iPhone 4
I haven’t said much on here lately, but I figured that I would add to the stream of reviews, criticism and praise for the iPhone 4. I picked mine up last Thursday at one of the local Apple stores, and despite a few problems with iTunes (error 13019) and that my new 32GB iPhone 4 can’t hold as much content as my old 32GB iPhone 3GS, it’s been an overall pleasant experience. Apple really does have the migrating between iOS devices down at this point — I have content that I created on my 16GB 1st gen iPod touch back in 2007 on my iPhone 4 still. I have text messages that I sent when I first got an iPhone in 2008. Apple has made it so easy to upgrade the devices that at times it doesn’t feel like you got a new phone — everything is exactly where you left it.
My experience with picking up the phone was interesting. Like probably thousands of others, I naively thought that with Apple allowing pre-orders this year that picking it up at the store would be cake. In addition to that mistaken thought, I had actually never bought an iPhone on launch day — I bought my original iPhone almost 6 months after launch, skipped the 3G and picked up the 3GS a few days after launch. Which means that I had very little idea of just how many people would be showing up for the 4th iteration of the iPhone.
Making the experience even more interesting, I had a tight time schedule — I had to be back at my house by 10 AM for a prior appointment. After not moving for about 2 hours and still not being able to even see the Apple store, I was able to get to the front of the line and complete my iPhone purchase just over 5 minutes later.
Complicating my upgrade was the fact that I used one of other lines on our family talk plan to get the discounted (i.e, subsidized) price. That meant that I had to play games with my SIM cards at home. Trimming down a SIM card to micro SIM size sounds tricky when you first hear about it, but since AT&T will give you a new SIM card anytime you request it for free, it’s not really that risky. On top of it, SIM cards are mostly plastic. All of the critical parts are located underneath the pads.
After all of that, though, I finally had a working iPhone 4 in my hands. I knew that coming from a 3GS that the speed increases wouldn’t be as dramatic as my upgrade from an original iPhone to the 3GS last year. And sure enough, it wasn’t. But that doesn’t tell the full story — while the iPhone 4 doesn’t seem that much faster, it’s the little changes that make it feel like a more refined machine. Animations are smoother, transitioning between apps is faster, web browsing feels a lot more responsive. This is the iPhone tightened up all around the edges.
Of course, it would be irresponsible for me not to mention the display. The best way that I can describe the display is that it’s basically like looking at a high end glossy print magazine and then realizing that you can interact with it. I still find myself looking at it in disbelief after I’ve been using lower PPI displays like my desktop machine and laptop. But even more amazing to me isn’t the display itself but the way Apple made existing apps and websites work with it. On normal PCs and Macs, adding a higher PPI display means smaller text. The OS doesn’t have resolution independence support. This means that it would be silly for us to go out an buy a 300+ PPI display for our desktops because we would be squinting at the text and tiny photos on the screen.
But Apple built resolution independence into iOS (presumably building on the work they’ve put into MacOS X dating back to 10.4 days), which means that we can benefit from the higher PPI immediately in all of our apps. Obviously apps that have been updated for the new display look the best, but even apps dating all the way back to when 2.0 came out can take advantage of the new support. Text, controls, images (if they are higher res) all benefit from the new display on old and new apps.
Going forward, I would be shocked if this functionality doesn’t turn up on the iPad when it gets updated to iOS 4.x. And Apple is almost surely going to finish up the implementation under MacOS X and use that to allow the iMac, MacBook and MacBook Pro to have 300+ PPI displays as well at some point. This is an area where Apple excels — by controlling both the OS and the hardware, they can introduce a technology like this without having to try to convince their OEMs why this would be great.
As for the iPhone 4, I am so far very happy with this update. And I didn’t even talk about the other major additions and changes — camera improvements, FaceTime support and faster networking support. Despite some of the problems so far (3G touch of death and proximity sensor issues), this device will be the one people will talk about years down the road as being one of the best iPhones ever.
