Apple iPhone 4

Apple’s latest is always the greatest – you have to give them that. Sometimes it seems they put less effort into making it than in letting people know they did. But with the Apple iPhone 4, they were obviously hard at work. The 4th generation iPhone has an all new look, new feel and plenty of new skill. We already caught a glimpse of the iOS4. But there’s much more: a 1GHz chip, two cameras, HD video and of course the Retina display – the highest-res screen we’ve seen so far on a GSM phone.

Surely there are still enough blank spots on the feature list but that’s Apple and its iPhone. Compromises are being made in every phone out there anyway. But the simple fact is Number 4 is the best iPhone to-date. Let’s see how good that is.

Key features Quad-band GSM and quad-band 3G support with 7.2 Mbps HSDPA and 5.76 Mbps HSUPA 3.5" 16M-color LED-backlit TFT capacitive touchscreen of 640 x 960 px resolution Scratch-resistant glass front and rear, with fingerprint-resistant coating 1GHz Apple A4 SoC; 512MB of RAM 5 MP autofocus camera with LED flash and touch focus 720p video recording at 30fps Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n GPS with A-GPS connectivity; digital compass 16/32GB storage options Accelerometer, proximity sensor and three-axis gyro sensor Active noise cancellation with a dedicated secondary microphone Standard 3.5 mm audio jack, stereo Bluetooth v2.1 Excellent audio output quality Slim waistline at only 9.3mm Secondary front-facing camera Some degree of multitasking Rich AppStore

As you can see, most of the main disadvantages are simply passed from one generation to the next but - whatever iPhone you’re coming from - the Number 4 will tick most of your boxes. Upgraders will be used to the shortcomings, and unbiased observers will have less points to complain against.

It just seems some features will be forever missing. The iPhone’s memory isn’t expandable and you can’t use the thing as an external drive (this also means that files are only transferred via iTunes, again). Bluetooth has been upgraded to cover not only for music and calls but a compatible wireless keyboard too. File transfers however are a no-go.

As for the multitasking, this is the closest the iPhone has ever gotten but there is no true multitasking, and certainly not for all apps.

You've probably also heard of the user reports of reception issues and you're wondering how much of that is true. Well, we've checked that in detail, too.

All that (and a bit more) aside, the new goodies seem to merit at least some of the iPhone 4 hype. The Retina display is gorgeous. The 3.5” capacitive TFT touchscreen has four times the resolution of the older iPhones. At 640 x 960 pixels, it’s the best we’ve seen – statistically. But perhaps the most impressive too, for its actual performance.

There’s a generational leap in imaging too. The first two iPhones had a single 2MP fixed focus camera on board. Last year’s 3GS tried to make some sense with a 3-megapixel autofocus snapper. With the iPhone 4, Apple are finally beginning to look good. The primary 5-megapixel autofocus camera not only takes impressive images but shoots 720p videos too. Oh, and it has a LED flash.

Design and construction OK, a new look for the iPhone does sound risky. After all, they didn’t bother to change the design for three generations and still sold ship loads of the thing. The Number 4 is here to open a brand new page in the iPhone history but a complete departure from the original styling could’ve been way too adventurous.

To be honest, Apple simply nailed it. Some will tell you the Number 4 has just about nothing in common with its predecessors. They may be right. We wouldn’t call it a complete overhaul though. You know, one of the things that made iPhone what it is, was the belief that no design is the best design.

When all you have is touchscreen and an interface that sets the standards for user-friendliness, you don’t need to put the focus elsewhere by getting too fancy with the finish. The iPhone is one of the most minimalist phone designs out there and Number 4 knows better than to try anything stupid.

So, Apple had no design to start with, made very little changes to it and ended up with a brilliant new design. What do you call it? Here’s one – magic. The iPhone 4 is thinner, sharper, more advanced, refined. The one thing to note probably is that it somehow feels more delicate than the older versions. This has nothing to do with the build and finish – we wouldn’t call the iPhone 4 fragile (despite glass being inherently quite easy to shatter).

