Yesterday in Part 2 we looked at iMovie for iPhone, Location Awareness, The iPhone 4’s Gyro, and The Glass Case of the iPhone 4.

Today we’ll look a little bit more at the iPhone 4’s overall look and feel, it’s Speed (and battery life) when compared to earlier iPhones, and a few bits and pieces that don’t really fit into any particular category.

The Overall Look & Feel:

Everything about this iPhone screams quality. I’ve already remarked on the heft of the device, and how its glass and steel construction feels cool to touch. But there is another subtle feature to its overall form factor. It really feels incredibly thin. The original iPhone comes closest to the iPhone 4 in this department. The 3G and 3GS feel like they have a beer gut by comparison to both.

But the iPhone 4 feels almost credit card like in its thinness by comparison to all earlier models of iPhone. It is too heavy to comfortably put in your shirt top pocket, but its just about right to put in a jacket pocket.

And, as has been oft repeated by many – including myself, the Stainless Steel frame, and it being slightly proud of the iPhone4’s glass front and back make it feel exactly right in your hands when you hold it to use it as a camera, or to play games which involve motion controls. In some respects this extra grip has gone some way towards making me less fearful of dropping it and breaking the glass, than I am with the current iPod Touch and the 3GS.

The buttons and switches are all solid, and give great feedback when pushed or switched. And the screen is like hard smooth marble to touch, but with just the right amount of friction to make touch activities feel tactile to exactly the correct degree.

Discounting any qualms people may have about the iPhone 4’s performance in any technical department for a moment, the case design, and manufacture quality, as well as the materials used in the iPhone 4’s construction are about as good as it gets in the tech and industrial design industry today.

If the iPhone 4 was a car body it would be a top of the line Porsche, Mercedes or Jaguar – inside and out.

Speed & Battery Life:

The iPhone 4 sports a slightly revised Apple A4 SoC (System on a Chip). Embedded in that device is an ARM Cortex A8, very similar to the one inside the iPad. The iPad is known to run at 1 GHz. It is very clear that for battery life reasons Apple has down clocked the processor in the iPhone 4. But not by a huge margin. Most benchmarks have it coming in at around 800 Mhz. So a cut of 20% in raw horsepower.

Memory wise Apple have done with the iPhone 4 what they should have done with the iPad. They have upped its memory to 512MB. This not only gives a lot more space for multitasking, or suspended apps to hang around in memory. It also gives us a lot more room for tabs to be open in Safari, games to use, and for the system to run smoothly overall.

iOS 4 is noticeably able to handle the kind of tasks that we expect from the iPhone 4, and with far less stuttering than on the 3GS.

Overall the iPhone 4 is around 20% faster at most tasks than the 3GS, and around 35% slower then the iPad. This is across the board on most processor intensive tasks.

When it comes to rendering web pages with lots of graphics the iPhone 4 is on a par with the 3GS. My reasoning for this is because the GPU in the iPhone 4 is working hard to push those 4 pixels for every one that then 3GS and other earlier iDevices are pushing. And this comes back to my caveats in my first iPhone 4 Impressions piece, where I said that we are not going to see a huge leap in graphics performance on the iPhone 4 over the most recent generation of iPhones and iPods.

It is certainly not the end of the world. But it would have been nice if Apple had done something to beef up the GPU in the iPhone 4. But without going to an entirely new GPU they didn’t have much choice. As iOS 4 is refined I expect we may see some improvements to the quite complex rendering pipeline in the iPhone Operating System. Just as we did in revisions of iPhone OS 2.x and OS 3.x on earlier devices. Apple may even decide to turn up the wick a little bit on the iPhone’s SoC, and that may or may not give the graphics a bit of a boost later in its product life cycle.

Having said all that the iPhone 4 is still a very fast beast when compared to all of its immediate rivals. I just always want more!

For more mundane web pages, and general text processing the iPhone 4 is not quite as fast as the Android Nexus One running Froyo, but it’s not far behind, and it sits quite comfortable in the middle of the iPad and the iPhone 3GS in terms of performance.

