FREN

#FF00AA


26 jun. 2010

24 hours with an iPhone 4

I still don’t like the design, but it doesn’t look as bad in real life as in a photograph — the device is just too small and thin and tight for you to start noticing the seams; as soon as you hold it in your hand, the very first thing that’s striking is how masterful the engineering is. There isn’t a micron of wasted space, not the tiniest gap in the assembly; you can just feel that everything fits together better than if it had been sculpted in a single block of marble.

The second thing you notice, though, is that it’s uncomfortable to hold. I don’t know, some people don’t seem to mind, but I don’t really like having it my hand: it’s way too angular. Touching it and holding it just confirms the impression that Apple has simply decided to sell the innards of their new phone as a module, a black box, that you’re supposed to clip into interchangeable covers.

Which turns out to be true in more ways than one (I couldn’t personally reproduce the reception drop when touching the bottom of the frame, but I always intended to buy a Bumper for it anyway, because I don’t want to be touching the antenna at all times).

 

At first glance, the Retina screen is noticeable, but not that impressive — that is, until you start running apps that really take advantage of it. Most obvious is Safari: it’s properly amazing to load up my blog and be able to read the small text without having to zoom. But the biggest shock came once I re-synced my photo library, updated for the higher resolution: I didn’t expect it to make a huge difference, but it does. What you have with the iPhone 4 is, simply, a slab of interactive photo paper in your hand — the most stunning way to display your photographs (until the iPad gets a higher-resolution screen in a year or two). The first iPhone already felt a lot like science-fiction, but this goes that much further.

 

And there’s the camera, which was my second reason to upgrade (after the CPU power — I’m coming from an old 3G — and before the screen, which is gorgeous but not exactly indispensible): being able to make good photos at any time, and capture high-def video.

The iPhone absolutely delivers on both of those fronts, and I’m probably going to post stuff (as in, cat videos) to YouTube semi-regularly. (Although it’s really annoying that you have to download the video to your computer first if you want to upload to YouTube as proper 720p; posted straight from the iPhone, it’s over-compressed. Thus making iMovie for iPhone perfectly useless.)

 

Upgrading from an iPhone 3G is a no-brainer (as is switching from another phone; Android phones aren’t going to catch up in any way that matters before iPhone 5 comes out). If you have a 3GS, it’s probably a tough decision — the majority of apps will work just as well for you, but the screen is an actual usability boost, and the video camera brings definite value. The best reason to stick to a 3GS is certainly that the iPhone 4 will make you look at your computer’s big obnoxious pixels with disgust (and, what’s worse, your iPad’s as well).

It used to be that Apple’s product cycle relied on making your device feel obsolete after ten months, when the new version was introduced, but with the iPhone 4 they’ve definitely fucked the iPad’s early adopters.

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