If you put a 3GS and an iPhone 4 side by side on the table, you may have a hard time noticing a profound difference. That’s when the screens are off though. Once that gorgeous Retina Display powers up, you will want to turn off the 3GS and put it hastily away to save it the embarrassment. Hard to believe it was considered one of the better phone screens out there.

At the rear, the new styling is way more prominent. Instead of plastic there’s glossy glass surface that is said to be scratch-resistant and quite more sturdy than plastic. But as it turned out, if you want to get it scratched or broken, you’ll succeed.

The oleophobic coating – both front and rear – is supposed to reduce fingerprints but there isn’t much you can do to keep the high-gloss surface clean. The special coating at least makes sure smudges are easily removed.

The Retina display The iPhone 4 Retina display is the highest resolution screen we’ve seen in a mobile phone. Retina is just a marketing name made up by Apple to differentiate it. But it doesn’t need the extra differentiation cause it’s among the best screens we’ve seen too.

The new display has the same size as those on the previous iPhones (3.5 inches) but the the resolution has been bumped up four times. From 320 x 480 pixels on the previous generations, the new iPhone 4 screen has the amazing 640 x 960 pixel resolution.

Thanks to the increased pixel density (reaching 326 pixels per inch) images now appear way sharper (or smoother, if you like) than before.

Based on an IPS panel, just like high-end desktop displays, the new iPhone’s LCD screen has LED backlighting and resulting contrast ratio of 800:1, which is 4 times the previous ones, as well.

iOS 4.0: at full throttle The iOS 4 is can be installed on any iPhone 3GS and – technically – 3G. We see no point porting it on a 3G though – the whole thing gets dismally slow and some of the new features are not supported anyway. What matters now is how the OS performs on the iPhone 4. There's a quick video you may have already watched in our blog.

Thanks to its gorgeous new screen, better still camera and vastly improved camcorder, gyro sensor and video-call camera, the iPhone 4 is the device on which users can genuinely appreciate the potential of iOS 4. iPhone 3GS can run it almost without any compromises but you’ll get the fastest and most seamless performance on the iPhone 4 and its 1GHz Apple A4 platform.

On an iPhone 3G you will get neither homescreen wallpapers nor multi-tasking. The rest of the stuff is there, but the performance drop is too much to bear.

But let’s be positive here – we have an iPhone 4 and a 3GS to enjoy, which is more than enough. You might have already been through our iOS 4 review – you'll find it's got a lot of common with the follwoing part of the iPhone 4 review. You will find identical wording, don’t you worry, we’ve made sure all the details are updated with iPhone 4 specifics.

Let’s start with the changelog:

General UI changes Homescreen wallpapers Applications can be organized in folders Multitasking – fast app switcher with app specific pause or backgrounding You can do Google/Wikipedia searches straight from Spotlight Minor icon facelifts Video call support (only in iPhone 4 and only over Wi-Fi) Settings menu gets you the last toggled setting screen Text input and management Keyboard layouts now cover QWERTY, QWERTZ, and AZERTY Spell checker Contacts Simplified contact adding and editing Messaging SMS character counter SMS search Email threading Unified Email inbox Email archiving is now available as an option when you setup Gmail Camera 5x digital zoom in still camera Touch-focus in video capture iPod player iPod music player can now create, edit and delete playlists Bluetooth Bluetooth keyboard pairing support iTunes store and AppStore Free iBooks e-book and PDF reader iMovie adds advanced video editing to the iPhone 4 (paid app) iAd service allows for free, ad-supported apps And the stuff iOS 4 failed to deliver No Flash support in the web browser No true multitasking for all applications No quick switches for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or 3G on the homescreen No social networking integration in the contact list No lockscreen or homescreen info widgets or plugins No new ringtones or SMS tones SMS,,email, and calendar tones are still not customizable No proper file browser or access to the file system No USB mass storage mode Screen has no vibrating haptic feedback No Bluetooth file transfers to other mobile phones Contacts lack a swipe-to-delete or mass delete feature No SMS/MMS delivery notifications No smart dialing (but Spotlight is a somewhat of a substitute) No DivX or XviD video support and no official third-party application to play that The whole iPhone is too iTunes dependent and you’re also limited to syncing particular types of content only with ONE computer..

