iPhone 4 gets thinner, adds pixels.
The Apple iPhone 4 has launched, but with a lot of the usual hype missing - the recent global lovefest over the iPad and various embarrassing leaks have, unusually, disrupted Apple's absolute control over the news. Nonetheless, Steve Jobs took to the stage at the Apple WWDC developers conference in San Francisco today and unveiled the latest iPhone as if nothing had happened.
The iPhone 4 is a particularly good example of Apple doing what it does best - building a product throughout its life by enhancing features enough to be exciting but not so much that the basic idea changes. The iPhone 4 adds a much higher resolution "Retina" screen, HD video recording and editing, faster WiFi, video calling through a front camera, longer battery life, thinner case, integrated adverts in apps, multitasking, "deeper enterprise support" - multiple Exchange servers - and folders.
The main camera is now 5 megapixels, has a flash and better low-light capabilities; there's also a gyroscope alongside the existing motion sensors, which makes the phone far more sensitive and accurate when detecting movement. A secondary microphone helps cancel out background noise when you make a call, and there 'integrated antennas' in the structure of the phone that 'have never been done before - really cool engineering'. (NB - these look like slot antennas, which have very definitely been done before and which have some interesting issues when asked to work with someone's big fat hand clamped over them. More as we find out.)
Inside, there are some design cues from the iPad - an Apple A4 processor and micro SIM, and a larger proportion of the internal space taken up by the battery. Apple promises seven hours 3G talk, six of 3G browsing, 10 hours Wi-Fi browsing, 10 hours music, 40 hours of music, and 300 hours on standby.
The videoconferencing application, FaceTime, is WiFi only, 'zero setup', and Apple wants it to be an open industry standard. That brings back memories of videocalling being the big marketing push behind 3G phones in the UK at their launch - only the most recent example of videoconferencing proving of extremely little interest to most people. Also quirky - the operating system is now called iOS 4, dropping reference to the iPhone (and long since leaving behind any hint of OS X). What makes this a bit more fun is that Cisco owns the trademark to iOS, the operating system in its routers and the software that drives most of the Internet's actual networking. Cisco has licensed the name (but nothing else) to Apple, in much the same way that it (eventually) licensed the iPhone name, which it also used before Apple decided it liked it. iOS4 will be available as a free update to most of the iPhone and iPod Touch models, with some functionality cut down on the older designs.
The iPhone 4 is going to roll out very fast, with a simultaneous launch on June 24th in the US, France, Germany, the UK and Japan, ramping up to 88 countries by September. US pricing is $199 for the 16GB and $299 for the 32GB model.