On pure GeekBench style raw CPU based processing tasks the iPhone 4 comes out a good 20 – 25% faster than the 3GS overall.

All of this performance balancing, and Apple’s decisions on the iPhone 4 lead to one thing. A compromise to give us the best performance possible and still maintain battery life. Just as with iOS 4 “multitasking” Apple have made decisions to ensure that we can surf the web, listen to music, and make calls all day long without trailing a power cord around behind us.

Battery Life:

I’ve done some tests of my own, and also compared my results with other tech experts that I respect to come up with these average results for battery performance on the iPhone 4:

Web browsing over 3G yields around 6.5 hours on the iPhone 4, even with its better performance. That is around an hour and a half longer than on the 3GS.

WiFi browsing tops out at just under 10 hours. An hour or so longer than the 3GS will go. Talk Time is far better than any other mobile phone in its class. At around 7.5 hours it is almost twice the time the 3GS could manage, and the Nexus One is about half of that.

For a quick test on multitasking I had my iPhone 4 run iTunes today while browsing web pages alternately over 3G and Wifi, and checking the odd app from time to time in a repeating pattern throughout the day. My battery ran out after 6 hours. For all of that time my screen was on, and music was playing. That is pretty impressive.

I feel very confident taking my iPhone 4 with me all day and using it as much as I need, and not worrying about charging again until I get home. At a pinch I think I could survive two days without a power point if I was frugal during the second day. Considering how much more is going on on the iPhone 4 when compared to the original iPhone (which has always been great on battery life) that is very impressive – and streets ahead of the iPhone 3GS and 3G.

Final Thoughts:

A lot of differing opinions have been expressed in the press this week about the iPhone 4. At first it launched in an explosion of positive reviews and consumer excitement. Even today stores across the world are either selling out, or sold out already.

And then this reception issue reared its ugly head. It is very clear that some iPhone 4s exhibit a characteristic that can mean that signals get dropped. It is a very well defined and isolated to one small area of the iPhone’s case. And if you have the issue easy to replicate. You can, and should then either take that up with Apple, or simply ignore it by using a carry case. Something that all iPhone users I know have anyway. It also bears repeating that all mobile phones will exhibit this same issue if you hold them in some particular way.

Apple have issued a Press Release today where they explain that the issue with the iPhone 4 is simply the algorithm they use for displaying signal bars on the iPhone 4. In some ways this is true. All cell phones will lose signal if they are insulated by the hand holding them. And Apple argue that their algorithm is misleading people by showing too many bars of signal when in a weak signal area, and that then people are further confused by the signal suddenly dropping away when they touch or squeeze the iPhone 4 case in a particular way.

I am more or less on Apple’s side in this case. But not because I accept their explanation as being the only cause of this problem, or Steve Jobs’ comments that people are “holding the iPhone incorrectly” as being acceptable. I am on Apple’s side because I think that the problem is getting blown out of all proportion by a media scenting blood.

I have used quite a few iPhone 4s this week, and none of them exhibit this problem at all. This makes me very sure that Apple have a manufacturing problem with a small number of iPhones, and not a design problem. A problem which can be fixed for consumers by exchanging faulty iPhone 4s. They also have another problem, which is not actually a signal issue, but the issue they describe with the cell signal strength meter software. I think some people are being misled by Apple’s own cell bar indicator on the iPhone 4, and consequently think they have a faulty iPhone 4, when they don’t. I hope that made sense!

Unfortunately Apple are not dealing with it very well. Their explanation in their Press Release is like something out of a Monty Python script :

Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong.

Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength. For example, we sometimes display 4 bars when we should be displaying as few as 2 bars. Users observing a drop of several bars when they grip their iPhone in a certain way are most likely in an area with very weak signal strength, but they don’t know it because we are erroneously displaying 4 or 5 bars. Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place.

