Reviewing the Device
iPhone-friendly pages! Updated 7/1/10.
This is what we said it should be, back when it was 1.0:
It took three more generations for it to get here.
With the iPhone 4, the thing we wanted back in 2007 has finally arrived. With its front facing camera on the wrong side of the ear phone, but who cares...
Physical:
In the current hardware, the roundy edged form has been abandoned somewhat, and it's now a strip of stainless steel machined to shape. Round corners remain. It has gone on a diet.
Glass clads both front and back. Like all previous hardware, it has its own set of oddities based on the physics of its form. That glass is quite hard and scratch proof. We do NOT recommend putting it into a pocket with keys, diamonds or titanium screws. The band of steel is strong. The whole thing lays down dead level, so gone are the days of lay it down and have every touch rock the boat.
This design almost assures that when you get your iPhone 5, you will be able to sell your iPhone 4 in "Perfect" condition. It won't have scuff marks or wear dings, unless you drop it a lot. And as you will see, that's to be avoided at all costs.
#1 That metal belt is its antenna. Antennae tend to lose effectiveness when energy is pumping into flesh. But it's not possible to avoid holding the phone by its cell antenna's surface. Early user reports suggest that in borderline reception areas, touching or not touching the metal can make a bar's worth of reception difference. How real is this? We shall see. Our AT&T coverage (Burbank, CA) is too solid to tell.
Reception Update: The reception / antenna / AT&T issue is a continuing, living story. Apple has issued a notice that their method of computing the bar readout was flawed, and will be soon fixed. Consumer Reports (not the bribable Consumer Digest) says ALL cell phones show similar loss of signal when gripped, stainless steel or not. Huh.
We received a non-Apple "bumper"-like device from Singapore ($2.27 delivered), and it serves as an insulator for the antenna band. In a desktop test, just this moment, I carefully floated the bumpered iP4 over my desk surface on a plastic support then ran the SpeedTest.Net app testing download/upload kbps speeds over the 3G connection. This presumably parallels cell performance, but gives its findings numerically.
Runs of seven tests with the iPhone held/not held were repeated. lowest and greatest performance numbers were tossed out of each run. The remaining five were averaged. The average of the non-held tests showed 1113 download and 1173 upload. The average of the tests holding the iPhone with the bumper showed 1298 download and 974 upload. Care was taken to hold the iPhone at the same point in 3D space. After doing similar tests like this, it seems clear that holding the iPhone 4 when insulated, can appear to actually increase download reception some times. Curious, we took off the bumper and repeated the test "naked." Downloading: 965 / Uploading: 741. Still, that's 86%/63% of the no-touching numbers. 3db = 50%. So it's looking like this giant "issue" is not so giant.
#2 The glass is covered with an oliophobic coating. Oil shunning. Making it easy to clean with a wipe using almost any cloth. But set it on a porcelain, glass or plastic surface and you may become surprised to see your iPhone trying to make a getaway. Slooowly, it runs for the exit. Even very level surfaces may cause the iPhone 4 to slide slowly downhill. Vibration may assist its migration. Ghosts are not at work, here, and your iP4 is not haunted. Even on surfaces you wouldn't guess were off-level by micro chunks of one degree can demonstrate slow sliding. Be careful where you park it. It can have a mind of its own...
#3 For design reasons, the glass comes right to the edge of the face of the phone. A one-millimeter band of plastic is all the cushion between steel and glass, meaning that a substantial portion of any edge impact energy (on concrete, for instance) will make it to the glass. Strong it is, but strength gives it a brittleness, too. Glass shatters where plastic deforms locally. People on the web who have entirely too much money to burn plus empty, boring lives can be seen giving the iP4 variations on drop tests. Some are survived, some are not. Other people are simply dropping them accidentally and crashing the glass. Try not to drop it on concrete, tile, terazzo, rock or metal.
#4 Two microphones at opposite ends of the slab let the iP4 use noise-cancelling techniques by subtracting the sound from the top mic from the sound coming in the mouth mic. It works, and probably improves voice quality, but compared to the 3Gs, it's kinda meh.
