Apple iPhone 4 (AT&T) Review

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.

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.

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.

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 >

Smartphone and App Experience

Smartphone and App Experience
The iPhone 4 is the best pocket computer available today. It has more and better apps than any other device, and runs them very well. Even though the Android Market is growing by leaps and bounds and Android offers a few unique benefits like free Google Navigation, Apple's App Store is still where the action is: it has better apps in almost every single category, most importantly games.

I'm not going to go into the iPhone's base software features. They've been well covered all over the Web. Rest assured it has a great Web browser (without Flash), support for various email accounts, multitasking (new with iOS 4) and al the basic features you expect from a modern smartphone. I'd like to see Apple integrate social networking directly into their address book the way HTC has been doing on Google Android phones, but apps are available for each social network you're on.

The iPhone 4's Apple A4 processor seems to run faster than the iPhone 3GS, but slower than the iPad. On the BenchTest and BenchMark benchmarking apps and the Google V8 Javascript browser tests, the iPhone 4 came in up to 40 percent faster than the 3GS, often almost evenly spaced between the 3GS and the iPad. The iPhone 4 matched the iPad on the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark and on the time it took to launch Need for Speed Undercover, a complex game.

Some of that extra horsepower will be necessary to drive higher-res graphics on the new screen. Some of it makes multitasking smoother—and multitasking was indeed smooth, as I played Pandora music over AT&T's 3G network while updating my TweetDeck. But a lot of it will just keep the iPhone app experience feeling silky smooth.

The faster processor definitely improves the Internet experience. I clocked consistently faster speeds on Speedtest.net with an iPhone 4 than with a 3GS sitting next to it (as long as I wasn't holding the 4 in a "death grip"). While the 3GS ranges from 700-1800 kbps down, the iPhone 4 consistently downloaded in the 2-2.5 Mbps range. In real-life use, that meant Google maps loaded noticeably faster and Web pages appeared faster on the iPhone 4 than on the 3GS.

I couldn't test the phone's new tethering capability, though I found it buried in the Settings menu. When I tried to activate it, it told me to call AT&T.

Apple ships some new apps to go with their new phone and new iOS 4. I have mixed feelings about iBooks. It's a beautifully designed ebook and PDF reader, with an integrated store, the ability to sync bookmarks with an iPad, and a great visual bookshelf metaphor for paging through your books. But the 3.5-inch screen doesn't display all that many words, which means you may be flipping pages almost frantically; a phone form factor just isn't the best one for reading books. The roomy iPad is much better.

I loaded some complex PDFs into iBooks, and I was happy to see them render clearly. A complex bus map took a few seconds to appear but then did so. A 44-page cell phone manual crashed iBooks once, but I didn't have any problems after I restarted the app. Here, especially, the 960-by-640 screen came in handy—tiny text was very, very sharp.

The iPhone 4's other flagship app is iMovie, and we'll have a of that soon. Suffice it to say iMovie is more powerful, and more complex than any other iPhone app I've seen so far, and its interface has more than a five-minute learning curve. On the other hand, it outputs complete movies from raw video you recorded with your iPhone, complete with introductions and transitions.

Multimedia Performance
The iPhone is still the best music and video player in the phone world, as long as you get along with iTunes. I personally like iTunes, and I find its simple yet comprehensive media organization and syncing abilities to be the absolute top of the class. Video playback is especially enhanced by the new screen. An HD TV show downloaded from iTunes was distinctly sharper on the iPhone 4 than on the 3GS.

Music sounded clear through headphones plugged into the 3.5-mm jack and through Altec Lansing BackBeat ($99.99-129.99, ) Bluetooth stereo headphones, with one minor caveat: the fast-forward and rewind buttons on Bluetooth headsets don't work.

The iPhone 4's lightning-fast camera is the best I've seen on a cameraphone so far. Compared to shots from the Motorola Droid X ($299.99, ) and HTC EVO 4G ($299.99, ) in 5-megapixel mode, the iPhone 4 shows less fringing, sharper edges, and better balance of wide dynamic range. Low-light shots still fall below point-and-shoot digital camera standards, and you get some softness, but they're very good for a cameraphone. The flash is also unusually bright, for a cameraphone.

The iPhone can't replace a good point-and-shoot like a Canon Powershot for still images—but for video, it just might. This is a downright excellent video recorder, taking very sharp movies in 720p (1280-by-720) format at 30 frames per second. The iPhone's movie mode easily matches or beats the quality I've seen from Flip cameras.

The elements which would give me pause would be the iPhone's lack of optical zoom and image stabilization. As with all cameraphones, it's hard to hold very still for long periods of time, so videos tend to wobble. And it's impossible to expect optical zoom in a thin phone, but people often want it in a camcorder (especially if they're trying to record kids' sports from the sidelines.)

You can also take photos and videos with the front-facing camera, of course, but they're 640-by-480 resolution at best.

Conclusions
Apple will tell you at great length that they aren't about specs, they're about "experiences." They still offer the easiest smartphone OS to use, with the best app library and the best PC syncing experience. And some of the iPhone 4's hardware features show why you need to look at quality rather than numbers. The phone's 5-megapixel camera may not have as many megapixels as others' 8-megapixel cameras, but it takes better pictures. On the other hand, the 960-by-640 screen has many more pixels than an 854-by-480 screen, but the difference isn't as dramatic as it sounds.

The iPhone 4 is far and away the best smartphone on AT&T, but that's in part because AT&T doesn't yet offer any of the Google Android-powered "super phones" you see on other carriers. If you're faithful to Verizon, for instance, the HTC Incredible and Motorola Droid X are perfectly good enough to prevent you from jumping over to AT&T for this iPhone; if you're a happy Sprint customer, the HTC EVO 4G is an excellent device. None of these phones are far and away better than the others—they're all tough competitors.

The iPhone faithful are reading this review to determine whether I'm a "fanboy" of something or other and to justify their purchases. I'm not a fanboy of anything specific, and their purchases are justified. The iPhone 4 is pretty great, in many ways. But one size doesn't fit all. There is no perfect, end-all device. Google could learn a whole lot from Apple about how to encourage game developers, and Apple could learn from HTC and Motorola about antenna design. The iPhone 4 deserves its place in the pantheon of cell-phone gods, but as part of a distinguished group, not as a single overlord.

Complete iPhone Coverage http://go.pcmag.com/iphone

Compare the iPhone 4 with several other mobile phones side by side.

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