At June 7th after a series of highly speculation and widely publicized leaks, Apple officially announced iPhone 4 the successor to the extremely popular iPhone 3GS. The iPhone 4 is this year’s effort, and overall, it’s a corker. Not everyone will be a fan of the iPhone’s new industrial look and feel. But I think iPhone 4 feels like a truly premium product, on a par with expensive designer handsets such as those made by Virtue. The iPhone 4 is certainly no exception -- in fact, it may be Apple's most successful launch yet.
The Apple iPhone 4 is everything that a new piece of technology should be. It's innovative, attractive, and ahead of its competition. It is the thinnest smartphone in the world, measuring 0.37 inch deep with the highest resolution display ever built into a phone handset. Its special “retina display” has four times the resolution of the iPhone 3GS, and Apple claims the pixels are so small that they can’t be detected by the human eye. That means that icons, text and pictures are pin-sharp on iPhone 4, with crisp, defined edges – making it significantly better the iPhone 3 GS.
It's just a tiny bit thinner from its left to its right edge, because the flat edges mean effectively less casing around the sides of the screen. The overall design screams elegance - from the rounded, individual volume up and down buttons that replace the plastic volume rocker on the iPhone 3GS to the ring/silent switch and the power/sleep button up top. The face and back are made of glass that is specially treated to withstand scratches and oily fingers, according to Apple. The side edging is aluminum, and doubles as the device's three cellular and wireless antennae.
The iPhone 4 uses Apple's A4 CPU, the same processor powering the Apple iPad, which gives you better performance and impressive battery life. As part of iOS 4, the iPhone 4 gains a bevy of capabilities. One of them--multitasking--feels long overdue, but as with Apple's long-awaited cut-and-paste feature, the company delivers on the promise of making multitasking work smoothly.
The iPhone 4 is the first iPhone to feature a flash on its camera (LED), and it also has a micro SIM slot (to save space for other essential inner workings of the handset). There’s also a front-facing video camera for video calling, so you can see - and be seen - by the person you are speaking to. Called FaceTime, it's a truly revolutionary advance in technology. The main camera is the subject of a “whole new camera system” – going from 3- to 5-megapixels, the camera also features a backside illuminated sensor which increases the quality of images shot in low-light. The camera also gains an LED flash, a backlit sensor, and an integrated 5X zoom. The camera now lets you shoot in high-def, at 720p, 30 frames per second; in addition, video gains the tap-to-focus feature already available on the camera.
If we are talking about the connectivity, iOS 4 adds persistent W-Fi, which means the iPhone 4 will stay connected to a hot spot even when it's in standby mode. This could have a negative effect on battery life so we'll be watching. With wake-on wireless, the handset promises to wake from standby when it comes in range of a cellular network. It's not something we were asking for, but we'll take it. Lastly, there's now support for using a Bluetooth keyboard. We haven't had the opportunity to test this feature yet.
So we can say that unlike the 3G and 3GS, the Apple iPhone 4 delivers the lip-smacking sense of anticipation of the original iPhone, and beats that handset for wow factor.
