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The iPhone 4 has finally arrived here in Gadget Lab. Some of you may have seen this before.

We’ve spent only a few hours with the iPhone 4, but our first impressions of the device are quite positive. The 960-by-640 screen is gorgeous, and the thinner profile feels nice in the pocket. FaceTime video conferencing was problematic probably because of our weak Wi-Fi network here but once it got working it was neat.

We’ll have a full review of the iPhone 4 by Friday, but for now enjoy the video above re-introducing the famous device at the center of perhaps the greatest drama in gadget history.

This episode of the Gadget Lab video podcast was produced by Annaliza Savage, with editing by Michael Lennon and audio engineering by Fernando Cardoso. If you want the audio version of this podcast, subscribe to the Gadget Lab audio podcast on iTunes.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

If you thought that the hype was settling down, guess again: iPhone-hungry masses lined up outside Apple stores around the world Thursday, eager to get their hands on Apple’s latest smartphone.

“The line is longer than expected. I wish they had it more organized by time frame like they do at the genius bar,” said Robert Arnold-Kraft, a line waiter outside Apple’s downtown San Francisco store.

“My legs are already cramping up. It’s almost been two hours. This launch is bigger than a blackout sale,” said Joseph Canino, in San Francisco.

In fact, the launch of the iPhone 4 may have drawn the largest crowds ever. In New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Tokyo, Paris and London, thousands of would-be customers queued up, some camping out overnight, to get a chance at buying the phone.

They’ll need some luck. Apple reported receiving more than 600,000 preorders for the phone, in a pre-sales rush that swamped AT&T’s and Apple’s web servers and led to countless customer complaints. Some customers lucky enough to place their orders successfully, and smart enough to choose at-home delivery, started receiving their phones as early as Tuesday. Those who chose to pick up their pre-ordered phones at an Apple store had to wait in line today, although their are separate lines for preorders and for customers without preorders. And the unhappy few who chose to pick up their phones at an AT&T store may have to wait until next week.

According to some estimates, Apple may sell as many as one million iPhone 4s today, a clear record. By contrast, it took the original iPhone 74 days to hit a million, and the iPhone 3GS took a whole weekend to reach that number.

A large crowd stands in line outside the Apple Store in the Cherry Hill Mall in Cherry Hill, N.J., early in the morning Thursday, June 24, 2010, waiting to buy the new Apple iPhone 4. (AP Photo/Mel Evans)

Still, waiting in line is worth it for some.

“Pre-ordering your iPhone is like getting the t-shirt without going to the concert,” said iPad DJ Rana Sobhany in a tweet. “The waiting and anticipation is part of the fun.”

“I feel excited, cold and insane,” said Juliet Hoffman, who was near the front of the line in San Francisco.

Others were less excited about the onslaught of new iPhone customers, given that AT&T’s network is already stretched to the limits.

“So *excited* to know there are about to be 500k+ more iPhone users on ATT starting today. Never thought I would be a network NIMBY,” tweeted Alexander Rose, the executive director of the Long Now Foundation.

Evan Wiendczak, foreground center, from Boston, waits as the first person in line to enter the Apple flagship store, Thursday morning, June 24, 2010, to buy his Apple iPhone 4 in New York. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

Top photo: Customers line up to buy Apple’s newest iPhone outside an Apple Inc’s store
at the Ginza district in Tokyo, Japan Thursday, June 24, 2010. Hundreds more
lined up across the city at Apple stores and other Softbank outlets. (AP
Photo/Shizuo Kambayashi)

Additional reporting by Brian X. Chen.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Got an iPhone 4 yet? Hold it carefully by the glass, avoiding the new steel antenna band that runs around the edges. Note the number of signal-strength bars you have. Now, touch the steel band with your other hand, preferably the left and bottom sides together. You will almost certainly see your signal disappear, or drop by three or four bars.

The problem is being so widely reported that Gizmodo has managed to add 16 videos of the phenomenon, along with many, many user reports. The problem is also repeatable, making it look like a lot more than simple coincidence.

