Apple iPhone 4 (AT&T)

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VIEW SLIDESHOW

• Pros

  Gorgeous screen. Jewel-like design. Fast processor. Tons of apps. Unparalleled media experience. Great camera.

• Cons

  Cellular reception issues. FaceTime video calling is limited.

• Bottom Line

  Apple's iPhone 4 adds a gorgeous screen, terrific camera and faster processor to add to Apple's awesome app experience, but voice calling still isn't this phone's priority.

Contents

• Full Review
• Smartphone and App Experience

The iPhone 4 is the best iPhone ever. That's for certain. It's the best media playing phone on the market, a terrific camera phone, and a truly awesome game-playing phone. It easily makes the cut for our list of The 10 Best Touch-Screen Phones. It's not the best phone-calling phone, but we've gone well beyond the era when everyone bought handheld, networked computers primarily for making long voice calls.

Folks who already have iPhones will find this to be a dramatic upgrade: the better screen, speed, and camera all change the iPhone experience for the better. Anyone who wants to dip into the iPhone's 225,000 apps will also love this phone. It's not perfect, but no one phone is perfect for everyone, and the iPhone 4 is still an Editor's Choice, and one of our 10 best touch-screen cell phones.

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Physical Features
The iPhone 4 is thin and sharp. Apple has ditched the rounded, organic look of previous models for an almost Mid-Century Modern stainless steel band around two slabs of black glass. (All iPhone 4s available right now are black; a white model is coming soon, Apple says.) The result is a phone that's slightly smaller and noticeably thinner than all of its competitors, at 4.5-by-2.31-by-.37 inches.

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The device comes in two memory sizes, 16GB and 32GB. There's no memory card slot, and Apple cut down on the size of the SIM card slot. (Apple hates slots, because they mar the phone's lines.) They're using tiny "Micro-SIMs" now, which shouldn't bother you much if you're in the US; US users have no reason to ever remove the iPhone's SIM card.

Specifications

Service Provider

AT&T

Operating System

iPhone OS

Screen Size

3.5 inches

Screen Details

960x640 IPS LCD capacitive glass touch screen

Camera

Yes

Network

GSM

Bands

850, 900, 1800, 1900, 2100

High-Speed Data

GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, HSDPA

Most phones feel like gadgets, because they're all metal and plastic. The iPhone 4 feels like jewelry, because of all that glass. The front of the phone is nearly-indestructible Gorilla Glass, according to Apple, and the back is a different kind of tempered glass. That will make the phones relatively resistant to scratches, but I'd still recommend a case if you want to keep yours looking pristine.

Apple's "retina screen" is pretty great, although it doesn't live up to its bombastic marketing copy. (What could?) The IPS LCD technology used has incredibly deep blacks and noticeably richer colors than the iPhone 3GS did, the viewing angles are wider, and it looks much better outdoors. It's far more beautiful than any other screen technology I've seen except for Samsung's upcoming Super AMOLED. I look forward to testing those two technologies against each other.

The screen's 960-by-640 resolution is really important, but not for the reason you think. If your world consists only of Apple phones, the new resolution is a revelation. Text, especially, looks razor-sharp, and Web pages practically look like they were laser printed right onto your screen. TV shows and movies look much better on the iPhone 4 than on the iPhone 3GS ($99, )—you can see subtle details and richer colors. It's like switching from a standard-def to a high-def TV.

But hold it next to a 3.5-inch, 800-by-480-or-greater screen like the ones on the HTC Droid Incredible ($299.99, ) or Motorola Droid ($249.99, ), and it's pretty hard to tell the difference unless you hold it really close and squint. Yes, the iPhone 4's text is sharper, but the other phones' displays are still readable down to the limit of my 10/15-with-glasses eyesight. The retina display leads the fight, but the battle has gone beyond the limits of human perception.

The real reason for the retina display is to keep the iPhone's 225,000 apps running smoothly. By simply doubling the resolution from the iPhone's 320-by-480, Apple lets all the existing apps run without letterboxing or distortion. This is incredibly important; if Apple had changed the screen's aspect ratio, existing apps would have run with black bars across part of the screen. That's not a seamless Apple experience.

