Five Minutes With The Iphone 4, Will It Live Up To The Hype?

Posted by The Marksman at 30 June, at 06 : 29 AM Print

Many people do not own an iPhone, and no phone will ever reach even 50% market share penetration.  There are many reasons for this, but it’s quite simple the iPhone is not the answer for everyone despite what fans of the device may tell you.  In the end everyone has varying needs, and things that they like which do not match everyone else’s preferences.

The iPhone 4 came out last week to much fanfare and hype much like all of the other iPhone releases, with that being the case how could we not review it to see if it lived up to the hype.  A friend waited in line for several hours to get his new iPhone 4, actually the wait was much shorter than he expected which I am sure was a relief.

He provided us with his initial thoughts on the phone after his first twelve hours of owning the iPhone 4:  “Improved battery life, Front and rear cameras are nice but resolution is meh compared to what’s out there.  Faster processor (I had a 3g previously), feels bulkier but I had the 32gb (had 16gb before).  The screen is a dream, words look like book text and colors are vivid.”  Thanks Adrian.

A fairly good review from a person who has owned several previous versions of the iPhone, so another friend let me borrow his iPhone 4 for five minutes to test drive it.  Initial thoughts were that the back of the phone simply looked like a scratch magnet, and without some sort of cover would quickly start to look like a scratch off lottery ticket.  The next thing we noticed was the screen yes it was godly, the icons and words looked crisp and clear probably one of the best screens we have seen on a mobile device.

We took a few quick pictures with the camera, and since the hardware and megapixels were updated on this phone I expected more.  The camera takes okay pictures, I guess above average for the typical cell phone camera.  I watched a video recorded by the person we borrowed the phone from, and well it was supposedly a 720p recording.  It looked okay, but it was not overwhelmingly great, it did not make me say oh look at the quality.  Once again it was okay good enough I guess you could say, but still no replacement for a real camcorder by any means.

The new operating system is okay, for the most part there are not many cosmetic changes most of the changes are behind the scenes.  The multi-tasking is implemented in an interesting way, not like you would think in a traditional sense; you aren’t running multiple programs with both Windows open for you to view.  Instead it is more of a program switching mechanism and the program you are not using is still “live” in the background, so I guess that can be considered multitasking.

The bottom line is you can only actively work in one program at a time, and play your mp3’s over the top of the program most users won’t care what is going on in the background.  The biggest benefit is that if you switch to a new application, the old one will be where you left off when you return to it rather than exiting completely.  You see commercials for the Face time application that allows you to do video calls, well it is a bit misleading, in order to pull it off you need the Wi-fi to be activated and connected and the other person has to have an iPhone.  So that Apple commercial where the lady is showing her husband the ultrasound while he is in Iraq using the Face Time application is unrealistic, it is not as easy and accessible as they make it out to be.  This is a normal practice for most corporations Apple is no different.

Polling more users of the iPhone 4, we have heard that the battery life is still about the same as the 3GS.  You cannot really blame this on Apple as battery technology has not advanced in a number of years, so unless they find a way to give all the features and minimize power consumption this aspect won’t change much.  Some users complained of antenna and reception problems, but those issues are always subjective.

Overall the iPhone 4 is a good phone; similar to the 3GS in function, but if you are one of those people who use the video function you will be happy you upgraded.  It looks and feels better in your hands overall, although it does seem to be a bit thinner than its predecessor.  The front and rear cameras for video calling is a cool feature, but will be a little used one after the novelty wears off.  Supposedly the 3G speeds have doubled because of the hardware upgrade to the phone as well, that is something that will be difficult to measure and accurately test.

The phone is boasting the same processor as the iPad, I have access to an iPad and have spent extensive time with it.  One of my friends commented how much faster things open up on the iPhone 4 because of the processor, so I decided to conduct a little test.  I installed several apps on my iPod touch, and the same applications on the iPad and I timed how fast the applications took to do the same functions on both devices.  Well the iPad was faster (so you can assume the iPhone 4 is as well), but fast by about a whopping 1 – 2 seconds that’s it.  The worst part is it was only faster on some of the apps, some of the other ones the time was even or hardly different at all.  So all that “new technology” in the iPhone 4 barely outperformed their “old technology” interesting.

For all the hype the phone is getting I was thinking it would make me swallow my pride and want to get one, but after messing around with it and reading several reviews about it my iPod touch more than meets my needs.  As a matter of fact I upgraded to iPhone OS 4 on my iPod touch last night, and yep Scrabble still opens the same and plays the same not much difference at all.  If you are into mobile video, or have a need for multiple exchange accounts then you may be blown away by this phone.  Other than that it is just a hardware upgrade for the most part, the display on the phone may make it well worth purchasing it on its own, but that will be up to users to decide.  I truly do not see why this phone is worth standing in line for 6+ hours, if you already own an iPhone you are not getting all that much more (depending on how you use it).

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