iPhone 4 announced

The iPhone 4 has landed, and Steve Jobs claims that it will revolutionize the smartphone world in the same way the iPhone did when it was released three years ago. Offering over 100 new features, he will cover just 8 to whet our appetites. It is a beauty to behold, and we can’t deny that statement considering Apple’s recent track record, with the iPhone 4 sporting glass on the front and back, alongside steel around the sides which makes it hark back to the good old days of an ancient Leica camera. For those who are interested only in the price, you can choose from 16GB and 32GB capacities which will retail for $199 and $299, respectively – obviously with a 2-year contract, where it will come in white or black colors. Pre-orders for the iPhone 4 will begin a week from tomorrow, shipping to US, France, Germany, UK and Japan first followed by 18 other countries in July. Want to know more about this purported beauty? Read on in our extended post for the full coverage.

Check out the hands-on video

It is 24% thinner than the iPhone 3GS at 9.3mm, making it the thinnest smartphone on the planet for the moment. Features touted include a front facing camera as expected, powered by Apple’s own A4 processor while sporting quad-band HSDPA (7.2Mbps), a compass, an accelerometer, a micro SIM tray, a camera with LED flash behind, a top headset jack, a noise cancellation microphone, a 3-axis gyroscope (that’s new), GPS, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi-n connectivity to boot. micro SIM, eh? That would mean cutting up your existing SIM card to fit in nicely if you decide to jailbreak and unlock the iPhone 4 for use outside of the US, eh?

Apart from that, the iPhone 4 will also sport an all round antenna thanks to its band which is part of the primary structural elements of the phone – “brilliant engineering” as Steve put it. Hopefully this would mean being able to receive signals even in hard to reach places previously.

Retina Display has also been introduced, where the pixel density has been increased to four times the amount – hitting 326 pixels per inch, which is more than what the human retina can register (it maxes out at 300). Will older folks’ eyes be able to view text on the iPhone 4 better? We think not as the improvements will still be marginal, since they’d prefer larger blocks of text over high resolution. Steve then compared two images side-by-side, where one was viewed via an iPhone 3GS while the other boasted the iPhone 4’s display, and the latter won hands down. All this is fine and dandy, but how will the display fare under bright sunlight?

What we do know about the iPhone 4’s display – it uses IPS technology which is better than OLED (says Apple), offering 800:1 contrast ratio – quadruple the improvement compared to the iPhone 3GS, alongside a 960 x 640 resolution 3.5″ display. Looks like the current “wife” is set to be dropped for a sexier mistress, although will her “makeup” melt under the sun? For those who do not understand this metaphor, we’re still interested to see how it fares when outdoors during a warm, sunny summer day.

Battery Life: as with any other new device, we will need to ask ourselves – just what is the battery life like? The iPhone 4 will offer 7 hours of 3G talk, 6 hours of 3G browsing, 10 hours of Wi-Fi browsing, 10 hours of video and 40 hours of music – and when left idle, it can standby for 300 hours.

The built-in gyroscope looks set to usher in a new bunch of games on the App Store that will take advantage of such capability. All we need now is a wireless transmitter to the TV, and we can have some sort of Wii-like experience on the big screen using iPhone games.

Camera: The camera system has also been revamped, hitting 5-megapixels of goodness where it offers 5x digital zoom, tap to focus, and an LED flash, not to mention a backside illuminated sensor. Stills aren’t the only thing it is good for though, as it also does High Definition video recording – we’re talking about 720p at 30fps.

Oh yeah, the iPhone 4 does video calls as well just in case you were wondering. It has been dubbed FaceTime (why not iFace?), and will ONLY work over a Wi-Fi connection, and on iPhone 4 to iPhone 4 only. Good thing that there is no need to set up any configurations to get it working. The idea behind Wi-Fi only might be due to maintaining the video call quality, but Steve Jobs hinted that the future might hold video calls over the carrier’s network.

So, what do you think of the iPhone 4? Does it tickle all the right spots in your body, or did you expect more?

Edwin Kee
Categories: Apple, Cellphones, Top Stories
Tags: Apple Inc, facetime, ibooks, iPhone, iPhone 4, iphone4, san francisco, Steve Jobs, wwdc