#5 Buttons replace volume rocker controls. A Mute slider switch replaces the stud from the 3Gs. Build quality is an 11 on a scale of 10.
Innards
It is probably an example of the loudest, most desperate excuse-making effort in all of pseudo-journalistic blogdom when Gizmodo tried to justify their opening of the iPhone 4 prototype as an investigation to "see if" the device in their hands was a genuine Apple product. That's right. They did it all for me.
The external shell clearly identified it as an iPhone, and no KIRF (Keeping It Real Fake) knock-off could or would ever be as well designed or fabricated. Not in the eyes of a reasonable man, and especially not in the eyes of a reasonable tech writer. But when you do get inside, you are confronted with another 11 on a scale of ten. It's all tech, all the time.
The interior layout reveals more than the sum of its parts. Bigger battery. Smaller chips. More elements. Fewer elements. (!) Better packing. Tighter design. Greater efficiency. Lower power requirements. Superlatives everywhere. Jony Ive (Apple's uber-designer) and his team have achieved maximum technical achievement here. What almost nobody has appreciated yet is that the center of gravity of the iP4 is almost exactly center of volume, too. This gives it the feeling of its being packed with solid matter. More on this later.
Features
Now there are two video cameras. One for HD 720p, one for FaceTime videophone chatting at 640 x 480 SD. With the right WiFi linking, iP4 to iP4 video communication has been simplified and made easy to work. Right now it's only WiFi. Future iterations may change that. As a feature, we have called for it since before iPhone 1.0. I think it is BIG.
Apple hinted in their FaceTime demo video that now the deaf can use the iPhone. It goes way beyond that. You will see iPhone news reports, iPhone-produced documentaries, iPhone dramas, iPhone emergency responder videos, iPhone COPS TV shows, iPhone talk shows, iPhone university and more. The dark side includes iPhone live porn, iPhone access restrictions, iPhone laws, iPhone persecution--all sorts of things that haven't existed until people get busy with video chatting, American style.
Recently, Jimmy Kimmel did a show during a technical glitch, by using the iSight camera on his laptop as the camera to shoot the show. It was a one-shot TV show, made novel by its odd image and point of view. Now he'll be able to do a whole show with HD iPhones.
FaceTime lets you use either camera. We predict that systems and apps will be developed that let you feed numerous cameras to a WiFi connection, switch among them live, add titles and transitions, all to enable multi-camera HD video production using iPhones or similar devices.
The clock it ticking on this one. I'm guessing that significant progress will be made in less than six months. (6/23/10)
Video
In the past, video on the iPhone, in the words of an unsolicited testimonial, "has been almost unusable." Now it is almost unusable in high definition. What makes it so marginal is its complete unsteadiness, not due to anything in the camera so much as due to the box the camera lives in. The 4.3 ounce iPhone 4 is not going to be steady unless you mount it on a tripod. That's not going to be easy, since it has no tripod screw.
Tiffen to the rescue. Sort of. It's not available yet, but the Tiffen > Steadicam > Smoothee (Smoothee from now on) has THE solution. Made for the iPhone, the Smoothee has a mounting device that clips the iPhone 4 into the main Steadicam unit. And it has a tripod screw. Here's a sample:
Putting this combo onto a fluid-head tripod has the magical effect of turning the iP4 into a worthy 720p HD camera. Almost. The camera still has some issues with auto-focus (rather abrupt and pumpy) and exposure (always swinging rather radically, and can't be locked.)
Maybe some enterprising App maker will cobble together some extra controls. That would be a good thing. The camera has potential, but for now, it's unrealized.
Of course, the general wiggliness of the iPhone is greatly moderated by mounting the iP4 on the full Smoothee rig. A demo of that is in the works. The iP4's CG allows Steadicam to adapt it to current hardware designs. You definitely want one.
Focus can be selected on the screen with a tap. The focus point also adjusts exposure, as seen in our demo movie, above. This feature also entered our 3Gs camera to with iOS4.