We are also making bars 1, 2 and 3 a bit taller so they will be easier to see.

We will issue a free software update within a few weeks that incorporates the corrected formula. Since this mistake has been present since the original iPhone, this software update will also be available for the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3G.

None of this will convince those with problems that they don’t have one. But it also won’t put off those that want an iPhone 4, and look at the problem from the perspective that I think we all should. Some iPhone 4s are not made as well as others.

If you get a bad one, return it. Ask for a new one. Or go buy another brand of phone. Apple do actually suggest this themselves.

As a reminder, if you are not fully satisfied, you can return your undamaged iPhone to any Apple Retail Store or the online Apple Store within 30 days of purchase for a full refund.

This article is purely about my subjective impressions of the iPhone 4 after having bought one for myself. If you’ll take a leap of faith with me and ignore the reception issue for a minute then I can say that quite honestly this is the mobile phone I dreamed of when I first went into an electronics store in the UK in the late 80’s / early 90’s and paid a small fortune for a Motorola Brick the size of a shoe box. The iPhone 4 is the culmination of all the dreams I had of a Star Trek Communicator when I was a kid, and my own copy of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy when I was in my teens, and what I hoped The Apple Newton Message Pad would be.

Quite simply it has the best camera, both for video and stills, that I have ever used on a mobile phone.

The operating system still destroys any other mobile operating system out there for usability and elegance of use.

The GPS is better than some in car GPS systems.

FaceTime is just “sick”. And I mean that in the way it is defined in the urban dictionary vernacular.

And web browsing, emailing and making calls all work fine. More than fine in fact. In my week of use they outstrip anything I have seen on the iPhone 2G, 3G and 3GS by far.

Should You Buy One?

Quite simply.. Yes!

I can’t see a reason not to. If you are still using an original iPhone then the upgrade is a no-brainer. Likewise if you are on an iPhone 3G.

If you are still using a fairly new iPhone 3GS you might want to perhaps wait. You have a fully functional version of iOS 4. And apart from the slight improvements to the GPS unit and the addition of the Gyro in the iPhone 4, you have comparable hardware in your iPhone.

There is the possibility that Apple will move to a dual core ARM Cortex A9 with a vastly improved GPU for the next gen iPhone (iPhone 5 or iPhone 4GS?). In what I believe will be the Apple A5 SoC in an iPhone 5. But it’s going to be a long year for you. And you are going to miss out on some cool stuff.

But I have done that by sticking with my 2G for a long time. And there is no reason you shouldn’t be as happy with your 3GS as I have been with my 2G since the iPhone was first made available to an expectant public.

Game wise I think you are going to see the same quality of entertainment on the iPhone 3GS as you are on the iPhone 4 for some time. And app-wise with the exception of some cool Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality type apps and games you are going to be able to do anything on your 3GS that I can do on my iPhone 4.

But don’t be put off by these reception problems. If it is an issue then Apple will fix it.

If you are unhappy, Apple will exchange it, or refund you.

Well that’s about it for Part 3.

Part 4 will be the end of this series tomorrow. It will be a little shorter, but packed with some cool stuff. I hope you’ve enjoyed it so far.

Do be sure to let me know your thoughts on what I have said in the comments.

I’ll be covering FaceTime a bit more in my final piece on first impressions of the iPhone 4 on Saturday. But for now here is a little bit on some of the initial experimentation I have done with FaceTime and some friends today.

FaceTime is great! But it also takes some getting used to. It is initially very weird chatting face to face with someone on the other end of a mobile connection. More weird than I expected, to be honest! You almost want to put the iPhone 4 down, as it feels awkward holding it in-front of you. But if you put it down you seem to be looming over your chat buddy – which is also weird. The dock angle is not quite right for FaceTime either. But I am sure I’ll get used to it… eventually!

I found it a little bit easier to get into FaceTime as my experimentation progressed, as I was doing it with long standing friends. I am not sure if I would want to, or be able to handle FaceTime effectively on a day to day basis with anyone. And certainly not for the first time I ever spoke to someone on the phone.