Phone Calls and FaceTime Video Calls
The iPhone 4, like the 3GS, is a GSM/HSPA 7.2 phone that operates on AT&T's and foreign 3G bands. Also like previous iPhones, it's not the greatest phone for voice calling.

Cue the screaming nay-sayers: "If it's not the world's best voice phone, what good is it? A phone should be a PHONE!" Yes, that is a valid view. There are phones for you. The iPhone 4 is not the phone for you. Move on. There are millions of people for whom making long, heartfelt voice calls isn't their primary desire—they send scads of text messages, play games, Fingerpoke on YouFace (if they're Tina Fey) and make brief voice calls to get their points across. The iPhone is for them.

If you're looking for salvation from dropped calls, the iPhone 4 isn't it. In extremely weak signal conditions in our lab and our basement, the iPhone 3GS actually connected slightly more calls successfully than the iPhone 4 did—about one in ten additional calls went through. The iPhone 4 gave a truer picture of signal strength than the 3GS did, though; its "bar" meter is quicker to respond to changes in RF than the 3GS is.

Apple also acknowledged that the "iPhone death grip" is real, and holding the phone the wrong way reduces signal strength. I made Speedtest.net data speed tests slow down and even stall out by picking up the phone and holding it in my left hand, with one finger on each seam of the phone and the bottom-left corner against the pad of a slightly sweaty palm. Putting the phone down on the table caused the speed test to resume. The death grip only made a difference on voice calls in weak signal conditions, though; with decent or strong signal, it didn't affect the iPhone's ability to connect calls. Adding one of Apple's $29 plastic "bumpers" fixed the death-grip issue entirely.

The iPhone 4 does improve call quality once calls are connected. The earpiece is just excellent: sharp, clear and loud, without distortion or gain problems. The speakerphone, which seems to emanate from the lower back of the phone, is loud enough to use outdoors, and considerably louder than the 3GS's too-quiet unit. Transmissions sound strong if a little bit tinny on the other end; they're definitely less harsh than calls made from the 3GS.

The iPhone 4 also stepped up noise cancellation with a dual-microphone setup, and it shows. While a little bit of background noise came through—the iPhone still isn't up to Motorola Droid X standards—the iPhone 4 cancelled background noise better than the 3GS and definitely well enough to muffle the sound of a refrigerated goods truck a few feet away from me.

The iPhone's voice control is accurate, extensive, and worked with our Aliph Jawbone Icon ($199-$99, ) Bluetooth headset perfectly, including triggering voice dialing from the headset. Along with dialing numbers, you can control the iPod functions from the headset, which is really neat.

I wasn't able to get a full battery test done in time for this review, so I'll update the review when I can. But battery life looks on par with most other major smartphones—about a day of average use.

FaceTime, Apple's video calling system, is a gimmick for now. Remember when you could only send text messages to someone with the same wireless carrier? FaceTime is even more limited: your friend has to have the same model of phone, and you both have to be in Wi-Fi hotspots, and you have to remember to turn on your Wi-Fi. That makes FaceTime a special-occasion parlor trick rather than a general purpose solution.

When you do get all the ducks in a row, it works. My FaceTime call was clear; my own face appeared in a small window in the upper left hand corner of the screen, while the person I was calling took up the whole screen. You can talk through the speakerphone or a Bluetooth headset, and you can flip the view around to use the rear camera and show your correspondent what you're seeing—though I found the image became pixelated very quickly when using the rear camera.

That said, I got FaceTime to work on the first try, which is a lot more than I can say for Fring and Qik on Android. In the land of the faceless, is the one-faced man king? Or something like that. Mobile video calling in the US is clearly not ready for prime (face) time yet, but a desktop or Android FaceTime client coming in the next year could really change the situation by giving iPhone owners more people to call.—Next: Smartphone and App Experience.

Source:http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2364784,00.asp