The iPhone 4 is in many ways the best iPhone so far. But it's also the most expensive. There's also a problem with the new design. The stainless steel body of the handset acts as an antenna and Apple claim this will help to improve reception of mobile signals. But only if you hold it the right way, because if you place your hand over the bottom left corner of the phone, you'll see your signal drop to zero. Is that a problem? "Just avoid holding it in that way," Steve Jobs remarked. Apple's official statement is more sober, but no less reassuring: "Avoid gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers both sides of the black strip in the metal band." Actually that's quite hard to do, especially for a large device like the iPhone. Alternatively, you can buy a case to shield the antenna. You know, if this was any other phone, we'd simply have marked our rating down and advised you not to buy it. But this is the iPhone after all, and you can maybe learn to hold your phone in the way approved by Steve Jobs or buy a case and then the problems will go away. So, we'll drop one star from our rating and carry on with the review.
So, if you can handle the high cost and the signal problem you'll want to know what you get for your money. Well, what you get is a very high quality device that's approximately the same height and width as the previous iPhone, but considerably slimmer, at just 9.3mm thick. It still weighs in at a chunky 137g though. It smells of quality, of course, from the box to the accessories, to the device itself, but apart from the slimness it doesn't look very different to previous generations of iPhones.
The display is the same size as previous iPhones at 3.5 inches, but the new Retina display packs in double the number of pixels in each direction, giving a total of 960 x 640 pixels in total and fantastic image quality as a result. It can't beat the Samsung Galaxy S if you want the best display on the market, but it's probably second best and surely that's good enough.
Apart from the screen, the biggest change comes in the form of upgraded cameras. The still camera has been given a larger sensor so it takes better images at night and in low light, the resolution has been increased to 5 megapixels and an LED flash added. The video camera has been seriously uprated to record videos at HD resolution (720p). That places the iPhone 4 in the top league for video recording with only a handful of other phones able to match - the Samsung Galaxy S, the Samsung Wave and the Sony Ericsson Vivaz among them. But perhaps the biggest change is the addition of a secondary video camera that enables video calling. "People have been dreaming about video calling for decades. iPhone 4 makes it a reality," exclaim Apple, ignoring the fact that other manufacturers have been offering this feature since 2003. Note also that you can only make video calls to other iPhone 4 users and only on Wi-Fi. That's rather limiting.
The other main improvement is the battery life of the phone. Although the quoted standby time is the same, Apple say that talktime and web browsing time have been improved by around 40%.
Multi-tasking has also been improved so you can run multiple apps without slowing down the performance of the foreground app or draining the battery unnecessarily.
So, Apple have created one of the very best phones on the market, but potentially a flawed beauty. Does it work as a phone? Not if you have no signal! But there are ways to work around that if you really want to. Apple have certainly gone a long way to plug the gaps in the iPhone's capabilities, but it's phenomenally expensive. Is it worth the money? Is it worth the risk? Only you can decide.
Features of the Apple iPhone 4 include:
- OS X Operating System
- Assisted GPS with digital compass
- 5 megapixel camera with touch autofocus, LED flash and geo-tagging
- Video camera: HD (720p) up to 30 frames per second with audio, VGA secondary camera for video calling
- Display: 960 x 640 pixels (3.5 inch) touchscreen
- Music player (AAC, Protected AAC, MP3, MP3 VBR, Audible (formats 1, 2, and 3), Apple Lossless, AIFF, and WAV formats)
- Video player supports 720p HD playback at 30 frames/second
- Voice control, voice memos
- Messaging: SMS, MMS, email
- Memory: 16GB or 32GB flash drive
- Connectivity: Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, USB 2.0, Wi-Fi (802.11b/g), 3.5mm headphone jack
- WAP, EDGE, HSDPA
- Size: 115 x 59 x 9.3 mm
- Weight: 137g
- Quad-band (850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz) plus UMTS/HSDPA (850, 900, 1900, 2100 MHz)
- Talktime: 7 - 14 hours
- Battery standby: 300 hours
- Audio playback: Up to 30 hours
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