iPhone 4 Review

Block-circling queues, midnight campers and stores with all the stock wrung out of them: it can only be a new iPhone. Apple’s iPhone 4 has landed and it’s taking no prisoners. Packing the freshly-released iOS4 with a slimmed-down, powered-up hardware, as ever the promise is not so much ticks on the spec sheet but a superlative user experience. Is the iPhone 4 another home run, or – in a market of rivals it helped motivate – has Apple lost its edge? Check out the full SlashGear review after the cut.

Hardware

This fourth-generation hardware marks a significant design departure for Apple, eschewing the curved plastic of the last couple of iPhones and replacing it with glass, metal and squared off edges. The fascia is a single sheet of toughened Gorilla Glass, supposedly 20 times stiffer and 30 times harder than plastic is, while the outer bezel is stainless steel and integrates the GSM/UMTS, GPS, WiFi and Bluetooth antennas for improved performance. At 4.8oz in the hand it’s solid and pleasantly weighty, while Apple’s opting for a non-user-accessible battery means there’s no battery door to creak or flex.

Hardware controls are limited to a power/sleep button on the top edge, a ringer switch on the top left hand side, volume up/down buttons just beneath it and the usual home key under the display. On the bottom edge is the dock connector, flanked by two speaker grills, while a 3.5mm headphone jack sits up on the top. The front-facing camera is just visible alongside the speaker grill, while on the back is the main camera and the new LED flash above the traditional shiny Apple logo.

The SIM slot – now taking a smaller microSIM like the iPad WiFi + 3G – has moved from the top edge to the right side, and there are now two microphones, one on top and one on the bottom, used for noise cancellation.

All in all it’s slimmer and slicker than the iPhone 3GS it replaces, and neatly distinct from much of its rivals on the market. Best of all, perhaps, it’s very obviously a new handset; the 3GS came in for some criticism by virtue of its being physically identical to the 3G, leaving those who had upgraded with no visible sign that they’d done so. That may sound shallow, but it’s nonetheless a real consideration for many consumers and will help differentiate the iPhone 4 in-store.
Retina Display

Turn the handset on, however, and you all but forget the physical design: Apple’s so-called Retina Display is eye-wateringly impressive, setting a new bar in smartphone screens performance. According to Apple’s official stats, it’s a 960 x 640 3.5-inch IPS LCD panel with 326 pixels per inch, an 800:1 contrast ratio and 500 cd/m2 brightness. As before there’s an oleophobic oil-resistant coating – that’s applied to the back of the iPhone 4 too – which, while the handset is still prone to picking up prints, means it’s an easy matter to wipe them off again.

Specs aside, the iPhone 4′s display is frankly the best mobile display on the market so far. AMOLED/Super AMOLED advocates will likely argue which technology has the better contrast, richer colors or inkiest blacks, but the real magic is in the extreme pixel density. On stage at WWDC 2010, Steve Jobs described Retina Display as having more pixels than the eye can see, marketing hyperbole that prompted another round of arguments, but in short, at the kind of average distance most users hold their handsets at, the individual pixels are simply too small to be differentiated between.