All earlier features are there of course Just as a quick reminder, cut, copy, paste, undo and redo are available since the previous OS version.

The Apple iPhone 4 has the two features that debuted on the iPhone 3GS: Voice control and the magnetic compass.

The Voice Control app supports lots of commands: call a phone name/number, play music by song/album/artist name, shuffle music and Genius support for playing more similar songs. The iPhone 4 comes with an expnded list of supported voide commands.

The Voice Control app can be launched with a longer press of the Home key. The interface is quite simple.

The compass works in both Google maps and third party maps, but also has its own application, which displays your exact GPS coordinates and lets you choose between true North and magnetic North.

The dedicated application seems quite inaccurate at times and quite often reported interference. In Google Maps however, the map compass orientation is quite accurate.

New settings and security options Let’s see what’s new in Settings. The guys over at Apple aren’t the kind to let you meddle deep inside your phone but still there are a few new tweaks inside among the usual connectivity, display, sound, messaging and security options.

It seems the Cellular Data on/off switch is now available on every iPhone, regardless of your carrier or country. It’s nothing new, but it now works properly.

There is a new security option for locking your phone too – you can now choose between a simple (4-digit) and a long alphanumeric lock code. We guess this makes some of you feel much safer.

Bluetooth keyboard support The last piece of new stuff is in Keyboards. You can now choose your preferred keyboard layout: QWERTY or QWERTZ, for example. What’s more, you can set the layout of the Bluetooth keyboard you’re pairing.

Slightly improved contact management The iOS phonebook hasn’t changed one bit, you’d think upon a casual look. It’s the same as Apple had it back on the first iPhone. OK, almost. There is one thing they did fix after all – the Edit Contact interface.

All those annoying buttons for adding new phone/email/address/etc. are now replaced with text fields. You will never again be redirected to a new entry page, all contact’s details are filled directly on the main screen. Yes, it was about time.

Here’s what we experienced with the iPhone 4. Signal bars do drop – and rather fast too – when your palm and fingers fold around the bottom left side of the handset. Contact with skin most certainly interferes with the antenna and the phone is effectively losing signal. But – and it’s a big BUT - we had no dropped calls because of this, nor any voice quality issues in areas of full strength signal.

In areas of spotty coverage, where the iPhone 4 reported only a single bar or two, things got messy. Even touching the surface of the phone, caused the voice quality to worsen and touching the bottom left corner consistently dropped the call.

We can also confirm that any type of a bumper case will eliminate the issue – we tested with an improvised rubber strip along the edge and signal remained steady.

We went ahead and did the same test with an iPhone 3G and it definitely looks that the bottom-left-corner-issue aside, the iPhone 4 has noticeably better reception than the 3G. It held on to signal more steadily and caught on signal much quicker when exiting a no-signal area such as a tunnel.

So as a conclusion, if the coverage in your area is good enough (full bars), touching the two antenna parts on the side and bottom of the handset simultaneously, may compromise the quality of reception a bit, but it won’t cause any dropped calls.

On the other hand, dropped calls are quite easy to recreate persistently in areas of relatively low signal, however a bumper case, or anything that will protect the handset from contact with human skin, will sort those problems just as well.

A boost to messaging SMS and MMS

The messaging app has been greatly improved since the iPhone OS 3.0 – better thread management with (mass) delete and forward options, turning on/off message reminders and previews, plus the full MMS integration.

Gallery displays Albums, Events, Faces and Places The iPhone’s gallery is rather simple and easy to work with. It hosts all you pictures organized in different albums or tabs. When you open a specific album you can scroll through the images with swipe gestures.

There is one interesting thing though. The iOS 4’s gallery opens every image slightly zoomed in so fits the whole screen without leaving black bars. If you want to view the full picture, you’d need to pinch or double-tap to zoom out.

If you use iPhoto software on any of the Apple computers, you are now able to sync your Events, Places and Faces image holders. In iPhone’s gallery you will notice the respective four tabs available at the bottom – Albums, Events, Faces and Places.

As usual, Albums holds all of your synced, downloaded and captured images.

