By now you’ve know doubt heard about the Apple iPhone 4. For the last two years I had been using my iPhone 3G every day and loved it; for the most part. Towards the end of using it the battery life was really killing me and things like Facebook and Twitter were taking forever to load any comments or feed at all. Now with my iPhone 4 I’m very happy to be back using what feels like a real phone again.
Facetime: Though I’ve only used it a couple of times the inclusion of a front facing camera no doubt will become invaluable once I start to use Skype over 3G as opposed to only being able to video chat over wi-fi.
Camera flash: This is awesome. It has allowed me to take photos that I wasn’t able to take with my iPhone 3G just from adding a simple LED to the camera area (and some additional logic of course). The other thing is that it doubles as a flashlight. That’s right, the iPhone Flashlight is free and easy to use. Simply launch the camera app, switch to video mode and turn the flash on and you’ve got a very bright flashlight to help navigate in the dark.
iPhone 4 home screen organized using stacks
Stacks: While stacks is a function of the iOS and not the iPhone 4, it’s still new to me. I didn’t upgrade the 3G much past iOS 3.x as I had heard of even more performance issues. I had pages of apps – about 4 to be exact. When I switched to the new iPhone 4 I purged some apps and added them in to stacks to be nice and cleanly organized. Now I can find everything nice and quickly, conveniently from a single home screen.
HD Video: Not having an iPhone 3Gs I had no prior access to video. While I haven’t done much video editing on the iPhone 4 I have used it to record video of my family and our experience at Disneyland. It was great to be able to take quality video to toss into iMovie and be able to edit it easily so that we’ll have a memory to last a long time.
Nike+: Much like the HD Video functionality, I was unable to use any Nike+ functions on the previous phone I had. Now it has access to the Nike+ system. I still use my Garmin Forerunner 305 for the majority of my runs and physical activity but I might just investigate the Nike+ a little closer as a number of my friends use it and love it.