Well, I bit the bullet and upgraded to the iPhone 4. With the "recycling" deal that O2 and Carphone Warehouse are doing with old iPhones, it cost cost me virtually nothing, other than a renewed 24 month contract (by which time I expect the iPhone 6 will have me drooling for 4G networking, a 3D screen and a built in projector or something.) The whole aerial issue (which I'll probably talk about in a seperate post) didn't really bother me, as I figured that as I live in London and am not left-handed, it probably won't affect me much. (And, stupid as the advice is from a PR perspective, if i'm in a low signal area and lose reception if I'm holding it in a certain way, then I just won't hold it that way.)

In fact, the only reason I upgraded now rather than waiting for the fuss to die down was that the iOS4 upgrade for my old 3G model slowed it down to an utter crawl- applications were crashing when I tried to launch them (including Apple's own, like the iPod and Mail), and Safari was locking up for 20 seconds at a time on a very regular basis. Basically, the iPhone 3G clearly doesn't have enough RAM to run iOS4, despite most of the cool features being removed (multitasking, fast app switching — even customisable wallpaper is removed.) So, unless you have an uncontrollable desire to edit more than one playlist at a time, don't install the upgrade on a 3G. (3Gs, from what I hear, is fine though.)

So, having had about 2 days now to play around and test it, my overall impressions… well, my expectations were pretty low. I expected the same sort of thing as my old iPhone, but faster (or at least, without the painful lock-ups.) And a better camera — that is, better than the one I occasionally used on the 3G model.

But my first impressions? I love it.

It's lots of little things that impress me about the iPhone 4. A lot of them are things that you probably won't notice unless you're an existing iPhone user, and probably a heavy user at that. For example, the system uses a different font (Helvetica Neue, rather than Helvetica), which gives screens of text a bit of a different feel. This is a difference that you probably wouldn't notice as much if the font was changed but the screen was the same, but perhaps you wouldn't notice the difference as much if it was the same font on a different screen. I would guess that most people would attribute the different "feeling" to the screen, rather than the font (if I hadn't read about it beforehand, I think I probably would have done.) And of course, if you haven't spent several hours looking at an old iPhone screen then you wouldn't even be aware that there is a change. (To see the difference, flip between the "Favourites" and "Contacts" lists in the Phone application — Favourites uses the new font, while Contacts uses the old one.)

But the point is that it's the feeling that something is different that makes a difference, more than the concrete "more space", or "faster CPU."

The Screen

The higher resolution was one of the big selling points for me, but it's actually a bigger factor than I'd expected. How much of this is down to comparing a 2 year old handset with a brand new one— I'm not sure. But colours are brighter, and blacks are darker. It also feels much smoother — again, this might be because I'm comparing a phone with 2 years worth of grime build-up to one with a freshly polished (and aleophobic-coated) surface.

Obviously, with 4 times as many pixels, the picture is sharper, but this also means that small text that was previously unreadable is now clear and legible. It's a funny area — in the same way that the TV ads for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 ads usually don't look as good as the game itself (because you usually don't get to see them in HD), pictures on a regular PC don't really do the iPhone 4's high resolution screen justice. On the other hand, it's clear that it's a better screen — what is less clear is the difference that it makes in day-to-day usage.

Basically, the problem is now that if you have to hold it closer to your eyes to read it, you get to a point where your eyes can't focus properly before you get to a point where the image is too pixelated. I haven't had my eyes tested for quite a while (I know I should), but I've never needed glasses or had any eyesight problems, so I'm quite happy with the claim that the screen is actually better than my eyes.

Apple compared the screen's higher resolution to print, but there's a bit more to it than that. The fact that the picture still looks good from different angles is one of the subtle things that makes a big difference. We're lucky enough to have bright sunshine in London at the moment, which on the old 3G screen meant that you had to turn away from the sunlight or stand in a shadow to read the screen — the iPhone 4 looks just as good in direct sunlight, which is a huge benefit.

The Camera

A problem I've always had with cameraphones is that at least 95% of the time, you only look at the photos either on the phone's screen, on a PC screen, or occasionally as a slideshow on my TV. What this means is that a cameraphone with over about 2 megapixels is just a level of detail that never actually gets seen (unless I'm bothering to do any editing — which is something I tend to have less and less time for), and in conditions like low light (ie. most of the time I actually want to get a photo where I haven't brought a "proper" camera), they are just rubbish. So, the improved screen means that the camera feels better straight away - because the pictures look better. But it's not about megapixels- it's about the quality of the pictures, and the iPhone's camera has now got to the point where I'm not bothered about carrying around a pocket-sized camera any more; if I want good pictures (that I might want to see in print) then I'll take my SLR. For everything else, the iPhone is fine.

