After stand­ing in line for a cou­ple hours very early Thurs­day morn­ing, I came home with a shiny new iPhone 4. The actual pur­chase and acti­va­tion process itself took about five min­utes and then I walked out of the mall with my shiny new phone and bumper case. Now that I’ve had some time to play with it, I’ve got a few observations.

Screen

The screen on this thing must be seen to be believed. I showed this to a friend Fri­day night and he thought the text looked pretty good, but when he got to the home screen and saw how clear the tiny, teensy icons inside fold­ers were, his jaw lit­er­ally dropped.

I’ve always been a typog­ra­phy snob, and this is the screen I’ve always wanted but never thought I’d see. It’s not just the pixel den­sity (which accord­ing to an actual reti­nal sci­en­tist, actu­ally does live up to the hype, even under a micro­scope), but what that pixel den­sity does in a user inter­face that doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily assume every­thing is 72 dpi. But­tons, icons, wid­gets, every­thing is sharp and nat­ural. Pho­tos look bet­ter, too.

And oddly, I’ve seen apps that can sense when they’re on a retina dis­play and react accord­ingly. On my 3G, iBooks won’t let me select a font smaller than 12 points or so. On my iPhone 4, iBooks has two more smaller font set­tings below what was the min­i­mum on my 3G, because iBooks knows the device can han­dle it. It would have been worth the upgrade for this alone, but there’s more.

More­over, a dis­play this smooth chal­lenges con­ven­tional wis­dom about best prac­tices for read­ing on a screen. For years, we’ve been told not to use fonts designed for print (Hel­vetica, Times New Roman) in favor of “web fonts” like Ver­dana and Geor­gia. On the iPhone 4, this is again reversed. The pix­els are so dense, the curves so smooth, that the advan­tages of print-​optimized fonts reassert and I find I much pre­fer Hel­vetica (which looks “cleaner” than Tahoma/​Verdana) for most text and Times New Roman (which is denser, allow­ing more words per line, than Geor­gia) for iBooks.

Speed

The iPhone 4 is built on Apple’s A4, the same chip that pow­ers the iPad. Spec­u­la­tion is that the iPhone 4’s A4 isn’t run­ning at the full 1GHz that the iPad uses, prob­a­bly closer to 800MHz. It bench­marks just about halfway between the 3GS and the iPad. But what this means is that it is most def­i­nitely faster than the 3GS. Com­pared to my old 3G, it’s a dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence entirely. Mul­ti­task­ing is quick and smooth (more on this later) and apps open just about instantly. I’ve yet to see any of the lag I was used to on my 3G when, say, tap­ping on the search bar in applications.

Build Qual­ity

The iPhone 4 feels really solid in the hand. Given what we saw of the phone’s innards first from Giz­modo and then more fully in iFixIt’s tear­down, this shouldn’t be a sur­prise. There’s not a cubic mil­lime­ter of empty space in this thing. The glass, which has been chem­i­cally treated to be as tough as sap­phire, is clear and solid. The solid steel antenna band (more on this and the “iPhone Death Grip” later) is adds even more rigid­ity and all the but­tons are firm and click with a deci­sive tac­tile feed­back. And of course, the indus­trial design is stun­ning. This is the phone Jony Ives always wanted to build, I’m sure.

Bat­tery Life

Part of the over­all den­sity of the phone is that the bat­tery is so much big­ger than on pre­vi­ous mod­els, and you can tell. With my 3G, I car­ried a Kens­ing­ton exter­nal bat­tery pack with me every­where I went, just in case. With the iPhone 4, I don’t. Even stream­ing Pan­dora in the back­ground, it sips power and I can type for hours with­out drop­ping more than 10%.

