- iPhone 4
Overnight, my shiny, curvaceous iPhone 3GS has gone from cutting-edge smartphone to yesterday's news. The UK launch of iPhone 4 on June 24 can't come soon enough – I think it will change the smartphone landscape.
I love the look and feel of the new iPhone 4. My iPhone 3GS looks like a bloated, plastic toy in comparison. And it's not just because the new iPhone's industrial styling, squared off edges and brutish combination of stainless steel and glass create a gadget that feels at once both luxurious and practical; it is design in the purest sense, with every material serving a specific purpose.
Then there's that screen - the more I think about it, the more impressed I am that Apple has been able to create such a pin-sharp display without using an OLED screen. The pictures really don't do the screen justice; it has a crispness and depth of colour that far surpasses any other smartphone screen I've seen. Text is no longer slightly blurred around the edges, icons leap out on the screen, while photos look incredible.
It's at its best when playing back HD video, though. I think the iPhone 4's ability to edit and record 720p HD video may just have signalled the death knell for Flip's pocket video cameras. The iMovie app, which allows users to edit and share video directly from the iPhone, makes it easy to come up with fun, professional looking clips that will look as good on a 42in high definition television as they will on a computer screen.
FaceTime, the video-calling feature, is getting plenty of coverage, and rightly so. If anyone can make people look with fresh eyes at the horror that, up until now, has been mobile video calling, then Apple can.
The fact the service is currently Wi-Fi only is a blessing and a curse - it restricts where and when you can use FaceTime, but it does at least ensure a high-quality signal, so video suffers very little buffering, and audio and video remain in sync. The ability to switch between front and rear-facing cameras at the touch of a button is a nice feature, and the whole FaceTime system is typical of Apple's approach to simple and intuitive interfaces underpinning the user experience. The clarity and quality of the screen then brings the whole conversation to life.
Multi-tasking - a feature of the new iOS4 operating system rather than something just specific to the new iPhone - is probably the most welcome improvement. A double-click on the Home button brings up a dock, which allows you to whiz through a carousel of applications and open Last.fm and your email, say, while still allowing you to play a game of Guitar Hero. The introduction of folders, to help corral apps in to some kind of order, also reduces desktop clutter, and makes the user experience more efficient.
I'm keen to see what advertisers do with the new iAd mobile advertising platform. If they are ambitious, and seek new ways to create immersive and engaging entertainment and interactive apps-within-apps, then some adverts could even become a "destination" in their own right.
One thing I would perhaps liked to have seen on iPhone 4 is a native app that unifies your social-networking stream in to a single, real-time ticker. HTC offers something similar on its Android-based phones, and it was one of the stand-out features of the Palm Pre and its webOS software.
But Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, told me that Apple had been "unimpressed" with the way other companies had implemented this social stream, and that they weren't convinced that people want to muddle together their social networking presence in to a single application. Instead, Apple believe that having separate apps that can run simultaneously was a better balance, allowing people to keep discrete social profiles and tune out noise while still keeping up with the things that matter to them.
Apple's iPhone 4 builds on a winning formula, taking all that is good about the iPhone experience and making it better. On battery life, speed and multitasking, Apple has addressed some of the key criticisms of its device. And, with Google Android snapping at its heels, Apple has, apparently effortlessly, manage to haul itself to the front of the chasing pack and cement its reputation for producing some of the best smartphones on the market.
