The iPhone4

Rumours of the Apple iPhone4 have been circulating for months and for so long I’ve been waiting to make my free phone upgrade worthwhile, I’ll finally get my hands on an iPhone. Now the launch date has arrived and I only have a few more weeks to wait.

So, what are some of the new features of iPhone4 that are going to be so special? For me forward facing video calling, is going to be a really good feature (in the main). A number of my close friends live all around the UK so being able to actually see their faces when we chat will be a real bonus and make them feel much closer. This is great. But, I don’t want all my friends, family and colleagues to be able to utilise video calling. What about when I’m working from home in my PJs? Or not feeling I’m looking my best? What’s the etiquette with video calling  if someone asks you to video call, how can you decline without them thinking that you’re hiding something? It will be interesting to monitor social rules around this feature and how they unfold as it becomes more widely used.

Multi-tasking is an essential feature of any smart phone which was overlooked in the launch of the first iPhone. As the number of functions and apps on such a device is so high, the ability to simply switch between them becomes more and more essential and I have never found the Home button on the iPhone good enough to support this. Parallel to this is the new feature to be able to organise apps into folders. Again, given the huge number of apps that are available this is essential to provide come kind of organisation on the Home screens. Currently I see people swiping through pages and pages of vibrantly coloured icons, in the hope of finding the app they’re looking for. 

iBooks is one feature I won’t be utilising. The Apple advert for this app uses a Winnie the Pooh book as an example where there is just one sentence of text displayed on the screen below a large illustration. The advert looks great, displaying such a simple page of a children’s book, but I moved on from Winnie the Pooh a while ago and I can’t imagine the 3.5″ inch screen being a comfortable reading experience for longer books. I know some people have got into the e-reader craze, but these have much larger screens than the iPhone and I therefore don’t think this is one of the top features of the iPhone4.

There area number of other features of the iPhone4 including a 5m.pixel camera which although will be useful, it’s expected in a phone these days. The original camera on the iPhone was way behind, so Apple are only just keeping up with competitors by offering this and I don’t see it as a super-selling feature. Similar to this, they are promising an extended battery life on the iPhone4 which, as far as I’ve been told from friends was horrendous on the original iPhone. Again Apple are just correcting flaws of the older iPhone and these aren’t unique selling points. I did read today that Apple are patenting solar panels to be used in future iPhones to enable users to extend the power even further by simply using the sun. So do I continue my wait for the iPhone until it includes this feature too? I think not. Given UK summers the use of solar panels is probably pretty limited…

I hope to be the proud owner of an iPhone4 at the end of the month, so look out for my next blog reviewing my new toy.