Blue­tooth Key­board Support

Typ­ing? Yes, typ­ing. Like the 3GS when updated to iOS 4, the iPhone 4 fully sup­ports Blue­tooth key­boards like my iGo Stow­away. In fact, it does so bet­ter than than the Blue­tooth key­board dri­ver I’d used under jail­break. Once paired, all you have to do is start typ­ing on the key­board in any editable field, and the text starts to flow. Con­versely, I had to re-​pair my key­board every time with the jail­break dri­ver. There is absolutely no lag no mat­ter how fast I type, and most of the key­board short­cuts you’re used to on Win­dows or the Mac work just fine. I can move the cur­sor with the arrow keys, select text with shift-​arrow, and use Control-​X/​C/​V to cut, copy and paste. This was the final nail in the cof­fin for my net­book. I now can do vir­tu­ally any­thing I need to do on my iPhone when I’m out and about. For the few things I can’t do (notably, save doc­u­ments from my cri­tique group from Yahoo Groups to my Drop­box), I can use Log­MeIn Igni­tion to remote into my desk­top and take care of it that way, then go back to what I was doing.

Spellcheck

And of course, for you writ­ers out there, iOS 4 now sup­ports spellcheck sys­tem wide. You’ll see a red dot­ted line under words the sys­tem doesn’t rec­og­nize, and just tap them to correct.

Mul­ti­task­ing

There seems to be a lot of dis­in­for­ma­tion and fun­da­men­tal mis­un­der­stand­ing out there about mul­ti­task­ing on the iPhone. Most of this seems to come from either jail­break users who were used to the way Back­grounder worked or peo­ple that came to the iPhone from other mul­ti­task­ing plat­forms like Win­dows Embed­ded Hand­held (for­merly known as Win­dows Mobile), webOS and Android. So let’s set some things straight.

You do NOT have to “close” your “run­ning” back­ground apps. I see a ton of con­fu­sion on this. Seri­ously, you don’t. I know on other sys­tems, even on the iPhone under Back­grounder you had to be really dili­gent about clos­ing things when you were done with them, but that’s the beauty of the Apple mul­ti­task­ing imple­men­ta­tion. Those apps you see when you dou­ble click the Home but­ton aren’t really run­ning. All that is, really, is a Most Recently Used list of short­cuts, the same as you have on your Win­dows Start menu. They are tak­ing up no resources unless they have a good rea­son to be doing some­thing in the back­ground, and even then, they’re doing just that and no more, not tak­ing up even as much mem­ory as the whole appli­ca­tion would when run­ning in the fore­ground. I’m not sure how I can make this any clearer. Com­pul­sively remov­ing apps from the mul­ti­task­ing tray is a total and com­plete waste of time. Yes, you can kill apps by tap­ping and hold­ing on them in the switch­ing tray and tap­ping the red minus sign, but I only do that when I need to force quit an indi­vid­ual app, that is delib­er­ately restart it from zero with­out saved state infor­ma­tion. This is exceed­ingly rare.

Another mul­ti­task­ing com­plaint I hear a lot is that this only works if devel­op­ers update their apps to sup­port it. First, any app you run will show up in the recently used app list, whether it’s been updated or not. So it’s just as easy to switch to an old app as a new one, the only dif­fer­ence being what hap­pens when you get there. Old apps will launch as though you just launched them fresh, new will pick up exactly where you left off. Also, you don’t have to launch them from the mul­ti­task­ing area to get this ben­e­fit. If you launch an app you’ve used recently from the home­screen, you’ll pick up where you left off the same way. Now what do devel­op­ers have to do to sup­port this magic new feature?

They have to recom­pile their app under the iOS 4 SDK. That’s it. They don’t have to change a sin­gle line of code. All they have to do is recom­pile, sub­mit the “update” to the App Store and their app will sup­port fast app switch­ing. Doesn’t seem like much to ask, and it’s actu­ally pretty much unavoid­able if they update their app ever again for any­thing. So you’re going to see apps updated a lot sooner than later. Even­tu­ally, every app that isn’t just aban­doned will be updated to sup­port mul­ti­task­ing in some way or another.

