iPhone 4

or should we call it the iPhone 3GSS (note the additional S ?)

With all the interesting Android handsets that have been coming out lately, I was expecting Apple to announce an exciting new version of the iPhone.  This exciting new version of the iPhone would make all other cellphones looks mediocre or crappy.   What Apple showed off on the 7th at WWDC was not that phone I was expecting. Perhaps my expectations were so high that it would have been impossible for anything to meet those standards.

The first new feature of the iPhone 4 is it's new display.  The resolution is 960x640   This is a HUGE resolution.  Unfortunately it's in the same 3.5" area as the original iPhone.  All those extra pixels give the phone a much higher DPI than the 3gs (326 to be precise)  Apple claims that the dpi is higher than what the human eye has.  This is of course all fake marketing speak.

326 DPI is very, but do we really need such a high DPI?  My Motorola Milestone has a much lower DPI and yet text on it looks perfectly fine.  I can't see a single pixel.  I found somewhere online that the Milestone has a DPI of 200 something.  Does that 120 extra DPI really make much of a visible difference?

I think those pixels could have been put to better use for something like making the screen wider.  I'm not entirely certain, but I believe the new iPhone has a aspect ratio similar to the old iPhone.  It would be nicer to have more pixels.

Aside from those small problems.  The iPhone 4 has a very nice display.  However, it hardly makes me want to drop whatever phone I'm using right now and buy a new one.

The second major new feature of the iPhone 4 is the front facing camera.  Front facing cameras are however not anything new at all.  Why does anyone care?

Everything else seems like a minor incremental upgrade.  I might write a little bit more about the iPhone in another post.