iPhone 4 Review

With all the hype of iPhone 4, Steve Jobs reality distortion field is in full effect.  I know there are literally thousands of reviews out there of the iPhone 4.  I almost didn’t do one.  However, I and TheGeekPub have been accused of being so pro-Apple that I felt I had to do a review of the iPhone 4 to prove that I can be critical of them.  WHAT?  You heard me right.  There’s some things that disappoint in the iPhone 4.

On Thursday, June 24th I woke up at 5:45AM.  If you know me, then you know that is insane for me.  I’m lucky to wake up before 10:30 AM on weekends, and no earlier that 7:45AM during the week – and I’m not one bit happy about it!  I told myself I would only be willing to wait for one hour in line.  Any longer than that, and I would just go home.  I get to the Apple Store in Southlake, TX and start counting how far back I am.  The Apple store people come tell us they have 30 people ringing sales at about 7 minutes each.  Awesome, that should be about 1 hour!  4 and a half hours later… I get two new iPhone 4s (32 GB models).  Ugh.

So let’s begin…

The Design of the iPhone 4

It’s beautiful!  The glass front and back, solid black, with an aluminum band around the outside.  The buttons are metal and all recesses (speaker, microphones) are protected with a silver wire mesh.  This thing is gorgeous.  In fact, who couldn’t look at this thing and fall in love with it?  But Apple failed at elegant design with this thing, because elegant design is supposed to look nice and function well.  More on that later.

FaceTime

Apple is touting FaceTime as the biggest new feature of iPhone 4.  I have to disagree.  For me, the screen resolution and processor speed enhancements are by far the best new features – but FaceTime is a big deal – and it will change the way we communicate, but not today.  FaceTime is Apple’s video conferencing solution for mobile phones.  It’s incredible, but has two major flaws:

1) Right now, only iPhone 4s can video call with each other. FaceTime is based on open standards, and Apple said they are going to open the entire protocol to other vendors.  We’ll see over time if the adoption of other vendors takes off.

2) Wi-Fi only.  Leave it to AT&T to take something so life changing, and F#$K it up!  Can you imagine sitting at a store, calling your spouse and showing them a product or article of clothing before you buy it?  Yes, that’s awesome.  But you can’t do it today unless the store has free Wi-Fi and doesn’t block the FaceTime ports!  AT&T manages to fail at every opportunity you give those geniuses.

However, with all that said, I’ve used FaceTime a lot.  I love it!  It’s smooth, fluid, and high quality.  The audio and video are synced well, and it all around just works.  Great job on this Apple.

Facetime Rating:

Retina Display

With iPhone 4, Apple also introduced the Retina display.  The Retina display touts four times the number of pixels on previous generation iPhones, resulting in a 326 pixels per inch screen.

What can I say?  The Retina display is a home run!  The quality of the text, accuracy of the colors, and the wide viewing angle makes this screen brilliant!  Before I actually laid my eyes on this screen I thought to myself “the screen resolution won’t make much difference.”  Was I ever wrong…

When reading iBooks, or Kindle, or when browsing the web the increased resolution and sharpness of the fonts really takes away the eye strain and makes reading on this device a pleasure.  The small screen size becomes less of an irritant when the text is easy to read at any font size.

Big win here Apple!

Retina Display Rating:

Antenna in the Frame

When I first heard about the antenna in the frame I really thought this was genius.  On the iPhone 4, the frame of the phone doubles as the antenna and a structural backbone of the phone itself.  This allowed Apple to make the iPhone thinner, while packing it with yet more features .

It turns out, there is a bug in this design.  What’s not known is whether Apple knew about this or not before they shipped it.  What’s also not known is if they didn’t know about it, how is that possible?

The Antenna in the frame is in three distinct segments.  The left frame section is for Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and GPS.  The right frame section is for UMTS and GSM.  The bottom most frame section is not antenna, but completes the frame.  The problem is that when you ground the left antenna with the bottom base portion of the frame with your hand, your signal strength goes from 5 bars to one or none in a matter of a second.  Or does it?

When I first heard about this problem I couldn’t duplicate it.  I tried and tried to no avail.  I simply could not recreate it on either of my phones.  Finally I stumbled onto the problem.  My hands needed to be slightly moist.  I had just finished swimming in the pool.  I could easily recreate the problem on both phones.  Slide the phone into any case, and the problem disappears.

Steve Jobs’ Answer: “This is a non-issue.  Don’t hold it like that.”  My response: “Are you kidding me?”

Antenna in the Frame Rating:

Conclusion

There’s a lot more to iPhone 4 than these three things.  In fact, there’s over a hundred new features in iPhone 4.

• Front Camera
• Rear 720p Video Camera with LED Flash
• Multi-tasking
• Folders
• Apple A4 Processor
• Noise Cancellation Microphone
• and a lot more!

So how do I rate the new iPhone 4?  I certainly think based on my personal usage and experience, that iPhone 4 is the best smartphone on the market – hands down.  It’s better than Droid.  It’s better than Microsoft.  But this phone is the 4th generation iPhone.  It shouldn’t have issues with the antenna.  Dropped calls and AT&T’s terrible network should have put this at the top of Apples quality control list.

So where does that leave us.  If Apple hadn’t messed up this antenna design I would have given the phone a solid 4.5 stars.  If Apple had dropped AT&T and moved to Verizon, even with the bad antenna design I would have found a way to make a six star rating.  But as it stands, I can only give the iPhone 4 a 4 star rating.  That’s a shame.  Because this is the best phone I’ve ever had.  Hands down.

Overall Rating: