A month with the iPhone 4
I’ve now been living with an iPhone 4 for a month. I’m sure few would be surprised for me to call it a great smartphone. As I said in my previous post, the screen is the outstanding feature. I am truly amazed at this “Retina display”. I actually carry 2 iPhones (work-issued and personal). My work phone is an iPhone 3GS. So, I’m reading each on a daily basis. When they were both 3GS I was a happy camper (except for having to carry 2 phones). Now, every time I check e-mail on the 3GS I’m reminded how poor the screen is in comparison to the 4. The difference is striking. I’m a gadget freak, so I would have picked up this new version anyway, but the screen itself is totally worth the upgrade. In fact, it almost makes me disappointed in the the iPad 3G, which is nearly as new. I know — totally different beast.
So, let’s go through the features. FaceTime is neat. It’s sort of gimmicky right now, but I think it will be less so when more widely deployed. My grandparents were amazed by it. My grandpa said he’d never thought he’d see such a thing in his lifetime. The physical design, with double glass panes sandwiching metal is beautiful. The “inherent” antenna flaw that is Antenna-gate is overblown. I followed it from the beginning and Anandtech’s write-up was spot-on (and mostly ignored). It completely explained my experience. Most places I go have good enough AT&T coverage to make it a non-issue, but since the 4.0.1 update that re-calibrates the signal reporting I regularly have fewer bars while at work. I went ahead and ordered a couple of the bumper cases, but I rarely use mine. During the week, my leather holster does enough and the bumper case makes it a tight fit. As an aside, the bumper cases fit very very well, but the charging port hole is small (limiting my use of third-party cables), the added height keeps the phone from fitting in my Tom Tom car kit, and the headphone jack hole precludes use of my favorite earbuds. I may have to get the drill out to remedy that one. Battery life is better as well, although we’re not talking about worlds difference. The thinness is notable. At first I didn’t think there was much to it, especially with the clever curves Apple had put into the 3GS to make it feel thinner than it really was, but over time I do find it thinner. Everyone that handles it says it’s heavier than the previous iteration, but I doubt their ability to feel the 2% difference. In fact, some have said it’s heavier than my 3GS with a case, and that’s absolutely not true. I’ll say that the 4 does not feel any faster than the 3GS. I’ve even seen a few jerks in the animations. I *think* I have felt the effects of the extra memory in having less Safari tabs/pages reload. The iPad should have received the 512MB of RAM too. The camera is outstanding. I’ve got a lot of HD video, like my CubCrafters Carbon Cub demo flight (nearly 1GB). The still shots are quite good, with much less noise than I’ve seen in comparable cameras, and the flash was late to the party (and a welcome addition). Start-up and shot to shot speed are welcome improvements as well. I know I would have missed a few shots at the old speed. Multi-tasking, which I also have on my 3GS, is pretty well done. It makes a nice trade-off between full multi-tasking in the desktop sense and usability (and battery life). Wifi seems better too, not dramatically, but enough to be apparent. GPS pickup seems faster. I haven’t seen anything use the gyroscopic sensors yet.
Overall, I’m glad I have one.
