Going down from 5 to 2 bars won’t make you drop a call or lose internet connectivity, trust me. I haven’t had any problems and I use the phone a lot (I don’t have a landline). If the visual impact of losing bars affects your mood, you can use a case and the problem goes away. And there are some beautiful ones out there that impact very little the iPhone 4 visual, if you’re worried about looks.
Conclusions
So, the new iPhone 4 has a new cool design, great screen, great camera and is blazing fast. You may ask why the hell I said it was the worst iPhone ever released. I’ll tell you why: it doesn’t bring anything that will blow the user’s mind when using the phone.
When the first iPhone was released, it was a revolution about how touch screen devices should work. The second release brought the App Store to its awesomeness, creating an environment that isn’t found anywhere else when it comes to content diversity, quality and easy of delivery. The third iPhone solved the problem created by the great apps on the 3G model – sluggishness, and added a whole new user experience. Plus, it gave us the oleophobic coating on the screen, making it the first touch screen device that was easy to keep clean, and also brought the iPhone into business.
Now, we have the iPhone 4. Sure, the Retina Display is awesome, but it doesn’t make me feel great about the new toy. FaceTime didn’t convince me too. It lacks that awesomeness that made me feel happy when I first used the iPad, for instance. Of course, the hardware has enormous potential, so Apple may show us a trick or two with the following versions of iOS (like AirPrint, for instance). But for now, it’s just an evolution, not a revolution.
Advice: if you have the iPhone 3GS, wait until the next release. Unless you can get one almost for free, like I did. If you own anything else, then it’s time to upgrade. A word of advice, though: the new display will make your iPad look like an Atari 2600.
Rating 3.5/5.0