Where the iP4 with HD video capability already shines is in iMovie for iPhone (iTunes; $4.99). It's a vastly streamlined version of iMovie '09, but it lets you make an assembly of shots that cut or dissolve picture and audio. A few simplified title, location (GPS) and thematic options are available. That little exposure/focus demo, above, was edited entirely with iPhone's iMovie. You may have noticed that there are two takes stitched together after the refocusing finishes. The fade to black at the ends was facilitated by recording a few seconds of movie with the lens covered completely.
Demo
Here's a more extensive sense of what the iPhone 4 is able to capture. This visit to Venice CA was edited in iMovie '09, but not the one inside the camera, and it is the first --EVER-- video shot with the iPhone 4 on a Steadicam Smoothee prototype:
Steadicam Smoothee Demo Part 1. Click the image to run on Vimeo.
Vimeo has the ability to run the image full screen at 1:1. Pause on the food menu to read everything.Backstory: I know the folks at Steadicam, and made the first YouTube demo of an informal, but edited iPhone 3Gs mini-documentary earlier in the year, demonstrating how much more useful iPhone video is when stability is not its major drawback.
As a user of the Steadicam Merlin for HDcams and HDSLR photography, the Smoothee is a very appealing device to me. So when the iP4 crossed my doorstep, within hours I was at the Steadicam offices and they quickly adapted it to the Smoothee prototype, so I hit the road hunting images.
Now you may view the Steadicam Smoothee Meets the iPhone 4 (Part 2) video as well.
Video Tricks
When the video camera first opens its preview, the aspect is 3:4. Only the center of the video frame is seen. You can tap on subjects to cause a re-focus and as you do, the exposure computation is refreshed for that small area of the picture. Be careful where you tap, and you can maintain reasonable focus and control the tonality of the image. That's all the exposure control you get, but it's worth noting that just about everything from 3 feet in front of the camera all the way to the edge of the Universe is in focus due to the camera's enormous depth of field.
Tip: Double tap the middle of the screen to drop the view to its actual 16:9 coverage. Or back to the center 3:4.
When you tap/focus/expose a subject, the screen keeps reading brightness ONLY in that area and will continue to use it like a spot meter to control exposure. If you don't swing the image around much during the shot, the camera won't sense the need to refocus. Gentle moves help a lot. Any major disruption causes the camera to search for focus afresh. As in the skateboarder scenes in the above video, that does not become disruptive very often, but if it happens, it will be when you least expect it.
Tip: Forget all the "screen becomes a flashlight" Apps. With the movie mode in LED > On previewing, that exposure assist lamp is much brighter than what the screen throws around. Whoda thunk? Movie preview in the dark = fairly bright led flashlight.
Okay, here's a free app that runs the camera light as a flashlight or strobe light.
Note: The camera corner of the iP4 gets warm from frequent movie previewing or recording. That's normal.
Tip: If you are in first-responder mode (for family movie opportunities or situational ops) you can set the camera to movie mode the way you like (light off or on) and turn off the iPhone with the top button--not by dismissing the camera app. Now when you start the iPhone up, the movie mode is waiting for you to start shooting right away, and if you left the light On, it will fire up too.
Note: Auto light mode does not work with movie mode.
Photo
Still camera attributes share the focus/exposure connection and now, due to features from iOS4, can digitally zoom. The 5Mp footprint of the image will allow about 2:1 zooming with low levels of image degradation. An LED "flash" can be set to Off/Auto/On, making fill flash in contrasty backlight possible, or have the flash operate when ambient light grinds to a crawl.
In general, the video and still images from the iP4 are welcome additions and will bring these capabilities to a lot of folks who otherwise wouldn't lug the more advanced gear around. You can print 8 x 10s or even 11 x 14s from the stills and be happy with the results, and for family work the HD video is a cut above the usual.
Auto-focus works all the way to about 3.5 inches. Angle of view is slightly wide. 5 MP files are 1936 x 2592 pixels.
Still Tricks
Tap the still preview image once. A digital zoom slider appears. If you zoom in and focus on something, zooming out maintains focus as long as the contents of the picture remain fairly stable. After 5 seconds of no use, the zoom slider fades away.
