iPhone 4 review: Internet

Using Your Browser like Laptop

Another thing Apple has always excelled at is the internet experience on its phone – it used to be the leader in this area without a shadow of a doubt.
Then Android got its WebKit-browser together and with it came a real rival to the throne of best mobile phone browser – and we're not sure that Apple comes up trumps this time.
The Apple A4 processor under the hood certainly has sped things up though – the internet browsing experience is markedly improved from the iPhone 3GS, with web sites loading a shade quicker and scrolling through them a much more pleasant experience.

We're still 'limited' to eight open pages at once though – any more than that and you're not allowed to start up another window.

We can't see that being a problem though, seeing as nobody can need that much information on their mobile phone at once – plus the impressive thing is there's no slowdown in the operation either.
However, the same gripe is still there: no Flash video. Yes, we know the myriad reasons Jobs has for not putting Adobe Flash on the iPhone or iPad, but it leaves iPhone 4 users in something of a limbo state.
Jobs has stated that he believed HTML5 and other standards will take over from Flash video and be a better experience – which is a fine stance to take.
But in the meantime we're left heading to the official BBC site and being constantly exposed to the 'Flash not detected' messages strewn everywhere, which makes us feel like we've got an ancient device, not something that's supposed to change everything. Again.

On the plus side, embedded YouTube works on most sites, jumping straight into the dedicated iPhone client and playing back with minimal loss in quality.
Other little internet tweaks we like are the ability to turn a bookmarked web page into a home screen icon, offering easy access from the start, and the ability to easily email a link to your friends.
However, when you look at the browser on the HTC Desire, you can see it's probably ahead in the overall functionality stakes.
Firstly, when you zoom into text on the iPhone 4, there's only one size that fits all the text on the screen. It's perfectly visible, but if you want to head in further (using the excellent pinch and zoom) some of the text moves off the screen.

The HTC range will constantly resize text no matter how close you get, which gives you far more options, especially for the short sighted.
The Android browser also allows shipping links to Twitter, Facebook and SMS, as well as deploying the latest version of mobile Flash in version 10.1 – and doing it fairly well.

In fairness, the iPhone probably does copy and paste that little bit better, as the little green pins are very easy to grab and drag with the magnifying glass around to help out.
We never thought we'd say it, but the iPhone is no longer top dog when it comes to web browsing on your phone.

iPhone 4 review : Interface part 1

Good Way of Improving


When Steve Jobs releases a new phone, it always comes with an updated firmware too - and the iPhone 4 is no different. The new iPhone OS has been dubbed iOS 4 now, seeing as it's being used on the iPad too, and it's bringing a lot of upgrades that people have been hankering for for years.
But we'll quickly run through the high points of the iPhone for the uninitiated: the same iPhone home screen is offered, where it's a simple grid of icons to select applications.

If you want to re-order these, simply long press on any one, and they all start to wobble around, allowing you to flick them in whichever order you like or if you want you can delete them by pressing the X.
You can't delete the pre-loaded applications though: for instance, nobody cares about Stocks, but you have to have it there. We'd love to know if anyone has ever created a decent portfolio based on the fact they had to stare at the Stocks icon all the time and finally cracked.

Most applications, like Settings and Contacts, take you to a menu-based system, with list options to tap and drill down to further things you can interact with. All very simple really.
But this is one of the key places the iPhone has always excelled - little animated transitions make things look so cool when they flick around under the finger, and it really makes people that try the phone for the first time think it's awesome.
iPhones of old have often struggled to keep up with these animations - talk of 400MHz processors should tell you why. But this is an ARM Cortex-A8 Apple A4 1GHz processor running things here: we're sure Apple is underclocking this to save on battery life, but it doesn't matter - each change is seamless and that's what we want.
And of course, Apple's simple way of navigation is still present - simply tap the home button at any point and you're back to the familiar home screen. Simples, as a certain member of the mongoose family may or may not say.
Multitasking
The main change with the iPhone 4 is the fact multi-tasking is now on offer, something that has put Apple behind the smartphone competition for many years.
Want to listen to Spotify and browse on Safari? Nope, not possible previously - but now it is, and that's what we call a Good Thing.
Of course, Apple being the gleaming machine it is, we couldn't have simple multi-tasking like on other platforms - Jobs has apparently 'solved' things with this cunning new method.

We mean cunning in an ironic, Tony Robinson-way, because essentially all that has happened is Apple has decided to control this element as well: only certain applications which have been verified to not eat all your battery and then kill your pets (well, the first one) will be allowed to run in the background, rather than all and any third party applications.
This is slightly annoying when you have things like social networking options that you want to be able to leave and come back to, and see all the updates without waiting.

But overall: Apple's way of multitasking is the right way - you simply double tap the home button, and a little row of icons at the bottom of the screen pops up, with the most recent application opened on the left.
You can scroll along to choose the running application you want and go right back in where you were before. This means an open email you're writing, a web page, video, or something like a third party internet radio.
Scrolling to the left of the icon dock again will offer two more options - music control with basic commands, and the chance to lock the orientation - handy if you need to keep twisting the phone when watching video for some reason.
Switching between the applications spins the chosen application into view in a very pleasing fashion, indicative of the way Apple does things with the iPhone.

iPhone 4 review : Retina Display

Big Features on iPhone 4

Another big feature of the Apple iPhone 4 is the new high resolution display - Steve Jobs has decided the best name for this is a 'Retina Display' by dearth of the fact it's meant to be so high-res that it's actually more than the eye can cope with. Read more about what we think of that.

But the main point is the screen is so packed with pixels - we're talking 326 pixels per inch, and a 960x640 display, making it ridiculously high resolution for a phone with a 3.5-inch display.
This beats the Nexus One, iPad and pretty much every other phone on the market at the moment - it's immense and we can't really do it justice by describing it; essentially you have to see it to believe it.
The idea is that the days of pixellated images are over - now it's all smooth and sleek lines for everything.
This claim is certainly shown when looking at a web page on maximum zoom; sure, the old iPhone 3GS' effort looked a little ragged, but we accepted it because of the high zoom level and the fact that, well, we didn't care.

But when you see things like that on the Retina Display, things just change completely. It's crisp and pure the whole way in, and while we're not saying that it's the most necessary thing out there, it's really cool and adds an element of wow-factor.
It's not just the smoothness that impresses either; it's the contrast ratios and overall image processing that comes to the fore when you see the iPhone 4's Retina Display for the first time.
Video looks simply sublime on the 3.5-inch screen, and while it's not an OLED (rather a TFT LCD with IPS backplane switching - here's a dull link to an explainer if you're into that kind of thing... and we sadly are) it still looks every bit as good as the display on the HTC Desire.

We might argue that the 800:1 contrast ratio, while stunning, isn't better than an OLED version, which has the advantage of no backlight so the blacks will always be that little bit purer.
We also think that perhaps the colour reproduction isn't as saturated - but given that some people claim that OLED screens are a little too colour heavy, this may not be a bad thing.
Overall - Retina Display is a great thing, although not necessarily better than WVGA OLED screens we see in a lot of high end phones these days; but we can only hope that it's a trend that's followed by more manufacturers in the future.