iPhone 4: video on wi-fi.

Apple this week unveiled the latest version of its iconic iPhone – now a wi-fi video phone – complete with an all-new design and hailing it as the thinnest smartphone ever. The iPhone 4 will be available in the US, UK, France, Germany and Japan on 24 June.

Meanwhile, the new Retina display, the highest-resolution display ever built into a phone, offers ‘super crisp text, images and video’. The iPhone 4 also features a 5 megapixel camera with LED flash, HD video recording, Apple’s A4 processor, a three-axis gyro and up to 40% longer talk time, all built into ‘beautiful all-new design of glass and stainless steel that is the thinnest smartphone in the world’.

It runs on iOS 4, the newest version of the ‘world’s most advanced mobile operating system, which includes over 100 new features and 1,500 new APIs for developers’. iOS 4 features multitasking, folders, enhanced mail, deeper enterprise support and Apple’s new iAd mobile advertising platform.

Leap forward

‘iPhone 4 is the biggest leap since the original iPhone,’ Apple’s chief executive officer Steve Jobs declared. ‘FaceTime video calling sets a new standard for mobile communication, and our new Retina display is the highest resolution display ever in a phone, with text looking like it does on a fine printed page. We have been dreaming about both of these breakthroughs for decades.’

FaceTime is as mobile as your phone, so you can see your loved ones and friends anywhere there is wi-fi. Using ‘FaceTime is as easy as making a regular voice call, with no set-up required, and you can instantly switch to the rear camera to show others what you are seeing with just a tap’ .

Apple’s 3.5 inch Retina display offers 960 x 640 pixels – four times as many pixels as the iPhone 3GS and 78% of the pixels on an iPad. The resulting 326 pixels per inch is so dense that the human eye is unable to distinguish individual pixels when the phone is held at a normal distance, making text, images and video look sharper, smoother and more realistic.

iPhone 4 is the thinnest smartphone ever—9.3 millimeters—with an all-new design and ‘build quality like no other mobile device’. The front and back are made of aluminosilcate glass, chemically strengthened to be 30 times harder than plastic, more scratch resistant and more durable than ever. The front and back glass have an oil-resistant coating that helps keep it clean, and encircling iPhone 4 is a highly finished stainless steel band made of a custom alloy that is forged to be five times stronger than standard steel.

Camera and video

It features a new 5 megapixel autofocus camera with a 5x digital zoom, a backside illuminated sensor and built-in LED flash that allows users to take ‘amazing pictures even in low light and dark environments’. It also lets users ‘record and edit incredible HD video and the popular tap to focus feature now works while recording video’. The iPhone 4‘s LED flash functions for both still photography and video recording, while the new iMovie app works to combine movie clips, add dynamic transitions and themes and include photos and music: users can buy it for just $4.99 through the App Store via their phone.

Games

iPhone 4 claims to be the best mobile device ever for games and entertainment, with access to tens of thousands of games and entertainment apps on the App Store. Every iPhone 4 has a built-in three-axis gyro that, when combined with the accelerometer, provides 6-axis motion sensing such as up and down, side to side, forward and backward and pitch and roll, making it perfect for gaming. Developers can access the gyro using the new CoreMotion API to make games and other apps that go well beyond what other mobile devices offer.

Thinnest smartphone ever.

Operating system

The latest operating system, iOS 4 has over 100 new features, including multitasking and folders. With multitasking, users can instantly switch between any of their apps while preserving battery life. With folders, users can easily organise their apps into collections by simply dragging one app on top of another. A folder is automatically created and named based on the category of apps selected. Users can change the name of any folder at any time. In addition, users can now customise their lock and home screens with an array of supplied wallpapers or with any of the photos on their phone.

Books

In a move that will threaten Amazon and other online bookshops, the new iBooks app will be available for iPhone 4 as a free download from the App Store and iincludes Apple’s new iBookstore. The iBooks app will sync a reader’s current place in a book, along with any bookmarks, highlights and notes created, between copies of the same book on an iPad, iPhone or iPod touch. iBooks users can now also read and store PDFs in iBooks. There are now over 60,000 books available in the iBookstore, and users have downloaded over five million books in the first two months, Apple claims.

Battery

If there has been one criticism of previous iPhones it has been in relation to battery life. The new model claims to deliver seven hours of talk time on 3G networks, up to ten hours of web browsing on wi-fi and up to six hours on 3G, and up to ten hours of video playback and up to 40 hours of audio playback. This is in part thanks to Apple’s new A4 processor that ‘provides exceptional processor and graphic performance along with long battery life’.

iPhone 4 features a second microphone and advanced software to suppress unwanted background noise for improved call quality when in loud places. iPhone 4 also offers 802.11n Wi-Fi networking and adds quad-band HSUPA to provide 7.2Mbps downlink and 5.8Mbps uplink capability.

Pricing & Availability

iPhone 4 comes in either black or white. Customers can pre-order the phone from Tuesday from 15 June at the Apple Online Store or reserve one to pick up at an Apple Retail Store. In the UK, where the phone will be available from 24 June, O2 says it will offer a limited-time special upgrade offer to its existing iPhone customers ‘to make it as easy as possible for O2 customers still in contract to get their hands on a new iPhone’. It promises further details in the coming days. Three UK will also be offering the new phone.

The iPhone 4 will roll out worldwide to 88 countries by the end of September and be available by the end of July in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.

My Question / Comment Is...