The Events and Faces folders on your iPhone 4 can only be filled with content from the iPhoto photo organizer on your Mac. You can’t populate them with photos from your iPhone’s camera.

All geotagged photos (saved from web or shot with the iPhone) appear in Places where they show up as pins on a map. Tapping a pin shows a small thumb with basic information about the image.

The better iPod The iPhone 3.0 OS enabled local search in the iPod player, as well media scrubber, shake-to-shuffle, third-party app access to your library and stereo Bluetooth headset/speaker support.

After you’ve created a playlist, you can add or remove tracks from it anytime you want directly on your iPhone. There is no need to sync with iTunes. Yes, we know it’s an option available on almost every other phone, but we are happy to see Apple finally respond to users. The iPhone maternal dependency on iTunes for uploading any content is perhaps the single greates limitation of Apple’s iOS and it’s the cause for a host of silly discomforts such as poor performance of iTunes under Windows (much improved in the recent year) and the limitation of syncing multimedia content to the iPhone from a single computer only. Syncing to iTunes on another computer will delete all the content of the same type uploaded to your iPhone before that.

Audio quality impresses It's hardly a secret that all the previous iPhones had perfectly clean audio output with relatively low volume being their only problem. However Apple have obviously done the right thing and fixed that here, making the iPhone 4 one of the best music player among the mobile phones that we have seen.

In fact the iPhone 4 is identical to the iPad tablet as far as audio output is concerned (volume levels included), which makes us suspect that Apple have somehow managed to squeeze similar hardware inside.

Very simple video player It’s the iPod app of course – and it makes no sense that in there you can access all your downloaded clips but not the videos you captured with the phone’s camcorder. The video playing interface is very simple, with nothing more than the usual player controls and a scrubber for precise skipping back and forth.

Supported video formats are not really varied and as you probably already know, DivX and XviD videos are out of the quiestion without a conversion. The nice thing about the iPhone 4 is that it can easily play 720p HD videos. Unfortunately, FullHD 1080p video is not supported - they can't even sync to the iPhone via iTunes.

Top-notch 5 megapixel camera The Apple iPhone 4 has a 5 megapixel camera capable of taking photos at up to 2592 x 1944 pixels. There is a LED flash too, which may even make some difference given the back-illuminated camera sensor.

The camera has both autofocus and touch AF, which are fast and quite accurate. The latter even tracks moving subjects.

The camera user interface is neat and simple – the only controls are a shutter/rec key, flash settings and a small thumbnail in the corner that shows the last photo taken. Oh, and there is a switch to toggle between the main and the front-facing camera.

Video recorder in HD The iPhone 4 records video in 720p resolution at 30 fps. That’s quite something as an upgrade to the 3GS. Clips are stored in .MOV format. The big letdown is the lack of a video resolution setting. We’re not even gonna mention SloMo or Time Lapse videos. We’re talking about giving the user the simple choice between HD and VGA.

Anyway, the actual video quality is quite good though. The framerate is very consistent. Perhaps the iPhone 4 could use some sort of digital image stabilization to keep handshake under control, but we suppose it’s too much to ask.

Connectivity One of the promising features of the iPhone 3.0 OS was enabling third-party developers to create apps that communicate with accessories or peripherals over a USB or Bluetooth connection. We didn’t see many results from that but might just get a boost from the new iPhone.

The iPhone 4 is Bluetooth v2.1 enabled with A2DP for streaming music to a compatible stereo Bluetooth headset or speakers. Bluetooth file transfers are not available. Peer-to-peer connections over Wi-Fi, and even Bluetooth, are a way around this but they only work between iPhones. Bluetooth connectivity also includes support for Bluetooth keyboards much like on the Apple iPad.

The latest iPhone 4 supports Wi-Fi b/g/n standards. Though we didn’t have a Wireless N router for testing, we can happily confirm that the Wi-Fi connection is much faster than that of the iPhone 3G over a G connection. What’s more, if you press your palm against the iPhone 4 Wi-Fi antenna – the metal strip on the upper left hand side of the phone – you even get a signal boost. That’s exactly the opposite to the issue we’re having with the cell signal.