But I can see myself occasionally sharing brief moments of my life, or work related snippets over a quick video chat from the office, or out and about – before retreating back to a voice only call, or the more normal Twitter / Text stream that we all seem to communicate with today anyway. Having a video phone in your pocket is probably one of those things that you will use to show off, and once or twice a year when it will pay for itself that one time alone in comedy value, or by solving a communication problem you could not have solved any other way.

There are also some great personal opportunities to exploit the technology. One of my calls today was to a friend who was in a supermarket which sells specialist food. I was able to have my buddy locate some items for me, and then verify that they were indeed the correct products by switching between front and back cameras and showing me what he was picking up. Much hilarity ensued with the staff of the shop also. If we’d had him dressed up in a Star Trek outfit that would have made the experiment perfect!

At peak traffic times, if you have a low bandwidth connection on either end the signal will drop out from time to time as FaceTime requires a fairly high up-speed for video. And that up speed can be close to what some internet providers provide – over here in Thailand anyway. But audio keeps going, and then things pick up again. We experienced these sorts of problems today when stealing WiFi connections in busy locations downtown. Sometimes the image got pixelated. And it is not really good enough for showing small text from magazines and the like. But great for packets of food!

More on Face Time in a later piece.

iMovie for iPhone:

It is incredibly easy to capture video on the iPhone 4. You simply fire up the video recorder and start shooting. If you are in low light conditions you can even switch on the Camera Flash and have it act as a permanent light. If you are happy with the video you have shot you can simply upload that directly to YouTube, or send it to someone.

If you want to trim a little bit off the end of your clip at either end you can also do that using the iPhone 4’s in built functionality, right out of the box.

It is worth noting that sending videos by email requires that they are less than a minute. None of that requires iMovie though.

But when iMovie for iPhone is around the cost of a good cup of coffee, well.. why shouldn’t we have that too.

iMovie is either something you will love or hate for its simplicity. It is just like a mini version of iMovie on the Mac, and very Apple in the way that it controls your workflow. Constrains it even.

You must choose a Project Template when you first fire up the app. And it must be one of the five that comes with the app. I am sure Apple will improve on this in the future with updates. But for now, a lot of people are going to be producing very similar iPhone iMovie end products. Having said that, the balance of minimalist to more complex templates is good. So there is something for everyone.

Once you are into editing your movie it is a very focussed environment. You can import your existing video clips, photos and music. There is also an option to make a quick video recording on the fly, to insert into your ongoing timeline. That is handy.

Much like iMovie on the desktop you have a timeline of thumbnails representing your clips, and transition makers in-between them. Everything is manipulated through touch actions, as you would expect, and by scrolling through the timeline, and dragging stuff about.

One thing I found frustrating was the inability to fade individual clips in or out at the end. So, when you shoot your beginning and end portions of your epic it’s a good idea to make sure you contrive some kind of beginning or end at that time. Similarly you can’t change the duration of a lot of the intro portions of Apple’s templates. So there is room for improvement in any update Apple provide.

Overall, and it is worth remembering I have only had an afternoon to play with iMovie, it is competent, snappy, and it does “just work”. But there is not a lot of room for individual flare outside of the actual shooting of your clips.

Location Awareness:

The iPhone 4 really has a great idea of where it is!

I am not sure if it’s the new antenna setup, or simply software and hardware upgrades. But this iteration of the iPhone 4 seems significantly more self aware than the 3GS I have sitting on my desk to compare it to.

Using the CoreLocation APIs in iOS, developers can make use of GPS (both assisted via cell towers and WiFI location triangulation – and from an inbuilt GPS receiver), along with the Compass in the iPhone 4 to get your location and which way you are facing. This is not new. The 3GS could do all this of course.

I live in a condo block just outside Bangkok, and the walls are made from something akin to nuclear bunker material. I have to get a guy with a special drill in to help me put up hooks for picture frames!

