iPhone 4 review

So you’ve caved in to the marketing and you are thinking of stumping up your hard earned cash for a brand new iPhone.  What can you expect?  Here at Select Mobile we’ll try to guide you through what makes the iPhone 4 the most desirable handset on the planet.  We’ll also try to point out the bad stuff that Steve Jobs doesn’t want you to know about!

The good stuff –

For starters the iPhone 4 looks the part.  We won’t go over board and say its ‘beautiful’ as it is a phone and not a great work of art or Megan Fox.  But it does feel like a quality piece of consumer engineering, which you would expect coming from the talented Apple design team headed by fellow son of blighty Jonathan Ive.  The iPhone 4 feels weighty in comparison to the 3GS but it certainly is not fat.  In fact it surely must be one of the slimmest smartphones around at the moment although we are sure that someone will trump Apple on that front fairly soon.

After the look of the phone the first thing that will get your attention is the screen.  The much hyped ‘retina display’ looks fantastic.  Icons look crisp and sharp on the menu screens and watching videos on YouTube is a pleasure, if watching some of the dross present on the site is your thing.  Apps (we’ll come to those later) look sharp on the screen and text is clear and easy to read.  All of this would be for nought if the touchscreen functionality was not up to much but thankfully the touchscreen on the iPhone 4 is just as god as on the previous models.

Next we come to the camera.  Five megapixels doesn’t seem that much but the clarity of the shots is bewildering.  When compared to our venerable old Sony Ericsson C905 the iPhone seemed to be able to hold its own.  The camera on the iPhone 4 is certainly streets ahead of its predecessors which, it has to be said, were about as good as the promise of a nuclear apocalypse.  Shots taken with the main rear facing camera are clear and even the front facing VGA camera manages to take decent shots, should you be the type who takes endless pouting pictures of their own face.  This brings us on to another hyped feature called FaceTime.  It is mildly diverting for a time but seeing someone’s face slide into view is a fairly creepy experience and broadcasting the front of your own skull is certainly not for the shy.  But it is interesting to see video calling be repackaged in typical Apple style.

As you would expect you have full access to the wonderful world of apps.  It has to be said that most apps are utterly useless and their only purpose seems to be to help smug iPhone types bore their non iPhone owning friends into a coma.  But it has to be said that there are rare gems among the dross and some of these have been optimised for OS 4.  Games look great on the colourful screen and multitasking works well, even if it is not true multitasking.

The bad stuff –

Some would have you believe that the iPhone 4 is all sweetness and light.  But there are some serious flaws with the handset.  The most famous of these is the dreaded signal issue.  It is simply not acceptable that such and expensive and powerful smartphone cannot hold a phone signal.  All the apps in the world do not make up for the fact that some users can barely make a phone call or send a text unless they bend their hands in the correct Apple manner.

Smudges, as with every touchscreen smartphone, are also a problem.  When you get an iPhone 4 it is not long before your beloved new toy starts to look like a CSI fingerprint lab.  It is a relatively minor issue but you are even supplied with a cloth to clean the phone in the box, and considering how expensive it is you’d expect one!  The screen and casing are easy to wipe but it would be nice to have a cloth to carry around so you know the phone won’t scratch.

iTunes is also still a problem.  Apple get so much right but iTunes is about as easy to tame as a dog with a severe case of rabies.  The software is slow and clunky and you totally locked in to it.  The store is slick looking and it is very easy to find things should not be baffled by the selection on offer.  But moving files around is more of a pain than it should be.

Conclusion –

So that’s it.  You may have noticed that our ‘bad’ section is a little thin and in all honesty we tried as hard as we could to find some cataclysmic faults with the iPhone 4.  But searching for any kind of massive fault was like the fruitless search for hope in a world gone insane.  The bottom line is that the iPhone 4 is a fantastic handset.  Sure it is expensive, the signal problem is annoying and using iTunes is a times like having root canal surgery but overall the phones many brilliant touches and excellent engineering leave even the most jaded Apple hater with a positive impression.  While it is hyperbolic marketing speak to claim that the iPhone 4 is revolutionary, it is certainly a great product.