The cameras are ready to roll

Jun 19, 2010 - Ashish Bhatia

Its predecessors altered forever our perception about not just what we should expect from a smartphone, but also how we interact with it. Now, the just-born 4th generation Apple iPhone — by pushing the technology envelope even further — is seeking to break fresh ground in enhancing and elevating user experiences with a mobile phone.

Upping the ante
Sleek, slim and smooth. At 9.3mm, the flat-bodied iPhone 4 is currently the thinnest smartphone ever. That’s 24 per cent thinner than the iPhone 3GS. The front and back of the phone now comprises chemically treated aluminosilcate glass to make it scratch resistant and sturdy. The stainless steel custom alloy band around it doubles as the antennae. Upping the ante on the display front, this iPhone’s 3.5 inch screen boasts 960x640 pixels. This dense 326 pixels per inch Retina Display, as it has been termed, makes text, images and video amazingly sharper and smoother.
The iPhone 4 now carries a 5 megapixel autofocus camera with an illuminated sensor — and at long last a built-in LED flash for photography in low light ambiences. Yes, that’s pretty yawn-worthy; other phones have long since been there, done that… Until you learn that the new iPhone not only allows you shoot high-definition video but also edit it right there on the phone using the iPhone version of the exceptional iMovie application. Oh, there’s the addition of a front facing camera for video calling.
Just when you thought that video calling was the stuff of hype and futuristic sci-fi movies, the iPhone 4 is attempting to exhume it. Don’t look bored, this could actually be interesting. There’s no set-up required whatsoever and no extra airtime pay outs.

Gaming on
Then, to further boost the already exceptional gaming abilities of the iPhone, the fourth avatar incorporates a built-in 3-axis gyroscope. This, combined with the accelerometer gives the phone 6-axis motion sensing abilities for side to side, forward and backward, up and down and pitch and roll gaming movements.
Under the hood now beats Apple’s new 1GHz A4 processor. This, and a beefed up battery help the iPhone 4 notch up an officially rated 7 hours of talk time on 3G networks and 10 hours of web browsing on WiFi.

Room for improvement
Everything in Apple pie order? No. Sore points with the iPhone that still remain are that it lacks free turn-by-turn navigation, file attachments within mail, streaming music from the cloud over iTunes, and file management. Features that even the new iOS upgrade is not addressing for now. One presumes that these goodies will be dished out in incremental upgrades, by and by. It also remains to be seen how video calling catches on. But the cameras for sure are ready to roll...
So when can you purchase and paw it in India? September 2010.
The writer is a part-time publishing
consultant and a full-time devotee of all things tech. He can be contacted at
ashishone@gmail.com

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