When I activate the compass it instantly spins to correctly give me my orientation. Tapping on the button to go to a Google Maps view it locates where I am to within about 5 or 10 meters within a couple of seconds. Then progressively over the next 20 – 30 seconds the iPhone hones my position down to what I would estimate to be within a few meters. I can also walk around my condo and see both the direction I am facing, and my location moving around on the map being updated instantly. Even with the fairly low grade satellite images of Thailand that we get from Google I can see my location dot on the balcony of my condo when I step outside. It’s very easy to sink a portion of your day into simply walking around with the iPhone 4 confirming where you are. OK, I am a geek!

On the Retina Display the maps look better, and the Compass really seems to gleam. And the way that everything updates simply seems silky smooth. The Compass particularly looks like a physical thing spinning just under the iPhone’s glass front. Very nice indeed.

Outside, away from our building, the initial pinpointing of your location is slightly quicker. But at the end of the day it will always take a while for GPS to kick in. I would say that the initial position information the iPhone 4 gets from our fairly sparse cellular and WiFi infrastructure in Thailand is incredibly impressive. And that overall the GPS performance in the iPhone 4 outstrips that of my dedicated in-car GPS Navigation unit from a few years ago.

If there is ever a navigation app for this part of the world, specifically for the iPhone, I’ll be buying it.

The iPhone 4 Gyroscope:

The Gyroscope is kind of the last piece in the puzzle of the iPhone 4’s location awareness and motion tracking arsenal. I am extremely excited about it.

On the iPhone 3GS we have GPS, an accelerometer (which is gravity sensitive), and a compass. With those three functionalities it is possible to tell where the iPhone is, which way it is facing, and roughly what orientation the device is at. All iPhones up until the iPhone 4 have a fatal flaw though. Because the accelerometer is gravity driven it can not measure any rotations around the vertical axis. This means that you can use the iPhone 2G thru to the 3GS as a steering wheel, or to tilt marbles around on a simulated flat surface, but you can never accurately tell the way the device is facing in all planes

Enter the Gyro…

Many of you may have had a gyroscope as a kid (Picture above). If you did you’ll remember that when you spun up the fly wheel it seemed able to defy gravity by standing upright on a single thin spindle. If you then picked it up and tried to rotate it you would be able to feel strong resistance to your movements as it tried to stay upright. This resistance to movement away from it’s spin axis is what a gyro uses to measure you turning your iPhone. Now, there isn’t actually a spinning thing inside your iPhone 4. Even though it’s nice to imagine one there. The gyro magic is all done electronically. But it relies on similar physics. And the truly amazing thing is that it is incredibly accurate, and works in all directions of rotation. i.e. It is not dependant on gravity like accelerometers are.

So what? Well by itself the gyro can tell us exactly how far the iPhone has been turned from an arbitrary position at any time. But that is not that useful unless we know where the iPhone was when we started. By combining GPS, the Compass and the accelerometer, already in the iPhone 4 (and previously in the 3G/3GS), with the gyro’s incredibly accurate sensing of motion in all directions, we can tell exactly where the iPhone 4 is, and which way it is facing at all times.

The gyroscope in the iPhone 4 can distinguish movement with an accuracy of up to 2,000 degrees per second – over 600 times more detailed than the movement of the second hand on a clock.

Using the CoreMotion APIs in iOS, developers can make use of the gyroscope to measure true roll, pitch, and yaw, making the iPhone sensitive to motion on six total axes.

I can’t say too much about an app that I am working on exclusively for the iPhone 4 right now. But what I am working on has not been possible before now on a mobile phone. And from my own initial testing with the gyro, it is just as accurate as the specs. boast.

At the moment if you want to experience the Gyro in action on the iPhone 4, and feel just how accurate it is for yourself, there is a game from ngmoco called “Eilminate:GunRange” in the iTunes App Store. That app is only for the iPhone 4, and uses the Gyro for aiming at targets in a shooting range. Strangely ngmoco are charging for it. But I guess they are trying to cash in on the iPhone 4 launch and have decided to forgo their normal Freemium model for now on that one!

