iPhone 4 8GB Review
By Jo Wilkes on November 1st, 2011
The iPhone 4 received a revamped design which opts for square, sharp edges over the curves of the previous model. The phone is 4.5 inches tall, 2.3 inches wide and 0.37 inches deep. In height it is equivalent to the iPhone 3GS, but it is also a fair bit slimmer (25% to be exact). The design, as it happens, works very well with the new retina display screen. Whilst most won’t notice the difference of a slimmer phone in the palm of the hands, they will notice the difference in the iPhone 4’s new screen. It is 3.5 inches in size and offers a whopping 940x640 resolution. The screen also has a similar contrast ratio to the iPad, coming in at a ratio of 800:1. So the screen is undoubtedly very impressive, if not the best on the market. The text, colors, icons are all very sharp, crisp and clear. On graphically demanding apps, such as games, the difference is really felt, making the step closer to featuring full portable gaming capability.
Shipping with the iOS 4.0, the new iPhone also comes with some fantastic new features. With the iPhone 4, the wait for multitasking capability is over. The multitasking menu is easy and simple to use. All you need to do is hit the home button twice in succession and you will be given a slide bar list of all currently running applications. To close one it is simply a matter of pressing it once and then selecting the ‘x’ at the top right of the icon. Yet multitasking is still not on level with what you’d usually expect from your computer, or even from other phones. There are a few applications that won’t run in the background, or will hibernate so that they do not take up more of the system’s resources. This includes such things as Twitter feeds.
Other interesting features include home screen folders, which are similar to those seen on the Blackberry. Reallocating apps into these folders is the same as moving an app through screens, only this time you drop it in on the created folder.
The performance modifications with this phone easily balance out the added system intensity of iOS 4, and especially multitasking. It features a 1GHz ARM Cortex A8 chip, Apple’s new chip that they’ve also used in the iPad. Applications run smoothly and load faster than they did on the 3GS.
