TECHNOLOGY Apple’s new iPhone 4 – thinner, faster, better?

Apple’s iPhone 4 - thinner, faster, better?


Fergus Kelly
twitter.com/ferguskelly

I've been waiting for Apple's World-Wide Developers Conference for months. Apple's CEO Steve Jobs uses his keynote speech as the traditional launch vehicle for the most exciting new Apple products. That the new iPhone was to be unveiled was a given, but we were left with some questions: What will it be able to do? How much will it cost? When will it be available? Not all of these questions were answered.

Steve started his keynote with some discussion on how wonderfully well the iPad has been selling and the showing off of some new features. This was followed by a brief look at how just how much money the AppStore has been making for Apple, including the launch of FarmVille for iPhone and iPod (which got a muted reaction at best). After what seemed to be an eternity, Steve Jobs got to the meat of his speech, iPhone 4, the latest version of Apple's 'groundbreaking' phone.
Unfortunately for Steve, bloggers from Gizmodo had 'obtained' a 'lost' Apple phone for an alleged $5,000 in April. They reckoned that they had the new phone and they were right. When Steve announced 'biggest leap since the original iPhone', the world (or at least that part of the world fascinated by such things) had already seen it. All he had to show off were the new features. So, what are they?
Conveniently, Steve broke it into eight parts.




#1 All-new design
"Stop me if you've already seen this," he quipped, a reference to Gizmodo that the audience loved. Steve reckons iPhone 4 is the 'most precise, beautiful thing we've ever made' and compared it to a Leica camera, one of the most beautiful industrial designs of all time. Pushing it if you ask me.
More pics here

#2 'Retina' display
Apple love the giving their technologies funky names. The idea behind this one is that the human eye can detect dots in print or pixels in electronics up to about 300 per inch when the object is held about 12 inches from the eye. This display is 326 pixels per inch, more than a magazine and, in Apple's theory, the dots should be undetectable. Sounds amazing - and the pictures seem to bear this out.



Jobs claimed the IPS LCD screen is better than the OLED screens used in some Android-based phones, giving better resolution, more accurate color, sharper text, images and video.
It was at this point that Steve tried to demo the screen quality. His demo failed. Steve takes his demos very seriously. Somebody will get fired. Maybe several people. He explained that there were 570 people using WiFi and MiFi, interfering with Apple's network. Not the best response from the world's most valuable technology company.
More info here

#3 A4 chip
The iPhone 4 comes with the same processor as the iPad, the A4. This chip is tiny but is big on processing power. Jobs showed an internal shot of the phone, packed to the gills with tiny components to make room for a bigger battery. He claims this has improved battery life by up to 40 per cent on the previous phone (the 3GS) to seven hours talk time, six hours 3G browsing, ten hours of WiFi browsing/video, 40 hours of music or 300 hours on standby.

#4 Gyroscope
The iPhone 3GS has an accelerometer so it knows which way up you are holding it, adjusting the screen to suit. The iPhone 4 adds a two-axis gyroscope tied to the accelerometer to provide six-axis motion sensing. What does this mean? Simply, it knows which way you're turning it - a bit like the controller for Nintendo's Wii games console. This feature is pretty difficult to explain and it will almost certainly only be used in games. Obviously a target market for Apple.

#5 New camera system
Apple being Apple, Jobs dismissed other companies' focus on more megapixels, saying that Apple's focus was on how to make better pictures. The engineers concentrated on 'capturing photons and low light'. He then immediately announced that the new iPhone has more megapixels than the previous model - 5MP, up from 3MP.
The sensor is larger rather than having a higher pixel density, which should mean that it will take better pictures. It is accompanied by a new LED flash and a
'backside illuminated sensor' to adjust the camera better for low light. It still has the pointless 5x digital zoom and the much more useful tap to focus.
The really big announcement was that this camera can shoot 720p HD video at 30 frames per second and the flash can stay on to light the scene as you shoot. Movies can be quickly trimmed for length and uploaded straight to YouTube. Stand by for hundreds of videos of drunk people making eejits of themselves appearing on a Facebook wall near you.
If you thought that was big, he then announced that the company's easy-to-use iMovie video-editing software will be available for iPhone for $4.99. With this software you will be able to edit videos, add photos, add music from iTunes and text titles to your video, all on your phone.

VentureBeat have a demo of the software in action.


#6 iOS 4
Not much in this one for anyone who isn't a programmer. It's just a rebranding of the iPhone OS. What he did announce was the addition of multi-tasking so more than one app can run at once. It's a useful feature and has been standard on Google's Android system since it launched, but it will drain the battery. Apple has also added folders to the interface so you can group apps together rather than having hundreds in different home screens. It has also improved the Mail app and added better data protection, device management, wireless app distribution, better Exchange support, SSL VPN support and Exchange Server 2010. These features will only make sense to IT managers, but it should see stronger competition for BlackBerry in the corporate market.

#7 iBooks
Following Apple's phenomenal success with iBooks on the iPad, the app is coming to the phone so it can make even more money. I've no idea why anyone would want to read a book on such a tiny device but there you go. The big change in iBooks is that Apple has added the ability to read PDFs and make notes in the app, a feature that I will definitely use.

#8 iAds
Another one for the app developers, this means you can expect to see even more advertising in your iPhone apps in future, and Apple's coffers swelling even more.

So was that it? Of course not. Steve loves his 'one more thing'. The last feature to be announced was the interestingly named FaceTime. This is a technology that allows video calling from iPhone 4 to iPhone 4 (only on WiFi in 2010). Nobody wasn't expecting this, after all, he'd shown us all the front camera on the device and hadn't told us what it was for. He attempted to demo this with a call to Apple's head of industrial deign, Jonathan Ive, but the app crashed. Those darn MiFis again. One thing that was almost lost in all of this – Apple intend to make FaceTime an industry standard, meaning that it could appear on a Nokia phone in the future. Watch this space.




I've been waiting for this phone for a very long time. My iPhone 3 is now too slow to be really useful, and this phone, if not quite the 'biggest leap', looks like a massive improvement on the current model. It looks like I'll have to put up with torture from the 02 reps trying to 'save me money'  for a little while longer - the iPhone 4 won't be available in Ireland until July. Prices are yet to be announced but I'll definitely be investing. The iPad can wait for another year!

http://www.apple.com/ie/iphone/

• Summary of iPhone 4 features

• 9.3 mm thick, 24% thinner than the iPhone 3GS
• Stainless steel for strength, specially toughened glass on front and back (but according to one site it's not as tough as Apple makes out)
• 2 microphones (one for noise cancellation)
• 2 cameras - 5MP back-facing camera with LED flash, front-facing camera for video calling
• 720p HD video recording
• Basic video editing on the phone
• iMovie for iPhone for more advanced editing ($4.99)
• New 'Retina' 3.5 inch IPS LED display, 960 x 640 pixels at 326ppi, 800:1 contrast ratio
• GPS, compass, accelerometer, gyroscope
• 7 hours talk time, 6 hours 3G browsing, 10 hours of WiFi browsing/video, 40 hours of music or 300 hours on standby
• System requirements: Mac OS X 10.5.8 or later; Windows 7; Windows Vista; or Windows XP Home or Professional with Service Pack 3 or later