But believe me, that is nothing compared to what you are going to see in coming months from myself, and other developers…

The Glass Case:

One of the reasons I kept my original iPhone as my day to day iPhone for so long was that I really don’t like the curved, plastic design of the 3G and 3GS. It was pretty inevitable that I would upgrade around this time anyway, as there are just too many features that I lacked on my 2G. Luckily the new iPhone 4 design is exactly where I think Apple should have gone with the iPhone’s look and feel after the original.

The iPhone 4 is 0.37 inches thick, compared to the 0.48 inches of the iPhone 3G/3GS. Because it is not curved it actually feels considerably thinner. It is also not quite as wide.

When I first saw shots of it the iPhone 4 I did have my doubts though. The way that the Stainless Steel frame of the iPhone 4 juts out from the front and back looks odd until you hold the device in your hands. When you do it makes perfect sense. It gives you some purchase on the device with your fingers, especially when you hold it in landscape mode to use as a video, or stills camera.

The combination of glass and steel also gives the iPhone 4 a solid, and physically cool feel in your hands. I mean cool as in colder than room temperature. Those two sensations when coupled with the iPhone 4’s smaller, slightly heavier and more solid form factor all combine to make this thing feel great in your hand.

And the glass display doesn’t seem to attract grease as much as previous iPhone screens. It also feels silky smooth when you make gestures on it, and solid when you tap it. It’s so good I didn’t even notice how natural it feels until I used a previous iPhone model later today and then spotted the difference.

Apple have used Gorilla Glass for the front and the back of the iPhone 4, and this is not without its controversy. If dropped at the wrong angle it is a lot easier to crack either the front or back cover of the iPhone 4 than on previous versions. And I have to admit to being a little nervous at breaking my run of good luck over the last few years. I have not yet dropped or broken any iDevice.

Some people have noticed that the iPhone 4’s glass back can get slight scratches in it in day to day use. And others have found that if you put it down on a flat, slightly damp surface then it can literally suck itself onto the surface because its glass back is so smooth and flat. Necessitating sliding it off that surface, which will then increase the risk of scratching.

But all these things are fairly esoteric quibbles in my opinion.

Ultimately this makes me all the more convinced that I will be wrapping an Apple Bumper around my iPhone 4 as soon as I can get hold of one. So far this week my iPhone 4 has spent most of its idle time in my original iPhone 2 dock on my desk. But it has also been out with me, in my pocket, flat on my desk, and moved around a fair bit on my notebooks as I try things out. I am not about to drop test it, or scratch test it. But it still looks brand new after almost a week of use!

Basically, don’t drop it. Don’t shoot it. And don’t put it into your pocket with your keys, and I think you’ll be very happy.

Well that’s the end of part 2.

Tomorrow I’ll be covering more on the overall look and feel of the iPhone 4, its Speed, some more on FaceTime and some Final Thoughts. I’ll leave the final part on Saturday as a surprise.

Do let me know your thoughts too in the comments.

The iPhone 4 is certainly much more than I expected it to be. I was hopeful of an even higher resolution screen than we got. But other than that I was simply anticipating what most other people were expecting. Smaller, faster, neater, video calls, and a stills camera with flash.

That is not to say that video calls, or a 5MP camera – with LED flash – are not good things. But they were kind of a given, and to be expected on any current generation smart phone. So getting excited about those features takes a little more effort. That’s all.

So where did the iPhone 4 really “Wow” me?