Touching an image subject on the display causes a re-focus and exposure re-appraisal for that subject. The camera attempts to make that subject look "normal" in tonality. This is all you get in the way of exposure control, so learn to use it productively. Practice.
Note: Tapping once brings up BOTH the re-focus area/re-exposure area AND the zoom slider at the same time.
Folders
Want to cluster some Apps together? iOS4 allows you to make instant folders by dragging wiggling icons over each other. You can name it what you want. Up to 12 apps per folder.
Got more than 12? Make a new folder.
The whole organizing, labeling and work process with iOS4 folders is the very definition of how to do this sort of idea right. Still, there are folks who wonder why only nine (of potentially 12) interior App icons show in the composite icon of the folder itself. If you can't figure it out, maybe reading the name of the folder will help. As it does for nearly every other folder in all of computerdom.
Retina Display
The display on the 3Gs has 480 x 320 pixels. Now the iP4 has 960 x 640. Exactly double the previous resolution in each direction. Apple touts this as being a 400% increase in resolution. Resolution in digital cameras is certainly a one-dimensional function of pixel count, but resolution is defined along a line, not an area. At the same time, one could argue that we see in area. After all, this is really a 400% increase in DETAIL.
In terms of area, it has 400% of the pixels. In terms of resolution, it's just double. Still it is about 329 pixels per inch of display, and at common viewing distance, that's more than your eyes can make out, unless you are 10 years old with 20/20 eyesight.
Subjectively, the difference from 3Gs to 4 is nowhere near the hype Apple is throwing at it. The impression you get from looking at the two next to each other is that the 4 looks about one tick better on a scale of ten from the 3Gs. It has more contrast, and colorimetry may be better in some ways, but you have to be looking through a magnifying glass to see the screen as double the resolution. If the 3Gs screen had been 680 pixels wide instead of 480, the 960 pixel Retina screen would have been a minor improvement. Even though the area improvement from 480 to 680 is just as much of a bump as 680 is to 960. (think increases by the square root of 2)
You will see "bogus" (I cleaned that up) shots on the Internet making the year-old 3Gs display look crummy by comparison, but the reality is that the old and new cameras deliver about the same impression to your brain. Above are the two in a single unretouched exposure. Darkness hides their identities. Which is which?*
Multitasking
Apple hates to have you bitch about your battery going down too fast. Maybe that's because they use these things, too. So when they implemented multi-tasking, they found ways to give you the feeling of desktop multitasking without the battery overhead. When most of us multitask, we keep a program fully OPEN, but not necessarily hung up in rendering, long math computing or thinking real hard. Desktop multitasking eats power and memory, so the clever solution shouldn't.
"What if," they asked, "we just freeze the program, park its current state and put it to sleep, so you can instantly get back where you were?" For most programs, that feels like multitasking. For the few programs that are streaming results live, like the music program Pandora, activity must actually process in parallel to anything else you're doing. Like playing a game with a Pandora soundtrack. Most games that have their own music shut competing programs, like Pandora, off.
If you're taking a test in a third program, the instant you return to it, you continue right where you left off.
Sure, there are exceptions, but for the most part it looks and feels as good an nearly every other multitasking situation you experience on desktop and laptop "true" multitaskers. The savings in battery is huge, but the experience is positive.
Life
Battery capacity in the iP4 is about 16% greater than in the 3Gs. But with all the extra speed, HD processing and App capability, that means the demands on the battery are greater. In use, it feels perhaps a notch more power,
but the mix of things you may commonly attempt is different with the iP4. You get more usefulness out of it with the gestalt of features. And that may lead you to running the power more hours in a day.
The iP4 is a device you want to recharge every night, unless you're just using it as a phone for the rare call.
Novelties
Did you get the iPhone 1.0? Do you still have its included charging base? You know, the one that didn't work with the 3G or 3Gs iPhones?
If so, you have the perfect charging base for the iP4. Now where did I put that thing?
Big Things
FaceTime. 720p30 video. 5 MP stills. Folders. iMovie on board. Longer life battery. Clean shape. Speed. Display detail.
In that order.
