iPhone 4 Review
The iPhone has been and still is the poster-child for the smartphone revolution. Its iconic design, multi-touch screen and simple user interface (UI) have become the template for an entire booming industry. Anyone who has a modern smartphone has, in part, the iPhone to thank for it.
The latest iteration is the iPhone 4. It sports a 5MP camera with LED flash, 720p HD video recording, video calls and a super high-res retinal display. You can get it on just about every carrier network and it’s surprisingly cheap on a 24 month plan. As far as memory goes customers have 2 choices: 16GB or 32GB. No, the memory is not expandable and this is a flaw, but the average user will be hard pressed to fill 16 GB of space on their phone, let alone 32.
The iPhone 4 is, despite a lot of media criticism, a great smartphone. It’s fast, sleek and offers hundreds of thousands of apps from its App Store. The loudest complaint you’ll hear about the iPhone will be to do with its lack of Flash compatibility. This is a minor concern in the grand scheme of things.
Sure, the iPhone doesn’t support Flash right now. In truth it may never. But currently, even the best phones with Flash support (read: Android v2.2 smartphones) do an extremely haphazard job of Flash support that ends up slowing down browser speed significantly. Many Android users end up turning off Flash support within hours of receiving it.
Apple has also received complaints about the phone’s casing. It seems Apple decided that it was a great idea to make their newest brainchild out of glass. While most people would agree that the iPhone 4 is a good-looking phone, in retrospect glass was probably a bad idea. The phone does ship with a free rubber cover that runs around the edge, but it’s not because of the glass issue.
Some customers have encountered problems with reception. This is due to the iPhone 4’s external antenna. Can’t see it? It’s that silver lining around the edge of the phone. The issue here is that apparently then the phone is held in a certain way callers will find their reception disappearing. The free rubber cover is meant to fix all of this, which it does. However, this particular problem doesn’t surface for most iPhone 4 customers. Perhaps some people are just more disruptive to phone signals than others.
Despite these issues the iPhone 4 is a great, solid smartphone. Unlike many other smartphones it still feels like a phone when you’re scrolling through menus, rather than a jittery palm-sized computer. Its UI is easy to use and extremely responsive, its camera takes great photos and it has just about every other smartphone feature you’d really want.
If you’re new to the smartphone market and are looking for an easy-in, or even if you’re a smartphone veteran who’s thinking of making the shift, it’s definitely worth having a play around with one of these before you buy online. There’s actually a reason that everyone seems to have an iPhone 4 and it’s not because they all love Steve Jobs.