Random iPhone 4 Thoughts

I took the above photo from work with my new iPhone 4. I took some more on the way home today.

It's very, very nice to have a phone that can take a half-decent picture. I moved to this city primarily because I love taking photos of it so much, but I rarely have a proper digital camera with me, so all I'm left with is my phone. The iPhone 3GS had a lot better camera than previous iPhones, but it was still pretty sub-par as cameras go. The iPhone 4's camera is comparable (note strategic use of word) to actual point-and-shoot digital cameras, so I'm excited at the prospect of being able to shoot quick pictures of things without them looking embarrassing on a computer monitor.

One thing I love about taking pictures with an iPhone, as opposed to most digital cameras, is that the iPhone tags photos with the GPS coordinates of where the photo was taken, so inside software like iPhoto (or, now, on the iPhone itself) I can see all of my photos represented on a map. That makes it easy to, say, find all the pictures I took while in Grant Park, or the photos I took while at my brother's place in Maryland. I find that feature so appealing that even when I have a superior camera with me I'll choose to use the iPhone so that I'll automatically have that location information stored.

Lines

I waited in line for four hours to get my iPhone 4 last night. I had a reservation, and reservations expired at midnight, so if I didn't deal with the line to get the phone yesterday, it would have been at least a month before I could have gotten one. I checked out the line at the Michigan Avenue Apple Store on my lunch break, and it was about 5-6 hours long. When I eventually got in line after work, it was a bit shorter. By that point, only people with reservations were allowed in (no "walk-ins"). It's amazing that a phone can draw that kind of line.

Apple handled the line rather well. It wrapped entirely around the block, but there were store employees all around, making sure that curbs, entrances, and sidewalk crossings weren't blocked and answering people's questions. Apple even paid for a local burger restaurant to give anybody in line free burgers, lemonade, and milkshakes, on top of having plenty of bottled water to go around, and for the first half of the day there was coffee and iced tea. When I was in line, a radio station was handing out bottles of SoBe Lifewater. I felt very looked-after.

Prior to this, the only line I'd been in close to that length was for roller coasters. I figure that if people can reasonably wait 2-3 hours for a ride you'll experience for about 77 seconds, the same amount of time for a phone I'll enjoy for at least a year can't be that absurd. The people nearby in line were pretty friendly and talkative. There was a nice mix of people, not the sort of sweaty geeks you'd expect to see lined up for a product launch. The guy behind me was editor-in-chief of his law school's Law Review.

For the record, I waited about an hour to get an Xbox 360 (which I don't really regret) a few days after launch, and about 40 minutes for a Nintendo DS (which I regret entirely).

Face-Time

The addition of a front-facing camera and a built-in protocol for video calling is nifty, but right now I'm like the one guy in 1987 who owned a fax machine and couldn't wait for someone else to get one so he could make use of it. Since iPhone 4 has only been out for a day, and only people with iPhone 4 can use Face-Time, there's nor many people for me to Face-Time with.

I suspect that in a year or so, the video calling environment will be a bit more accessible. Hopefully, Apple will add in support for people using their iChat software on Macs (which is in itself a rather well-performing video chatting utility), so that (so to speak) people will realize that they had fax machines the whole time.

Long-term, though, I don't think video calling will ever catch on in the way that the past's version of the future predicted. Video chatting requires you to worry about how your face and hair look, and it requires your full attention, whereas you can be naked and rollerblading and hold a vocal conversation over a phone perfectly well. Our laziness and vanity will probably keep widespread video chatting on hold for quite a while, until we've reached a point where shame and privacy are no longer common traits among humans.

Screens

Much hay has been made over the iPhone 4's buzzword "retina display." A previous iteration of me would have spent time researching the specific pixel matrix resolution mathematics involved in the newfangled screen to formulate a solid opinion regarding whether Apple really accomplished a legitimate feat of engineering, or just hobbled together someone else's invention and put a marketing spin on it, but at this point in my life I don't or can't care.

All I know is that the screen is so crisp, my brain can't process it. It's crisper than any display (computer or handheld) I've ever seen. Text isn't represented on the screen, it exists on the screen. The words just pop out at you. Comparisons to printed paper are meaningless, because the concepts are entirely different. Text on the iPhone 4's display is a whole new kind of thing.

The Catch-22

I think the mostly-plastic iPhone 3G and 3GS were kind of ugly from the back, but didn't mind so much because the back was always hidden by the various multi-layered cases I bought for them. It was in my interest to protect the iPhones from the various drops-on-concrete I subjected them to, so the ugly back wasn't an issue.

The iPhone 4, however, is much better-looking a phone. It's a rather gorgeous little brick of steel and glass. Sometimes I just look down at it, sitting on my desk. Hello, little phone. That beauty comes at a price, though. The glass front and back means it's got twice as much surface area susceptible to catastrophic breakage.

That means that it's in the phone's best interest to get some kind of protective case for it. But it's in my best interest to leave it naked so I an continue to ogle its curves and edges. Because it's so pretty, I don't want to cover it; but because it's so delicate, I want to protect it. I feel like the parent of a teenager struggling to find the right balance between overprotective and irresponsible.

The Verdict

Upgrading from the iPhone 3G to the 3GS had a very sharp, immediate payoff in that apps ran twice as fast. It's an easy selling point: iPhone 3GS is faster.

Upgrading from the iPhone to the iPhone 3G also had an immediate, obvious payoff: it had 3G cellular internet, which was much faster than EDGE, plus it had actual GPS. Easy selling point: iPhone 3G has faster internet.

Upgrading to the iPhone 4 doesn't really have that wham-bam payoff. It has a lot of improvements and niceities, but nothing that gets all up in your face and tells you how stupid you've been for having a crummy ol' 3GS. It's faster, sure, but not several times faster. It doesn't have faster cellular internet. It has a much better camera, and a crazy-awesome screen, but those aren't huge selling points to the general public. Basically, it's just a ton of gentle improvements upon the former phone. Its selling point: iPhone 4 is just better.