iPhone 4 – My First 24 hours or The Good, The Bad and the Ugly
Here’s a summary of my experiences, good and bad, with the iPhone 4 after using it for 24 hours.
Good
- Fast. A hell of a lot faster than my iPhone 3G
- Great display. Debates aside, holding it up next to my iPhone 3G the iPhone 4 display is amazing
- Better camera with good video. First photos: http://post.ly/kY8M
- Ability to choose the image size/resolution when emailing photos, including full size
- Folders! I can get to all of my favorite apps from the first home screen
- Direct access to inboxes. Not the unified inbox option, which I don’t want, but a direct way to get to any accounts inbox. The only way I can use the unified inbox is if I can choose which accounts to include instead of including all of them.
- Backup during syncing to iTunes is a lot faster.
Bad
- Glass on the front and back means more smudges.
- Emailing videos compresses them. I need to find a way to easily (over the air) move videos around to my iPad, Macbook Pro and online.
Ugly
- I cannot get my two A2DP Bluetooth devices (Jabra Stone earpiece and Kensington headset) to be seen by the iPhone 4. Apple, Bluetooth keyboard support is nice but how about getting A2DP working.
- Reports are coming out that holding the iPhone by it’s new antenna, you know… the edge of the phone, causes the signal to drop. IMy tests show that there is an issue with this. I immediately ordered one of those expensive rubber bands (aka Bumpers) which I’m hoping will address the problem. Seems like they should have included a “Bumper” with the phone.
[Update:] the problem seems intermittent. I tried showing off the issue to a half dozen different coworkers this morning and the signal was fine. I made sure I had the palm of my left hand overlap the two antennae (the alleged cause of the problem) but the signal never dropped.
Unknown
- Battery life. I’ve read reports of people getting good battery life, in one account up to 38 hours under “heavy use.” Since I live in an area that has crappy Internet, thus WiFi at home isn’t a great option, is out in the boonies, and is surrounded by trees, the phone is constantly going in and out of 3G service. More importantly, the phone is expending battery power to find and connect to the 3G network frequently. During my full day of testing which included shooting videos and trying to email those videos and full size photos over the constantly alternating Edge/3G network, I got 12 hours of battery life. Definitely an improvement over my iPhone 3G and I’d expect it to be better under typical use.
- Using the provided headset, since my Jabra Stone doesn’t work with it yet, Judy said the call quality was a lot better. I haven’t tested it with just the phone by itself to see if the second mic really helps with noise reduction.
- FaceTime. I’m still waiting for someone I know to get the iPhone 4 so I can test FaceTime with them. A local (i.e. Chicagoan) contacted me on Twitter last night to see if I wanted to try FaceTime, but I was on my slow WiFi at home so it wasn’t worth trying it.
