The iPhone 4 duly launched yesterday with a series of presentations that will bring enthusiasm and nausea in equal measure. Apple continued to praise itself in videos about the product, pointing out how fantastic its new product is, faster, slimmer, with a better screen, a better camera and it offers HD video and video conferencing. It is the biggest step since the first iPhone Apple said. Wrong.
Of course absolutely none of this is new, and where it has added something which is fairly new, its because it bought the capability OEM from other companies, companies who are just as likely to deliver the same components or features to HTC or Samsung, as to Apple.
It was particularly galling to hear Apple talk about a front facing camera so that you could show people on the other end of a videoconference both you and what you are looking at, and to hear Apple pretend it was an innovation. It’s been on every smartphone but Apple’s for the past 4 years, and some for longer. This is catch up.
But for those who love the Apple message, they will see the company re-inventing its core product, and in the process it will appear to have re-invented video calling, HD Video (only at 720p, others do more) and a finally decent (though not leading) camera. Apple has put all this around its own A4 chip, and the new OS can run multitasking, like so many others already can.
More innovative was a stainless steel band around the new handset, which forms part of the antenna system. “Stainless steel for strength. Glass on the front and back. Integrated antennas, and extraordinary build quality,” was Jobs’ boast. Yeah, well welcome to Nokia’s world. iPhones have, in the past, fallen apart earlier in their lifetime than many other rival products, although they’re great when they’re new. Maybe that will have gone away with this generation, but that’s only because Apple is prepared to pay for the extra build quality with the same contract manufacturers which rivals already use. The Apple marketers have managed to make a feature out of the fact that previous products had a poor robustness by comparison with some.
The biggest problem was the smugness of Apple, from Jobs down n the presentations. You would have thought that it invented 5 MP cameras, when in fact most smartphones are moving to 12 MP now; you would have thought that Apple has invented its new Retina display, which is supposed to have the highest resolution display ever built into a phone. It cites 960 x 640 pixels, which is certainly more dense over a 3.5 inch screen than the latest HTC EVO, with a 4.3 inch screen at the more traditional 800 x 480 pixel smart phone resolution. Apple is giving away margin here, in order to come up with something to differentiate its new phone, but all smartphones will move to this form factor screen in their next iteration. The truth is that this screen is better to give the impression that the video and images it takes are better. When you look at video taken on a top of the line Nokia or Samsung viewed through an HDMI link on TV, it’s fantastic. But on their owns screens the Apple video might look better.
Also the killer App as far as we can see is video conferencing, which Apple dubs as ‘Facetime.’ All smartphones have been MORE videoconference capable than iPhones and still are. The issue with videoconferencing and the reason why people don’t use it, is because it takes some kind of in-network media appliance to identify the resolution and codec of each device and then transcode to that spec, on the fly. A call set up used to take about 10 to 15 seconds to align and reserve the network capability. It is only with the introduction of the new MONA standard which has brought this down to around 1 second, and video conferencing is about to become more popular. This is another case of Apple adding something which is about to come into common usage, and the Apple loving public probably ending up believing that Apple invented it. That’s marketing. But for the most part you will only be able to use it with WiFi, not 3G, Apple suggests, because most operators are refusing to support it on 3G.
But still there are issues for the new iPhone. There is no CDMA version or LTE roadmap for the device, and the user experience has stayed more or less static. Recently HTC’s top end phones have been breaking records in several markets and Android is making steady progress, and we think Apple should have done more to hold onto its crown.
The new model IS ultraslim, at just 9.3mm thick, has the famous 3-axis gyro and 6-axis motion sensing and offers up to 40% longer talk time ‘ achieved how? By adding a more powerful, bigger, more expensive, battery. We think that later editions of the A4 processor will reduce power consumption considerably, but that will take a while.
Internationally most Apple iPhone resellers are publicly saying they will have the iPhone 4 from June 24th onwards and the original exclusive partners which sold the first generation are all putting together upgrade plans from the 2G and first generation 3G version of the iPhone.
In the US, where the phone is also coming on June 24, the subsidized AT&T price starts at $199 for the 16GB model and $299 for the 32GB model, with a two year contract. In Europe they are likely to be fully subsidized.
One nice new feature to the UI is the way you can simply drag and drop files or Apps onto one another and the system creates a folder for them and tries to give it a meaningful name. Also Apple’s new iAd mobile advertising platform will be onboard from day one.
iPhone 4 will roll out worldwide to 88 countries by the end of September and by end of July it will reach Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.