The iPhone 4- a considered review.

I bought an iPhone 4 in the release week. Despite doing this, I maintain that I am not a “fanboy”- a word up with using the word “tot” to describe a small child and “jogging” in my words of hate. My company phone went back from whence it came and I needed a phone to replace it. As such, I believe This rather charming critique does not apply to me although I certainly understand the sentiment. I made my decision based on some basic criteria;
• I am used to the iPhone. Buying another resulted in no time lost learning how to sync this or set that.
• I do not own an iPod at the moment (or rather my Classic lives a life of Allison Krauss and audiobooks with my mother). An iPhone kills two birds with one stone.
• Having an Apple audio product in the inventory is useful for reviewing docks and ancillaries as and when they get offered to you.
• I will freely and willingly concede that a select few Apps are genuinely life enhancing things and I would miss them or at least struggle to collate the same set on another platform.
With this in mind, after a few days of iPhone 4 ownership, l am left with only one word suitable to sum up the whole business; exasperating.
First, the good bits.
The new “retina” screen really is very lovely indeed. The clarity and depth it gives to pictures and video are a genuine step forward. Using a 3G or 3GS alongside is a fairly stark demonstration of the difference between the two platforms. Even very small type on web pages and the like stays easy to read and view.
The battery seems to have improved. The 3G I gave back was a warranty replacement and still relatively new with a battery to match, consumed power like I do lager on a hot day. This unit seems relatively parsimonious by comparison. I would point out however, the torture tests such as walking around streaming Spotify will still destroy a battery in short order.
The new unit is definitely faster. Apps open and close quickly, the web is as fast as this laptop connected to wireless and there is little in the way of lag if you turn the phone through 90 or 180 degrees even when viewing video. It seems as fast as the iPad in this regard.
The new OS is good. The best part being that if you don’t want to change the way you use the phone, there is no need to. I like being able to banish certain functions to a folder and at the same time reduce the number of pages that I have on the phone.
The camera will now take pictures as opposed to artist’s impressions. The flash is a step forward as well.
The not so good bits.
The 32gb unit sat next to me now was £300. Now I’ve spent more than this on stranger devices in the past- my record cartridge for example- but there is no hiding that this is a big chunk of change. It becomes a larger chunk still when we take into account that £300 is not the end of the story. I am the proud owner of a £25 “bumper” (more of which later) and the supplied earphones remain as unusable as ever so if this is your first foray into iPhone usage, you will need to have a look behind the sofa cushions to replace those as well. Thankfully, a number of really useful Apps are free but I will resign myself to another few quid here and there on some that are not. In short, iPhone ownership remains expensive. Of course many things in life are expensive but usually the payoffs are clearer and less littered with provisos than this one.
It still will not play Flash. Now if the rantings of the great rollnecked one are to be believed, this is unlikely to change any time soon. On the iPhone, this is an inconvenience rather than the deal breaker it is for me on the iPad. It is still pretty much the most obvious manifestation that Apple product will render the world in a way decreed by Apple. More times than not, any site in flash has an alternative but many restaurant pages do not. When you absolutely need a phone number right now, being confronted with the little blue “not supported” box is not conducive to a low resting heart rate. I’d like them to sort this but I am not holding my breath.
The actively bad bits
First- the “bumper.” Now I have always bought protective covers for my big screen or touchscreen phones. I would have bought one for this unit too. It is still a bit of a stretch however to see the bumper in the same way I saw the Belkin phone cosy I bought for the 3G. There seems to be pretty strong evidence that without the bumper, this latest iteration of iPhone actually will not work properly. I read the Apple Explanation with a certain sense of familiarity. It does in fact read like most of the hurried excuses I have helped dream up to customers in the past when something I was supporting was behaving strangely. It does in fact read like the same sort of science that the entire world of skincare products is based on (that is to say above homeopathy but below a GCSE textbook).
How does this manifest itself in practice? Well, to be clear, if your life actively depends on the business of making and receiving phone calls, the iPhone probably never has been for you. In fact, smartphones in general probably ought to be given a wide berth and you should buy something recognisably phone shaped, probably built by Nokia and use that instead. Calls made on an iPhone 4 are still not great even judged by the standards of its peers however. Moving around can cause interference, being inside can cause interference, being more than fifty feet from a phone mast can cause interference. In fact interference is pretty much the word that springs to mind when describing calls made on the iPhone 4. By way of comparison, I have a Nokia 2610 that I bought last year as a pay as you go stopgap. It cost £10. If I had to make a call of life or death importance, I have a nagging suspicion that the Nokia would make it whilst the iPhone degenerated into Primal Scream style static.
So where does this leave me? Well I am still unsure. In part I only have myself to blame for buying something when it is brand spanking new. I imagine that some of the bugs will be ironed out. I also suspect that jumping ship is unlikely to be an unqualified step forward. My last Blackberry was sufficiently weird in a number of areas to leave me unsure about it and HTC will remain blacklisted until such time as I can forgive them for the absolute dungheap of a phone they supplied me with a few years ago that was so flawed, the iPhone appears to be a work of near divine provenance by comparison. Nonetheless, if you want to get hold of me in the immediate future, you might do better to email or text me. I described my last 3G as the best personal device I've owned and at the same time, the worst phone I'd owned this century and to be honest, this seems awfully familiar.

Everything has to start somewhere.

And this blog is no exception. I have decided to give this a whirl to see if I can use it to collate some of the work I have undertaken and hopefully make more people aware of it. I have been reviewing Hifi for a little over a year now and have been working with the industry for the best part of a decade. Some examples of the work I have done for Hifi Choice can be viewed here;
Idyam Zeus
Naim 152/155XS
Pure Sound A10 Valve amplifier
Leema Elements Phono Stage
Luxman L550A-II integrated amplifiers

There are more reviews online but you get the idea. Recently I stopped working in the industry full time and with a six month contract hopefully acting as a crossover, I intend to make this work full time. Only time will tell how successful this idea turns out to be!