iPhone 4 – Observation After The First 24 Hours Of Use

While the iPhone 4 was officially released today, the 24th of June, mine arrived at my door yesterday morning on a FedEx truck … effectively giving me a one-day jump on the vast majority of the 600,000 people who pre-ordered the iPhone 4.

Now, having had my iPhone 4 activated for just over 24 hours I have a few initial observations.   The first thing you’ll notice switching from the iPhone 3G / 3Gs to the iPhone 4 is its build. The phone feels more solid and despite its squared shape, is in fact slimmer and smaller than the iPhone 3G design.

Once you power up the phone and look at the screen be prepared for the real “WOW” factor. I had read all about Apple’s claims that the iPhone 4 screen was superior to all other mobile device screens, but that did not leave me prepared for the absolute brightness and clarity of the screen.   My initial thought in looking at the iPhone 4 screen was “Why doesn’t my iPad have this screen?”

In use of shuffling between Apps, the applications launch faster, the transition from screen to screen is faster and overall the performance of the actual use of the phone appears quite a bit faster.  I have used more than 50 Apps on my iPhone 4 in the past day, some that I know run slowly and others that rely on the 3G data network to run, and all of them seem to run faster in side-by-side tests.

FaceTime seems quite interesting, and while it is being heavily publicized by Apple, I find it extremely limiting. Presently FaceTime only works when on WiFi, not the 3G network, and only works from iPhone 4 to iPhone 4. While FaceTime is an ‘open platform’ and Skype is exploring creating a way for its users to interact via FaceTime … the FaceTime option does not even allow basic video chat with Apple’s iChat option.

The camera is fan-friggin-tasctic (is that word?). The 5mp camera really does a great job. As a life long photographer, who has been shooting digital images since the time of the now ancient Kodak/Nikon NC2000 … and who was overjoyed with the Kodak/Canon DCS520 “finally” allowed for a 2mp sensor … a 5mp camera that appears quite good optically in my phone is a lot of fun. The video on the iPhone 4 isn’t jumpy and the clarity is really far more than I expected from a mobile phone (my iPhone 3G has a hack App that allowed it to shoot video). The 720HD video isn’t exactly going to replace my Canon EOS 5D Mk II, but it’s nice for those grab videos for work or play. The 720HD video also means that video doesn’t look all that awkward when edited into other packages via Aperture 3 of Final Cut Express.

Not near your computer to import your video into Aperture 3/Final Cut Express?  Edit your iPhone 4 video on the fly with the iMovie for iPhone App. Not that I want to spend my time editing on an iPhone, but being able to quickly edit video on my iPhone is really fun (not that I have the hang of it yet).

App organizing … I always had my Apps organized by screen, it made my life easier … however the ability to drop apps into different organization categories makes everything that was already easy even easier.   I love that I can drop my airline apps into a category, travel apps into a category, photography apps into a category. Really this function (which is now available for iPhone 3G models with iOS 4) is just wonderful!

The battery life of the iPhone 4 appears to be far superior to the iPhone 3. I have not plugged in my iPhone for 24 hours, and have been using it constantly, intentionally using it to kill of the battery, and it is still going strong.

…and since the iPhone is an iPod … the audio is louder!  This is great for listening to the LiveATC App while walking through airport … I mean listening to Mozart at your
desk.

Anyway … that is my quick take of the iPhone 4 having used it for the past 24 hours.

Below are two photos of the iPhone 4 and photo that shows the dramatic difference in scream brightness between my iPhone 3 and iPhone 4…yes the difference is that dramatic side by side.

Happy Flying!