I’ve seen some peo­ple claim that they feel like they have to remove “run­ning” apps because they’re crowd­ing out the apps they use fre­quently. I can only assume these peo­ple haven’t actu­ally used said apps fre­quently, because that’s exactly how they’re sorted. The app to the far left is the last one you used. The one to the right of it is the next to last app you used, and so on. All you have to do if you want to bring an app back to the first screen of recently used apps is run it. So again, peo­ple accus­tomed to higher-​maintenance sys­tems are bring­ing old habits over and wast­ing time and energy (and get­ting frus­trated) doing things they sim­ply don’t have to do on the iPhone. “Doc, it hurts when I do this.” “So don’t do that.”

iPhone Death Grip

Speak­ing of which, let’s talk about the iPhone Death Grip. This may be a moot point by the time I post this arti­cle, as Apple is rumored to be fast-​tracking iOS 4.01 to address this issue, but it was such a huge con­tro­versy at launch that even my mom knew about it, so again, let’s dis­pel some of the hoopla.

There is a prob­lem with degrad­ing sig­nal qual­ity if you meet a very spe­cific set of require­ments. In order to see this issue, you must:

  1. Have a sweaty hand or be in a high-​humidity area
  2. Have a weak cel­lu­lar signal
  3. Hold the phone in such a way as to bridge the gap between the Bluetooth/​WiFi/​GPS antenna (which runs up the left side of the phone through the vol­ume and mute but­tons) and the cel­lu­lar net­work antenna (which wraps around the bot­tom and up the other side of the phone)

So, if you hold the phone left-​handed in a moist palm where you have mar­ginal sig­nal, you can watch the sig­nal strength bars drop down to vir­tu­ally noth­ing. Oddly, in most cases this doesn’t seem to affect call qual­ity and may be more a dis­play bug than an actual sig­nal prob­lem, but it can hap­pen. To some peo­ple. In spe­cific sit­u­a­tions. Sometimes.

When asked about this via email, Steve Jobs replied, “Don’t hold the phone that way.” Apple fol­lowed up with a more detailed pub­lic state­ment acknowl­edg­ing the prob­lem and sug­gest­ing peo­ple who expe­ri­ence this fre­quently might want to invest in Apple’s Bumper case, which cov­ers the prob­lem area with plas­tic and rub­ber and pre­vents the issue entirely. They’re also work­ing on an update to iOS 4 to address the issue.

So, there’s a minor issue that the com­pany has already com­mit­ted to fix­ing and which can eas­ily be worked around by using pretty much any case or merely hold­ing the phone dif­fer­ently. Clearly, this was grounds for the world at large to go crazy. Cov­er­age of this hor­ri­ble design flaw even made local news across the coun­try, to the point where my mom, not a techie by any means, asked me if I had the problem.

Per­son­ally, I don’t. And I’m left handed. But I live in Den­ver, where the air is thin and dry. So most of the time, all the cri­te­ria to see this prob­lem aren’t met. I do have a Bumper, which I bought at the same time as the phone because I’d already seen, at 7am here in Den­ver, reports on the Twit­ter machine of the issue and wanted to be safe rather than sorry. While I almost never see the iPhone Death Grip issue when not using the Bumper, I’ve started using the Bumper more often any­way, mostly because it pre­vents the phone from slid­ing around on a table while I’m typing.

Con­clu­sion

The iPhone 4 is the finest mobile com­puter I’ve ever owned. Cou­pled with my Blue­tooth Stow­away, it’s every­thing I need in a mobile device and good enough to con­vince me to hold off to see if the next gen­er­a­tion iPad has a retina dis­play as well. Yes, there are a few things here and there I’d like to see tweaked (like how in many apps, the area where the on screen key­board would be is just blank while using the Blue­tooth key­board rather than dis­play­ing more text), but over­all this is every­thing I wanted. If you have an older iPhone, upgrade as soon as you can. You won’t regret it.