With the release of the iPhone 4, Apple has ushered in "The Future." The iPhone 4 is the all-singing, all-dancing smart phone that multi-taskers, technophiles and gadget nerds have been waiting for. For the rest of us, though, it might be a little overwhelming.
Holding the iPhone 4, the first thing you notice is the beauty of the thing. It manages to be both imposing and miniscule at the same time. And it sort of looks like the monolith from Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968), which is pretty cool.
Unlike previous generations of iPhones, the iPhone 4 is flat on every side. And it's skinny. Really, really skinny. According to Apple, the thing is just 9.3 millimeters (.37 inches) thick, making it the thinnest smart phone in the world. But the screen, the new "Retina Display" that Apple has been gabbing about, is 3.5 inches diagonally, comprised of 326 pixels-per-inch. For those who don't know how to interpret that last figure: It's really, really sharp-looking.
Apple claims that it has developed pixels so small that the human eye can't differentiate them, so images look crisper and more fantastic than ever. And it's actually true. The iPhone 4's screen makes any other cell phone look absolutely ridiculous. Computers don't stand a chance against the screen. HDTVs might even look a little silly.
It's a pleasure to look at, watch videos on and play games on — generally, eyes will enjoy staring at the iPhone's screen, even though it's still relatively small. And not only is it incredibly clear, but in using "in-plane switching" technology, its range of viewing angles is wider than most normal LCD displays, so you can view the thing from almost anywhere.
But the iPhone isn't just the prettiest phone on the market — it's also one of the most full-featured. It boasts two cameras: a rear-facing five-megapixel camera with an LCD flash and a high-quality, forward-facing camera. Using a photographic technique that's new to the iPhone — HDR (high dynamic range) — the camera snaps three photos in quick succession and blends them to produce an even higher-quality image. It looks great even in poor lighting situations. A fun feature of the phone is that users can switch between the cameras to take great photos of things you're looking at or to take self-portraits.
With the promise of "The Future," Apple had to contend with video calling. It's unclear why calls would need to include video in the future, but some people like these things. So Apple invented FaceTime, which basically amounts to built-in video calling right out of the box for every iPhone 4 user. It's super easy to use: Just hit an on-screen button during a call with a fellow iPhone 4 user, and you'll find yourself staring at your similarly equipped co-converser. And now with FaceTime available on new iPod Touches and all Macs, everyone can basically video chat with everyone else all the time.
With over 300,000 applications available, automatically geo-tagged HD photos and videos, video and photo editing, music recording and editing, e-books, tons of games, full e-mail integration, video calling, multitasking and an amazing screen, it's really easy to forget that the iPhone 4 is meant to be, first and foremost, a phone. And that's really its only issue.
It's sort of cumbersome to make a call. Contact lists can be strangely awkward to scroll through. And, although it's featured at the bottom of every screen, the phone button's location isn't intuitive.
Call quality is good but not great, although the phone is the ideal shape and size for an adult's head. I didn't experience any of the phantom call-dropping that the iPhone 4 has been associated with, but I hold the phone with my right hand, so it's difficult to comment on the problem.
To the phone's credit, however, I didn't read any manuals before I picked it up. After playing around with it for a while, I did crack the books open, but the learning curve is almost nonexistent. The iPhone 4 is nearly foolproof. If you see it, you can touch it; if you can touch it, you can use it.
Multi-touch capabilities, like the two-finger pinch-to-zoom function, make the interface incredibly easy to use, and the thought process that must have gone into crafting every aspect of this iPhone generation is staggering. Nearly everything is totally intuitive, and the stuff that isn't probably isn't worth doing on the iPhone. It even does double-duty as a full-featured iPod.
Is it really a phone, then? It's the phone as MP3 player, camera, camcorder, GPS device, videogame console, Internet tablet, e-book reader, editing station, flashlight, airhorn (really!), barcode scanner, radar detector and Rolodex — ad infinitum.
The iPhone 4 almost does too much. It's a wonderful piece of technology. It's basically a tiny little go-anywhere, do-(almost)-anything computer. Compared to the phones that most people still carry around every day, or even to most smart phones — well, there is no fair comparison. While so many phones market themselves as iPhone killers, the iPhone really has nothing to worry about.
The phone certainly isn't for everyone. Some people will be overwhelmed by the iPhone. For users who just need to make and receive calls and text messages, the iPhone is completely superfluous. But for those who need, or at least want, to be super connected all the time, there is simply no beating the iPhone 4.
