I’ve had my iPhone 4 since July and I gotta say, it’s pretty great! Now that I’ve had the phone for a couple months I thought it was time to post a brief review.
Before I ever seen the phone in person I already knew everything about it. I watched the entire hour long video of the Apple announcement and after I was finished I knew I needed to upgrade from my 3G! Sure, nothing in the release would I call truly revolutionary, but seeing the number of improvements to the phone from the 3G I just knew I had to have one. The big question was would I be eligible?
From the video I knew that if I were eligible for upgrade anytime within the year that I could upgrade immediately. I had bought my 3G in March of 2009 and I assumed that I wouldn’t be eligible for two years so I figured I wasn’t eligible and have to wait until March 2011. I put the phone out of my mind for a month or two, but it called to me. I had to go and check it out!
I went to the local AT&T store shortly after to go see the new phone first hand. The first thing I noticed was the new sleek design. The phone looked thinner and much more sleep. Kind of like the difference between an IBM Thinkpad and your average Dell or HP laptop. The second thing I noticed was the screen. I of course already knew the screen had a much higher resolution; a resolution so high you couldn’t see the pixels, but I didn’t think it would be that big of a deal. Wow what a difference! Everything on the screen is so sharp! The edges of the text, the icons, the buttons… they are all so smooth! It was really incredible! Of course after a couple months now I’m used to it, but it still is somewhat stunning. Especially when I take a look at my old 3G. The screen on that phone looks terrible to me now!
After I got past the beauty of the screen, the next thing I noticed was the responsiveness of the phone. Everything reacted faster to my input. The web pages loaded twice and fast and all the animations were super smooth! After loading my 3G with over 100 apps, it definitely felt a little slow and the 4.0 update didn’t help. The iPhone 4 made the 3G feel like Windows Vista on a Pentium III computer with 512 MB RAM! The speed improvements alone were enough to sell me! I talked to the AT&T representative at the store to see if there was any chance I was upgrade eligible. When the answer came back yes I put in my order!
That brings us to now. Past the initial features that really had me sold on the phone, I’ve been very impressed with all the other new feature as well. One that really shocked me was the camera on the phone. I had always thought of cameras on phones as more of a gimmick than useful because the always sucked. The camera on my 3G was the best phone camera I’ve had before, but even it still sucked. The camera on the iPhone 4 amazingly doesn’t suck! In fact it is actually really good! The first time I noticed just how good it was was when I used it on a business trip for work to take some photos indoors. Even with the flash off, the photos were amazingly clear! They weren’t duper grainy or blurry like I would have expected from a phone. They’re remarkably good! Take a look in the samples below. (Note: I can’t show you the indoor work photos. Intellectual Property an stuff. One from Walmart will have to do!)
The quality of the camera didn’t just stop at photos though. I really liked the fact that the phone included an 720p HD video camera and I was even more delighted to find out how good it is! The video is smooth and like the photos, very clear! For a moment I actually felt like I didn’t need my digital camera anymore! Of course then I came to my senses and remembered that my digital camera is 12 MP and has optical zoom and as a camera is definitely superior. I will still definitely be using my digicam to take my vacation photos, but for the everyday photos the iPhone 4 camera is really quite good. It’s certainly much more convenient to keep around since my phone is always on me anyway! A sample video from the phone can be seen below.
To download the raw video(105 MB), right-click and select Save As…
Overall I’m really happy with the iPhone 4 and for anyone considering upgrading from a previous model, I highly recommend it!