Hey all, this is an article I wrote for MediaKick about the iPhone 4, announced by Steve Jobs at yesterday’s WWDC Keynote Speech. I’m not totally sure what MediaKick’s feelings about me reposting articles I’ve written for them but if this post undergoes a swift exit you’ll know…
Keeping up his tradition of announcing a new iPhone at WWDC each year, the bespectacled Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the newest addition to their smartphone range, the unimaginatively named iPhone 4.

To build up anticipation ahead of his official announcement (which was no mean feat considering Gizmodo leaked a prototype of this phone several months ago, to which Jobs made a sly reference when showing off the new handset’s design), Jobs described this new version as “the biggest leap since the original iPhone”.
The new iPhone departs from the casing style of its predecessor in the biggest way seen so far. As it does away with the slippery bevelled edges that caused many a drop-induced screen crack, replaced with a steel edge that nicely frames the handset. What’s more is that the stainless steel edges make up the band for the antenna system within the phone, fitting all standard connectivity medium antennas (GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, et al) in a feat of engineering that Jobs claims was worth sacrificing Apple’s traditional aversion to distinct lines in their products. The new edges also allow the phone itself to be notably thinner, reduced to an anorexic 9.6mm, with Jobs claiming it to be 24% slimmer than it’s past incarnations, making it the thinnest smartphone on the market today; which, to me, sounded like a challenge. The buttons on the edges remain more or less the same, volume rocker (but now with an added mute toggle) on the side, headphone jack atop and microphone beneath. Jobs referenced the Gizmodo leak by insisting that nobody had seen this before, to howls of laughter, none of which (I assume) were coming from Jason Chen.
The new iPhone 4 also packs a new screen, a 3.5 inch display with an 800:1 contrast ratio and a 960×640 pixel display, figures until now unheard of on a mobile phone. A new feature allows this called ‘Retina Display’, which, despite it’s cool-sounding name, is simply a quadrupedal increase in pixel density on the screen; meaning that text and displays will be far crisper even at close range as the ppi (pixels per inch) is increased to 326. Indeed, Jobs went into scientific detail explaining the working of the human eye and explaining that the limits of the retina is 300ppi and, with a display comfortably over that limit, text viewed at a longer distance should resemble a printed book. Arguably, this (pretty poor) comparison was in response to the critics of the iPad’s capabilities as an eBook reader as it uses a backlit screen, rather than the traditional eInk screens, and is less comfortable to read at length – surely if the problem doesn’t exist on the iPhone, people will be more confident about iPad purchases for it’s eBook functionality. After some technical difficulties in which the iPhone 4 seemed to lose Internet connection which caused Jobs to, paradoxically, request that the journalists in the room, promoting his product online, stop using the Wifi, the ‘retina display’ was further demonstrated through a wealth of comparisons between the iPhone 4 and the 3GS. Jobs reassured the assembled app developers that their existing apps, when used on an iPhone 4, would render in the sharp retina display, before rounding off his demonstration of the display by describing it as the “best window on the planet”, I can only assume he was excluding the human eye.
Eager not to leave out the major techies in the room, Jobs went under the hood of the iPhone 4 and for the first time in WWDC history we were shown the innards of the new iPhone, he started talking about the A4 processor, designed and built in-house by Apple; currently only available in the iPad, the A4 chip packs 1GHz of punch. The most noticeable thing within the new iPhone is the larger Li-ion battery, taking up a good 30% of the immediately visible back, accompanied by the usual unrealistic stabs in the dark estimations about battery life, claiming 6 hours of 3G browsing, 7 hours of 3G talk and an amazing 300 hours standby. Not to be outdone on the ecological front, Jobs’ next job was to fly the green Apple logo for a moment and explain how the iPhone 4 meets all the environmental standards that the users have come to expect from his products – good to know that the Apple is compostable. The phone also comes with 32GB of storage (though it’s pretty likely models with varying capacities will be available), dual mic noise suppression (using the back mic to identify noise and attempt to filter it out of the front mic input), support for 802.11n Wi-fi which has recently come out of draft and a fairly standard HSDPA connection speed.
Rather than bringing out their own gaming device, Apple has opted to infiltrate the gaming sector in the guise of an MP3 player as they touted, above anything, the gaming features of the iPod Touch. Now the gate is open for the iPhone to throw it’s antenna-edges in as, to go with the classic accelerometer and the oh-so-pointless compass, the iPhone 4 packs a gyroscope. This 3-axis addition gives a far more accurate representation of the device’s position and movement to make motion-controlled games even more immersive. The gyroscope, combined with the accelerometer, now give the iPhone a 6-axis sense of motion putting it at about the same as early PS3 controllers, this is the first time anything Apple has produced has been directly comparable to a gaming-specific product so it’ll be interesting to see if this will lead to any degree of competition between the large gaming companies and Apple. The iPhone 4 also comes with the proximity sensor that deactivates the touchscreen when, for example, the user lifts it to their face to talk, to avoid face-dialling (a word I just made up) and a light sensor.