Little Things
The buttons for volume control replace the less-interesting rocker switch up/down control found on previous iPhones and, ahem, the iPad. Screen contrast delivers a tad deeper blacks without blocking up. Double tapping the video preview image shrinks it back to 16:9 aspect. Some degree of exposure control can be had by steering focus to the brighter or dimmer subject you wish to see normally exposed. Double clicking the home button shows the apps you've used from most recent to oldest. iP4 Multitasking is quite usable.
Missing Things
You can make mini-productions in iMovie, but you can't shoot them over to your contact in FaceTime. You can look at yourself in mirror mode, but you can't see yourself the way the camera sees you. Since things like Address Book, Phone Contacts, Photo Albums and eMail is shared over the network puffycloud, you can't customize everything that sticks to your iPhone without changing it back at the desktop, so many changes are impossible. You can't, for instance, toss out individual photos in an imported album, nor can you streamline the number of portable address book entries or groups to a more manageable clump so when you're piloting a 42-ton big rig through the Cumberand Gap and want to phone up a good buddy, you don't have to sort through the seventeen Joneses in your life to find Buck. (What you really want to do is press the round button until it goes into voice mode and say "Call Buck Jones.")
Bottom Line
While Jobs describes the iP4 as the "Leica" of smartphones, and its build quality reflects this attitude. However, the Leica had leather for gripping, and the iP4 is even more slippery than the 3Gs. Extra care, or the Apple Bumper is required for active use.
Things like the speakerphone performance, overall cell tower transactional sensitivity and size are improved. The weight is identical to the 3Gs (okay, two grams heavier). The battery lasts longer. You can edit HD video inside it (for five bucks!), and the folders feature (iOS4, really) is a major step forward.
Physically (the machine), it gets an 'A-' but not an 'A' for the combination of slipperiness and shatterability. Many people with too much salt in their fingerprints would argue that the antenna "issue" would deserve harsher appraisal. Our own iP4 shows only minor slowing under the most all-encompassing gripping. There may be more to this story as time moves on. Which it tends to do.
The oleophobic coating not only repells fingerprints, it repells finger GRIPS as well, making the iP4 hard to pinch-hold. Ahem.
Mentally (software) it gets an "A++" but not an "A+++", because we have to give the software designers something to aspire to.
Overall, it gets an 'A' and should be on everybody's A-list. Unless you're holding out for some other manufacturer to develop Apple-level thought processes...
Extra:
Want a Bumper for under $3, delivered to your door? It's possible. Here's one now.
(I've been a Meritline.com customer for a few years, now, and they're a source of unexpected deals, sometimes, in the odd-category tech accessories. I bought a cluster of iPhone 4 cases from them to see if they were worth it.
Since they cost so little, of the four cases I've bought, my total expenditure is under half of what an official Apple "Bumper" would have originally cost me.
One of them in particular, turned out to be my everyday case. Meritline's Item Number 262-616-001 is a black hard plastic shell that clips securely around the iP4 providing about a 1mm added protection to the left, right and back of the iPhone. The top and bottom and front are open, and the corners are not fully protected on the face of the iPhone, but since it is so thin, it fits in previous belt pouches that worked for the 3Gs, 3G and iPhone 1.0. A white version is available for $2.57. Shipping is free from Singapore, so it takes over a week. The ones most like Apple Bumpers are the soft, colorful silicone "skin" versions, and I don't recommend them. Other harder silicone [flexy, but stiff] cases offer all-around protection, but don't fit the belt pouch well.)
Okay, I lied. Or I've been updated. A different shell from Meritline is now the current fave. It's a well-crafted, matte black, perforated stiff shell that adds little extra dimension, but a great deal better hand-holdability. Item # 262-625-001, under $4, shipped.
Or: In Apple's July 16, 2010, iPhone 4 Press Conference, Steve Jobs has decided to give a free Bumper or other 3rd party case to EVERY IPHONE 4 customer who requests one. On line. Starting July 20-ish on the Apple website. Free.
* The iP4 is on the left. Slightly more contrast gives it away.
All concepts on this site subject to the crushing presence of realities beyond our control.
©2010, Peter iNova, all rights reserved.
The iPhone 4 Review