I haven't had a phone that shoots video before, but I suspect it's going to make a difference. For example, when my son took his first few steps last Saturday, if I'd had a video camera with me then I probably would have got it out to film him trying again, instead of waiting until the next day. I guess the bigger question of whether this is really a good thing or not (in the sense that I might be watching more and more of my special moments through a tiny LCD screen) is a different debate.

On a more practical note, if you have used your phone's screen as a night-time torch, then you'll find it useful to know that putting the video camera on and switching on the flash gives you a very bright light. Not just a dim glow that stops you bumping into things, but an actual, don't-look-directly-at-the-light torch. (Naturally, apps have quickly sprung up that take advantage of this, and despite initial rejections, are being approved by Apple.)

The Aerial

The fuss over the aerial problems are probably the subject of a separate post, but in short; I live and work in London so I generally get a good signal, and although I think it's pretty stupid advice to tell people to "not hold it that way", if I'm losing signal, then I'm not going to hold it that way. (I don't think I do anyway.) So I'm not really bothered by the whole issue. As far as I can tell, the overall reception is better rather than worse, so the aerial is a plus point for me.

Wifi reception has definitely been improved; at my desk at work, I can log onto a Wifi hotspot that is about 80m away, on a different floor, and with a lift shaft between the wireless router and my desk. (So that's a floor, and at least 3 walls between us.) My 3G could never see it — and even my Macbook Pro doesn't register it.

The drawback of this is the deal with BT to give access to their wifi hotspots. If you're near a public BT Openzone hotspot, then the iPhone will automatically log on to it. Which is great.

What isn't so great is if you're near a private BT Openzone hotspot (ie. pretty much any house with BT Broadband and one of their Home Hubs), then the iPhone will log onto it, not get access to the internet, and redirect you to a sign-in page that you can't skip back from. Which is incredibly annoying, and is now something I'm getting when walking down the street, and occasionally on the bus.

Other Stuff

iBooks - I have this problem with an old 3G iPhone, an iPad, and now the 4G iPhone; PDFs that I've downloaded from iTunes (specifically, iTunes U) appear in iTunes as documents that I can transfer to iBooks, which I can tick and tell it to tranfer, but don't actually appear on the device. So I think I'll be sticking with Dropbox for moving documents around that I want to read on different devices. (Incidentally, I would highly recommend Dropbox to anyone who uses more than one computer, especially if you find yourself emailling things to yourself or using USB sticks to move files around. And if you use this referrer link to sign up, then we both get some extra free storage.)

I can't see myself buying books — but with the new screen, I can see myself using my phone as a portable reader for PDFs much more. (But at least for now, through Dropbox rather than iBooks/iTunes.)

Multitasking. Multitasking isn't really here yet. Not because of the limitations of what can or can't be done in the background, but because applications need to be updated to make the most of the new feature. Given that so many iPhone apps don't bother to save their state already (which has been possible for quite a while now), I think this is going to take some time to be seen as a standard feature, rather than an extra luxury. But given that even Apple don't seem to have fully integrated it into their standard apps (if I switch away from a video playing in the iPod and then switch back, I don't go back to the video in the same spot; I go back to the list of videos instead), I think it's going to take a while yet for regular developers to recode their apps.

In the meantime, fast app switching is good. I haven't yet got out of the habit of going back to the home screen, but I expect it will only be a few days until it's the kind of thing I can't imagine an iPhone not having. One minor niggle is that the dock-like menu bar that you use to switch apps has been compared to a task manager — a clear illustration that this isn't the case is the fact that an app you are currently running doesn't appear in the list- so if you want to kill an app that's crashed, you need to switch away from it first before you can kill it.

So, overall, big thumbs up. Given that, with the recycling deals that O2 and Carphone Warehouse are doing, it will have effectively cost me about £2 (plus a 24 month contract), it's definitely worth the upgrade.

(Now, what I really need is a good blog editing application that works well with Drupal. If I can't find one, I might start building one for myself…)