If you have ever touched a bare-metal loop antenna for a TV, you’ll know that the water-filled human body has an effect on the reception, although in that case it usually improves the picture.

This, it turns out, is not entirely unexpected. Just two weeks ago, Jens Nielsen of Danish blog ComON quoted Professor Gert Frlund Pedersen of the Department of Electronic Systems at Aalborg University:

[H]uman tissues will in any case have an inhibitory effect on the antenna. Touch means that a larger portion of the antenna energy turns into heat and lost. This makes the antenna less efficient to send and receive radio signals. [Translation by Google]

Simply holding the new iPhone in the hand is enough to kill the signal. Even Walt Mossberg, in his review of the iPhone 4, had an eerily similar-sounding experience:

[O]n at least six occasions during my tests, the new iPhone was either reporting no service or searching for a network while the old one, held in my other hand, was showing at least a couple of bars. Neither Apple nor AT&T could explain this. [emphasis added]

Is it possible that a problem like this would make it into the wild? You’d think that it would have been discovered in testing. On the other hand, maybe this is what caused Steve Jobs’ connection woes at the WWDC keynote where he demoed the new handset?

One possible answer is in the way the new antenna works. Instead of just picking the strongest signal, the iPhone 4 picks the highest quality signal, the frequency with the least amount of interference. In the current iPhone firmware, this is not yet reflected in the signal display, which still indicates actual strength. Apple has said that this is known bug which it plans to fix. If true, then you shouldn’t actually drop a call, even when your apparent signal-bars drop to zero.

Or perhaps it is all a sinister plot from Apple to sell more of those insulating rubber Bumper cases?

If you have an iPhone 4, please test this out for us, and send the results to us at gadgetnews@wired.com or post them in the comments. Specifically, check to see if a decrease in displayed bars corresponds with an actual drop in call quality.

iPhone 4 Reception Issue? [MacRumors]

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

The iPhone 4’s $200 price tag can be mesmerizing, but we’re all aware it’s going to cost a lot more over time thanks to monthly bills. Just how much will you ultimately spend on an iPhone 4 versus, say, a comparable Android handset? Fortunately for the non-mathletes, a website called BillShrink has done the tedious number crunching for us.

The chart at right (click to enlarge) does a nice job summing up the total costs of ownership for the iPhone 4 compared to three highlight Android phones: the Droid Incredible, HTC Evo 4G and Nexus One. Bottom line: If you opt for minimal data and voice plans, you can potentially spend the least on the iPhone 4 over two years.

That should be comforting for owners of the 600,000 iPhone 4s that were already preordered, though of course it doesn’t factor in the amount you’ll be spending on apps. Considering there are 215,000 apps in the App Store compared to Android’s 70,000 apps, we’re guessing iPhone 4 owners will be spending a lot more than Android users over time with all that additional software available.

Via BillShrink

Image courtesy of BillShrink

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

An exploded view of the iPhone 4 from iFixit

Hardware and software tests of the iPhone 4 and iOS 4 have started to show up, and there are a few surprises. Those brand-new iPad owners looking jealously at the fancy new iPhone can relax, though: the iPad is still the fastest piece of Apple mobile hardware out there.

MacRumors has run the numbers using benchmark Geekbench and Checkup apps for iOS, and although the tests were complicated by the fact that not all the test software runs on all the platforms, the iPad came out tops, closely followed by the iPhone 4, with the iPhone 3G coming in last.

This is a little mysterious, as iFixit, the King of the Teardown, has already ripped open the iPhone4 to reveal that it does indeed use the same 1GHz A4 processor as the iPad, and also has double the RAM (512MB vs. 256MB). We strongly suspect that the chip is being under-clocked inside the iPhone to both keep things cooler in the tight confines of its case and to conserve battery life.

