Introduction
You can't make a phone that everyone loves and Apple is not even trying. Much like any other iPhone so far, the iPhone 4 is a phone that everybody loves AND hates.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
Main disadvantages
- Hardware design is prone to reception issues
- MicroSIM card support only
- No Flash support in the web browser
- No true multitasking for all applications
- FaceTime video calls work only over Wi-Fi
- No file transfer over Bluetooth or USB Mass Storage mode
- No hardware shutter key for the camera
- No FM radio
- No stereo speakers
- No microSD card slot
- No smart dialing
- Too dependent on iTunes for loading multimedia content
- Poor loudspeaker performance
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.
The lack of Flash support in the Safari browser is no surprise given the Apple-Adobe feud. Luckily there’s the good old YouTube app to partly make up for that but Flash games are still out of the question.
There is now a secondary video-call cam but the “reinvented” FaceTime video calls feature only works over Wi-Fi (for now) and between two iPhone 4’s.
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.
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 following 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..
General user interface and key features
The traditional flat interface should be all too well familiar by now. Tap an icon to open an application; press the hardware Home key to close the application and return to the Home screen. That's all there is to it. Only the Settings section goes several levels deep. Basically that’s all you need to control your iPhone.
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.
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.
The iOS 4 treats the iPod player to a single, but important upgrade. You are now able to create, edit or delete playlists straight on your mobile (as opposed to only getting them from iTunes).
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.
But let's cut the small talk and give you the results so you can see for yourselves what a great music player the iPhone 4 is. It might be about time that you retired that old iPod of yours.
| Test | Frequency response | Noise level | Dynamic range | THD | IMD + Noise | Stereo crosstalk |
| +0.01, -0.07 | -90.1 | 90.0 | 0.0068 | 0.012 | -89.6 | |
| +0.01, -0.07 | -90.1 | 90.0 | 0.0068 | 0.012 | -89.6 | |
| Samsung I9000 Galaxy S | +0.03 -0.04 | -90.7 | 90.6 | 0.014 | 0.019 | -90.6 |
| Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 | +0.07 -0.37 | -85.4 | 85.3 | 0.018 | 0.068 | -83.6 |
| Google Nexus One | +0.19, -0.55 | -86.1 | 85.8 | 0.023 | 0.088 | -85.2 |
| HTC HD2 | +0.39, -2.99 | -89.0 | 89.1 | 0.057 | 0.960 | -87.5 |
| +0.01, -0.05 | -92.1 | 92.1 | 0.0035 | 0.011 | -95.0 | |
| +0.34, -1.16 | -90.8 | 91.3 | 0.0050 | 0.016 | -91.4 | |
| +0.52, -1.05 | -89.9 | 90.1 | 0.0033 | 0.016 | -93.1 | |
| +0.04, -0.05 | -91.4 | 91.5 | 0.0027 | 0.012 | -90.0 |
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The Apple iPhone 4 frequency response is simply perfectiPhone 4 advantages over iPhone 3GS
No, there isn’t a perfect smartphone out there. There’s always something for anyone to love or hate. What makes the iPhone so special is that it takes love and hate with the loftiness of a royalty. |
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