Well a fairly full featured version of iMovie available for the iPhone in the App Store at launch, and 720p recording was a pleasant surprise. Plus it’s Apple, so we know that it will “just work” beautifully too. So when these features are simply demoed on stage we can relax safe in the knowledge that the final product we get later this month will do all that it is advertised as doing. But even then, Nokia had video editing on their N series phones a while back I seem to remember.
I am also glad that Apple refrained from calling the iPhone 4, “iPhone HD”. It’s not HD. The screen resolution is not high enough, even if the phone itself records in half-way HD. And HD would have caused a lot of confusion with iPad app names – as I have often suggested to deaf ears. I have to admit to a little bit of smug satisfaction watching most of my fellow industry pundits call it that over the last few months, whereas I refrained, except where chastised by my editor for “SEO reasons”. Whatever that means!?!

But I still haven’t said what really blew me away about the iPhone 4 yet, have I? No! Sorry! Ok.. In order of no particular importance…

The iPhone 4’s screen construction.

It was common knowledge a fair while before launch that the iPhone 4 would feature a more traditional LCD panel, rather than an OLED one. This was a sensible choice from Apple, as OLED has been shown on various Android devices to deliver fairly lacklustre results so far. OLED has certainly not been shown yet, in smartphone form, to be able to deliver the crispness or quality we expect of Apple gear.

What Apple have also done is incorporate a hybrid of IPS and FFS technologies into the 960×640 LCD panel in the iPhone 4. Those technologies are specifically suited to a versatile range of viewing angles, and clarity of view specifically for text heavy applications. Think eBooks, PDFs and web pages. Games, and pictures always look good with a bright, well balanced display – which high quality LCDs produce better than OLED currently also. So Apple worked on what it was important for them to work on. Which is what makes them market leaders after all.

But that’s still not what is really cool about the screen. Their choices so far are what we’d expect from Apple. In other words, the best possible implementation of stable and current technology, rather than new “bleeding-edge” technology just for the sake of it.

What is really cool though is that Apple have reengineered how they make their screens. In doing so they have made it so that there is literally no space between the touch layer and the LCD itself.

Engineering. This is where Apple consistently outshine other OEMs. Their new method of making their composite touch / LCD panels, coupled with the beautiful glass front panel of the iPhone 4 puts our fingers literally on top of the LCD itself. When you look at the new iPhone the screen literally looks like a bright shiny sticker stuck on the outside of the iPhone. It is truly incredible. When you see one in the flesh, that alone will make you want one. I guarantee it. And my name is not Steve Jobs!

The Stainless Steel Case

Stainless Steel has several properties that the Aluminium cases that Apple has favoured to date, do not. It conducts radio waves very well, and it has a heft to it that feels more solid and satisfying. It’s also far stronger.

By combining a practical quality of Stainless Steel, with an aesthetic quality they have produced both a high quality / high performance arial framework for all the various radio signals the iPhone 4 produces, coupled with a healthy feeling heft, and strong construction to the entire device. The iPhone 4 is solid, and receives and transmits strong signals.

Apple have gone one step further still by making the edges of the device square, rather then rounded like previous iPhones, so that it genuinely feels more like a camera when you turn it on its side to use it as one. Again, when you get your hands on one in an Apple Store, or when you steal your friend’s iPhone 4 for a few precious moments you’ll see what I mean.

iOS

This is not an obvious feature of the iPhone 4. But what Apple have done is start to refine their iPhone / iPod Touch and iPad OS into one Operating System : iOS.

Part of the reason for this is to bring the various screen sizes that we will inevitably have more of in future, and have now on current devices, under the control of the OS.

For games it is not such an issue. Games makers can just scale graphics to fit the screen, and choose to have, or not have, various levels of detail for textures and other images. But for applications, which is after all what Apple is more interested in, and has to put more work into supporting visually, different screen resolutions is an important issue. And potentially a problem.

Imagine if the 200,000+ apps in the App Store today all had to be re-written for the new iPhone? Developers would not be happy. Apple has addressed this issue with various technologies in iOS (previously iPhone OS 4.0), and will continue to do so moving forward. Currently it is in an early form, but has already improved on the crude 2X feature of iPhone OS 3.2, which is currently found on the iPad for using existing iPhone apps.