The iFixit teardown reveals some other surprises. The battery is not soldered in place, making it easy to replace. Very easy, in fact, as the two screws on the bottom edge release the back glass plates panel, giving instant access to the battery. Not so good is the new bonded display. It may be tougher, and make the pixels look closer to the surface, but the glass, LCD and digitizer are all one unit, meaning cracked screens will be a lot more expensive to replace.

But what of older hardware? Well, if you have the older 3G, you might not want to upgrade the OS. Flickr user Adrian Nier has posted a side-by-side video of two iPhones 3G, one running the new iOS4 and the other still on iOS 3.1.3. He tests the startup time, the camera, loads a web page (the now-traditional NYT, of course) and accesses the settings. Surprisingly, the phone running 3.1.3 is significantly, obviously faster. See for yourself:

This is not so surprising. The iPhone 3G is capable of running iOS4, but doesn’t get many of its goodies, including multitasking. It is also a three-year-old hardware design, and if you bought one back the, you should be eligible for an upgrade to the new iPhone anyway. For the record, my latest-gen iPod Touch (32GB) runs as fast as it did before. There seems to be no slowdown on an already very fast device.

To delve even deeper into the innards of Apple’s latest, head over to Chipworks, which carries on where iFixit leaves off. If you want to see pictures of the new 5MP camera’s sensor taken with an electron microscope, that’s the place to go.

iPhone 4 Teardown [iFixit. Thanks, Kyle!]

Apple iPhone 4 Smart Phone – Teardown to the Silicon [Chipworks]

iPhone 4 is Faster than 3GS and Slower than iPad in Early Benchmarks [MacRumors]

iOS 4 Performance on iPhone 3G Camera and Settings [Adrian Nier / Flickr]

Image: iFixit

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Just when you thought a few lucky customers beat the rest of the world to getting an iPhone 4, some technology journalists with early access to the device just published their reviews.

Apple typically handpicks a select group of publications to get early review units, and the first round of reviews comes from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Engadget and others.

The reviewers agreed that the iPhone 4’s hardware is state-of-the-art industrial design. However, they debated about whether the handset solves the iPhone’s biggest recurring problem: handling phone calls on the overloaded AT&T network.

Priced at $200 for the 16-GB model and $300 for the 32-GB model, the iPhone 4 hits stores Thursday (though a few lucky pre-order customers are getting theirs as early as today).

Excerpts from the early reviews are as follows:

Josh Topolsky, Engadget:

The big question is obviously whether or not this fixes or helps with the constant dropped calls iPhone users on AT&T’s network have gotten used to. Well in our testing, we had far, far fewer dropped calls than we experienced on our 3GS. Let’s just say that again: yes, the iPhone 4 does seem to alleviate the dropped call issue.

Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal:

In both hardware and software, it is a major leap over its already-excellent predecessor, the iPhone 3GS.

It has some downsides and limitations– most important, the overwhelmed AT&T network in the U.S., which, in my tests, the new phone handled sometimes better and, unfortunately, sometimes worse than its predecessor.

Xeni Jardin, Boing Boing:

The fourth incarnation of Apple’s iPhone is an incrementally improved, familiar device — not a new kind of device, as was the case with the recent introduction of iPad…. Apple’s focus on improvement is as much key to the quality of its products as innovation. But there’s one flaw it doesn’t eliminate: the unreliable quality of calls placed over AT&T, which remains the iPhone’s only U.S. carrier.

David Pogue, The New York Times:

With the iPhone 4, Apple tried to relieve the wigginess [of phone calls]. Sound is much better on both ends of the call, thanks in part to a noise-canceling microphone and an improved audio chamber (which also helps speakerphone and music sound). The stainless-steel edge band is now part of the antenna. The new phone is also better at choosing the best channel for connecting with the cell tower, even ifs not technically the strongest one. (Ever had four bars, but a miserable connection? Then you get it.)

Edward Baig, USA Today:

Cutting through the hype, Apple has given longtime diehards, and first-time iPhone owners, plenty to cheer about.

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews