iPhone 4: Hands On Review
Although the iPhone 4 sold out pretty much everywhere yesterday, I managed to get my hands on this new piece of hardware for an honest and opinion based review for your reading pleasure.
HARDWARE
Being the owner of the HTC HD2 with its huge 4.3″ screen and the iPod Touch 2G with its 3.5″ screen, every time I handled my iPod Touch after using my HD2, it felt like I had a lot of free space in my hand which I didn’t like the feel off. I was expecting the same feeling with the iPhone 4 which has the same screen size. I was however pleasantly disappointed. It felt very nice to the touch and very durable (although proven otherwise by iFixYourI).
SOFTWARE
What can I say about the iOS 4 that hasn’t already been said? It looks good, is very smooth, responsive and packed full of features. It has to be said, regardless of how much you may dislike Apple, they do know how to make things we’re already used to look, a lot better.
FEATURES
- Front facing VGA camera with ‘FaceTime’ video calling, which only works from one iPhone 4 to another over Wi-Fi only. This may be temporary but there is no concrete evidence to prove otherwise.
- 5 mega-pixel rear camera capable of recording 720p HD videos which take up a ton of space. A 42 second video I recorded took up 50MB of space. But I suppose that is to be expected from a HD recording.
- 1GHz A4 processor (the same processor found in the iPad).
- Apple’s version of multitasking.
- The most obvious is its price: 16GB is £499 and 32G is £599 on pay-as-you-go and around £180 on the cheapest contract deals.
- Multitasking isn’t actually multitasking. It’s Apple’s strip down version which is very limited. This is understandable as enabling “full” multitasking would drain battery life if used abusively.
- The 720p recording takes up too much memory especially if an iPhone 4 owner has a lot of music on the device. (17gigs worth in my case)
- The famed loss of reception, which can lead to dropped calls when holding the bottom left part of the phone (see proof in the post image)
- Although the iPhone has two speakers at the bottom of the device, only the right one is used for music playback. Very weird.
FINAL THOUGHTS
There is a lot more to say about the iPhone 4 but I’ve tried my best to cover the most important parts. The iPhone 4 is a very good product but I do have a few issues with it.
In my honest opinion I think there are a lot more reasonable devices for my use (and I use my phone intensively) in other HTC Devices. Either way, there are a few more snapshots of this new device for you to ogle at below.
Video Source: Engadet