Whilst not completely realising their final goal Apple have, in my opinion, taken an important first step towards Resolution Independence in iOS. The best is yet to come. But this is a solid foundation to build from.
iPhone 4, and iOS is where it starts to come together.

The Gyroscope

Steve actually demonstrated the iPhone 4’s gyroscope with a game of Jenga. I found that quite amusing. Apple have not been great at promoting games as a medium in the past. Even with their new found romance with games on the iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad they are still not taken seriously on Apple’s desktop lineup.

Ironically though I don’t think the gyro will find its greatest success in games. There are still a lot of iPods and iPhones, and brand new iPads out there that don’t have this feature. And for a while, at least, games writers will have to ensure their games work with the older Accelerometers found in earlier devices.

Some forward thinking developers will have a gyroscope option in their games. But important aspects of game play won’t be able to rely on the increase in accuracy and freedom of movement that the new component undoubtably brings… for the immediate future anyway. Otherwise the game will suffer on older devices, and the core market at the moment.

Where I think the gyroscope will be amazing is in Augmented Reality applications. At the moment looking around and using the camera in an existing iPhone to view our environment and overlay information and advertising on the world around us is a popular gimmick in “AR” apps. But the view is clunky and a bit jittery in most mobile devices (including current iPhones) because of the lack of precision that accelerometers offer. With a gyroscope on the new iPhone 4 Augmented Reality is set to go mainstream. This will be helped by the increased speed of the A4 processor, and the increased accuracy of the gyroscope.

Expect a lot of iAd enabled gyroscope using Augmented Reality apps to hit the App Store very soon.

As a little bit of background for you. The last gyroscope I programmed for was a component that was used in guided missiles originally. Our use for it was entirely different. But that is the kind of precision, and freedom of movement that gyroscope technology is derived from. Think about that for a minute. Your iPhone 4 will be distantly related to a guided missile! Cool eh!

Finally, a quick note about the 5MP camera in the iPhone 4

Apple could have played the numbers game here. They could have gone for 8 or 16 MP unit. And some Android owners may well quote the 8MP pixel camera in the new HTC EVO 4G to backup that line of thinking. But in reality until you make your lenses and your CCD (the device that receives the image inside your phone) bigger and of better quality there is no point. With the current form factor of all smart phones, their lenses and CCDs, more Megapixels just equate to bigger pictures, with more noise, which take up more space on your Flash Memory. Pictures which overall are of the same quality by and large – just noisier.

5 – 6 Megapixels is the optimum size for consumer cameras of the kind of lens dimension we are seeing on these phones. Any more is simply there for bragging rights for the OEM, and offers no functional advantage. Period.

What Apple have done, again, is focus on making the entire package better. Apple’s CCD in the iPhone 4 is designed to get more photons, more accurately, with less noise into your iPhone’s storage. In the iPhone 4’s case they do it by using Backside illumination :

Wikipedia explains Backside illumination this way :

In a device with backside illumination, the silicon light sensor for each pixel is on the “back” side of the silicon wafer, opposite the transistors and metal wiring layers. This increases the efficiency of the sensor as compared to the traditional (“frontside illumination”) technology, in which some of the light is scattered by the circuit layers on the front side of the wafer before it can reach the image sensor.

Here is a good example which illuminates the point I am making about megapixel count perfectly :

Joe Holmes’ limited-edition 13 x 19″ prints of his American Museum of Natural History series sell at Manhattan’s Jen Bekman Gallery for $650 each. They’re made on a 6MP D70.

No the iPhone 4’s lens is certainly not up to the standard of one found in a Nikon D70. Not is the one found in the HTC EVO 4G, or any other smart phone for that matter. But they have CCDs of roughly the same quality. The iPhone 4 has one which is better suited than all of them to low light conditions, and getting the best performance possible out of its surrounding hardware.

So there you have it. Those are the things about the iPhone 4 that excite me! What is your favourite feature of the new iPhone 4? Let us know in the comments.