In response to one of the biggest criticisms of the iPhone, a feature oft-rumoured but never vindicated, Apple has finally introduced a front facing camera to the iPhone’s otherwise unblemished front. Though the cameras are now 5 megapixel instead of it’s normal 3, Jobs insists that for image quality and professional photography the focus shouldn’t be on simply increasing the megapixels in a camera and one’s effort should, instead, focus on “capturing photons and low light photography”, to which Apple’s solution is a backside illuminated sensor. Other features of the camera includes a fairly standard LED flash and 5x digital zoom, but also continues the development of Apple’s ‘tap to focus’ feature which directs the camera to focus more on areas indicated by the viewfinder and less on other areas. A very interesting, but perhaps ultimately superfluous, addition is the camera’s ability to record video in high definition – a video quality of 30 frames per second at 720p quality, integrated with the iPhone’s antecedent video editing application (or a new development which I’ll come to later) and one-click sharing with major social media websites.
After gleefully announcing the introduction of iMovie for the iPhone, Jobs left the stage and ushered in Randy Ubillos, one of the people behind Adobe Premier, Final Cut Pro and now the new iMovie for iPhone. This new app incorporates the functionality of the original Mac application into a portable format, into which you can import recorded video and chop’n’change to your heart’s content; it even includes visual effects, transitions, sounds and geotagging to give you the full experience of a basic video editing package. The iMovie app can even allow you to export your edited creation into a variety of sizes and resolutions: 360p, 540p and 720p. Attempting to stuff so much functionality into one cramped, if well pixel-occupied, screen inevitably meant that the screenshots appeared to be quite cramped, but hopefully this will be resolved with later versions. The app will be available soon in the App Store for $4.99.
Steve took the stage once again to again request that the journalists, for whom this whole keynote is for, refrain from using the Wi-Fi and even requested that Wi-Fi cards be switched off as it was interfering with the smooth demonstration of the iPhone 4 features. His return was to talk about the iPhone OS 4.0 which will now, and forever more, be known as: iOS 4; this segment was little more than a rehash the new features of the iPhone OS 4.0 as he did in April: multi-tasking, unified inbox, etc. Jobs mentioned that the Safari search engine feature, which already houses Google and Yahoo! search engines will now also support Bing, and Jobs was surprisingly kind to his companies rival about how Microsoft have done with the introduction of Bing.
As with the iPad, the iPhone 4 will have a focus on eBooks as the app for this, ‘iBooks’, is added to iOS 4 – combining an eReader with a PDF reader to act as a pseudo-document management application as well as a bookshelf with the charming visuals for iBooks that we saw on the iPad demonstrations. Jobs also touted the ability to sync your eBook collection with all your Apple devices, saving the need for repeat purchase and syncing your place in a book and your notes, along with a heavy focus on interactivity within the text, such as finding word definitions with the in-built dictionary and searching the web for words, phrases or references within the book you’re reading.
A new feature within iOS 4 is the inception of iAds, the inclusion of advertisements within apps to, as Jobs explained here, to help app developers (and, no doubt, Apple themselves) earn money and, thus, encourage the development of free and low-cost apps. He demonstrated how these apps would seamlessly integrate with the app and, in fact, the overall effect was quite pleasing; the ad wasn’t distracting. Given the controversy that this move has been met with, Jobs assured the developers present that clicking an ad wouldn’t, thanks in part to the new addition of multi-tasking, cause the app being used to exit, nor would the developer be required to do any sort of hosting or management of the ads, all of which will be served by Apple servers. Apple already has a very wide range of surprisingly well-known companies signed up to advertise on iAds, collectively committed to pay $60 million; money which would come back (minus Apple’s fees of course) to the developers. Jobs delighted in explaining how this close communication between advertiser and platform owner meant that new ways of advertising where possible, and continued to demonstrate using an in-app advertisement for the Nissan Leaf.
Jobs then takes his audience back to 2007 when he demonstrated the first public iPhone call to Jony Ive, one of the lead Industrial Designers at Apple, and he says that he has the honour of doing so again. The large iPhone on the screen showing what Jobs’ handset shows flashes up with the normal outgoing call display to Jony Ive when suddenly a face fills the screen, a face belonging to Jony Ive himself. Now, Jobs and Ive begin a sort of double-act to introduce ‘FaceTime’: Apple’s new iPhone VoIP application, allowing video calling using the front or back facing cameras between any two iPhone 4s. Jobs was coy enough to mention that the app currently only works for “calling” over Wi-Fi, as they are still working on deals with carriers to allow this data-heavy service. The call to Ive came through very clearly with no palpable lag, even in spite of Steve’s Wi-Fi worries so it remains to be seen if this service can compete with Skype, which has recently moved into mobiles. My prediction is that, considering the high number of iPhone users and FaceTime’s video calling prominence (where Skype has, on mobiles, failed to bring that out yet), Skype should retreat – fast.
Wrapping it up, Jobs mentioned that they’d resurrected the white iPhone for it’s fourth iteration to co-exist, once more, with it’s black twin. Details of US pricing were much the same as in the past and there was, understandably, no mention of UK pricing [O2 will be announcing pricing in the coming days - Ed]; though it was mentioned that the UK was one of the first five countries the iPhone 4 will ship to upon it’s release on June 24th. Before signing off, Jobs pleased music-lovers and early iPhone adopters everywhere by announcing that iOS 4 would be available for past models of iPhone and iPod Touch, unfortunately it would be feature-limited on the 3G and not on the first generation Touch due to hardware capabilities.
With the keynote speech over, loyal Apple fans will go away happy that practically all their past demands have been met, if 2009 was any indicator then 2011 will probably be simply a minor variation on what we’ve witnessed now; but you can’t help wonder where Apple can possibly go next…