Apple iPhone 4 Review: The Flawed beauty

The iPhone 4 brings new meaning to the metaphor ‘looks aren’t important, it’s what’s on the inside that counts’. The iPhone 4 is the flawed beauty; more time should have been spent on the backend instead wasting their efforts on glitz.

The main improvements include a high resolution screen, an improved 5 mega pixel camera, HD video recording, longer battery life and a second camera for video calls.

The improvements are all well and good but the phone has a number of fundamental flaws and is phenomenally expensive.

Zero Signal

The major issue with the iPhone 4 is attributed to the new design. The body of the handset is made of stainless steel which not only looks swish doubles up as an antenna. Apple claims this is to improve the signal of the phone.

The problem is you only get this improved signal if you hold the device the correct way. If you place your hand over the bottom left of the phone the signal drops right down to 0. Mr Steve Jobs co-founder of Apple unbelievably said “Just avoid holding it that way”.

Easily said than done, considering the size of the device. iPhone have kindly offered us a solution to their problem, buy a new apple case to shield the antenna. So you can learn how to hold your phone recommended and approved by Steve Jobs or buy a new case that will hopefully make the problems go away.

It’s no surprise that the senior vice president of the iPhone 4’s hardware engineering Mark Papermaster has “left” the company. Jumped or pushed the fact remains the same it was for his part played in the design of the iPhone 4’s aerial.

As far as business mobile phones go performance has been increased with the new iPhone 4. The battery has been optimized, Apple has said although the standby time is the same the talk time and web browsing time have been greatly improved by around 40%.

On top of that multi-tasking has been improved. This means you can run multiple apps without affecting the performance of the app actively being used. Previously this would drain your battery at a far faster rate, this has now been fixed.

The device itself is still around the same width and height as previous versions what’s changed is the depth. It is now far slimmer at just 9.3mm thick but still weighs 137g. Apart from the new slim design nothing much has changed in terms of looks and design.

The display is still 3.5 inches big as previous generations but with one fundamental change, double the number of pixels giving it a total display size of 960 x 640 pixels resulting in some excellent image quality.

The last big change is the camera. The stills camera has been upgraded with a far larger sensor which allows the phone to take a far better picture at night and in low light settings. The camera has now been armed with a 5 megapixel camera and a led flash.

The video can also now record at HD resolutions at 720p. This places the iPhone 4 up there on the Video recording department with only a handful with better or like specifications.

The biggest change with the camera is the addition of a second which enables video calling. A statement from apple - "People have been dreaming about video calling for decades. iPhone 4 makes it a reality." Apple seems to be ignoring the fact that many others have been offering this feature since 2003.

This Video calling feature may seem all very nice but I should point out you can only use video calls over Wi-Fi and to other iPhone 4 users, unlike other phones that can make video calls over the 3g network to multiple handsets. So all in all it’s a very limiting and flawed feature.

Don’t get sucked into Apples adverts, they are a very good marketing company.

If you feel if any of the above comments are an unfair judgment don’t hesitate to leave a comment.