iPhone 4 Review

Hello, Kyle here. I'm going to do a simple review/informational post about the beautiful piece of technology that's called iPhone 4.


I stood in line for over 3 hours in 90 degree Fahrenheit weather in Texas on June 24, 2010 (Launch day) waiting to pick up my reserved black 32 GB iPhone 4. Was it worth waiting that long for to replace my first generation 8 GB iPhone with a failing battery? Oh, heck yes. I would have waited longer if I needed to. This iPhone is just amazing. If someone tells you that the iPhone 4 is the best smartphone on the planet, you can believe it without a doubt.


First thing you will notice with this phone is the screen's quality. It really is beautiful. You have to see it in person to see how awesome it looks, but believe me. It really does look flawless.

One (very) welcome improvement with this phone is the amount of RAM. It has as much RAM as the iPhone 3GS and iPad put together. That means 512 MB of RAM. For a phone, that is quite a bit. Another very welcome improvement is Apple's A4 processor. With the RAM and processor, this phone is VERY responsive. I can do everything MUCH faster and much more fluidly than I could with my first gen iPhone.

Multitasking is kinda hard to review thus far, since very few apps support it right now. Multitasking is mostly a "recent apps" deal right now. But as time goes on, a ton of apps will support multitasking. From what I've seen so far, it works really well. I don't see a difference with the battery life or any lag in the phone due to overload.

Lets step away from the software for a moment and get to the hardware. First thing is the frame. I love how Apple actually made the structure of the phone the antenna of the phone as well. As far as I know, that has never been done before. That actually has a flaw, though. If you touch the gap on the bottom left of the outside frame with your hand or whatever, you make an electrical connection between the two pieces of metal, making the iPhone lose reception until it loses service entirely. I haven't seen my phone lose service entirely, but it did lose 4 out of 5 bars when I touched that gap for a little while. Solution: Apple's Bumper case made specifically for the iPhone 4. Or a third-party iPhone 4 case. Anyway, moving on.

The 5 megapixel camera (And flash) is awesome. You can record 720p video with it. Actual HD video. On a phone. How awesome is that? What's even cooler is the front facing camera. With that, you can do video calling, known as FaceTime, and also record video and take pictures. The quality is great.

I haven't been able to try FaceTime yet because nintendude hasn't gotten his iPhone 4 yet. FaceTime requires two iPhone 4's.

iPhone 4 also comes with a new 3-axis gyro. With the accelerometer that's already in place, it gives iPhone 4 six points of reference for motion sensing. That makes it capable of advanced motion sensing such as user acceleration, full 3D attitude, and rotation rate. Which is really cool, considering it's a phone.

There's a noise-cancellation microphone on the top of the phone for phone calls. I noticed that the microphone and speaker at the bottom of the phone have switched places from previous generation iPhones.

Getting back to the software. iOS 4 is really cool. Multitasking, folders, the improvements in iPod functionality such as being able to create and name playlists as well as iTunes can (Not that On-The-Go stuff anymore), spell checking (In addition to autocorrect), you can gift applications to people, wireless bluetooth keyboard support, better security, the list goes on and on.

iPhone 4 is the best phone I've seen in my life. I'm very happy with what Apple has done to it and I can't wait to see what they do next year. If you have a first generation iPhone or an iPhone 3G, I strongly urge you to get an iPhone 4. If you have a 3GS and you're thinking of upgrading, I say do so. The upgrade won't be as dramatic as opposed to from a first or second gen iPhone, but it's still a great upgrade.

The iPhone 4 gets a 10/10 score from me. =P

Until next time, see ya.

Kyle

Learning Jav- ...er, Objective-C

Hello, Kyle here. I'm back with Hunter with our project and I, as well as one or two other people, am learning Objective-C as part of our project. Objective-C is a programming language that's used for the Mac and iPhone platforms. I've been wanting to learn it instead of Java. I didn't like Java too much. Don't get me wrong, Java is a good language. It just doesn't do exactly what I want to do. Objective-C does.
So far, I've learned some of the very basic statements. I can output mathematical equations and text to the console. No real program yet. I should get better progress with Objective-C than I did with Java. I didn't have too much of an interest in Java, while I'm very interested in Objective-C.

I'll be using the Mac/iPhone SDK (Xcode) for my programs. The one problem with that, it requires a mac to be able to use it, which I personally don't own. My brother and mother have one, but I can't use those. My solution? Something awesome.


You may be thinking "What am I looking at?" well, besides the Mass Effect 2 theme on my desktop, you're looking at OS X Snow Leopard running in a virtual machine in Windows 7. Basically like the Mac software Parallels, but in reverse. I won't explain how I did it since it's actually quite difficult, but I basically have a mac now. All that trouble just so that I can learn Objective-C. Worth it? Yes. Very yes.

Moving on to the actual language itself. It's not as easy as Java, but I like a good challenge. The code is a bit confusing to me since I know a bit of Java. But other than that, learning progress is slow but steady.

WARNING: The rest of this article is nerd talk.

Here's some example code that I've written.

#import <>

int main (int argc, const char * argv[]){

int a;
int b;
int c;

a = 2;
b = 3;
c = a % b;
NSLog(@"a%%b=%i",c);
c = b % a;
NSLog(@"b%%a=%i",c);
c = a % a;
NSLog(@"a%%a=%i",c);
c = a + b;
NSLog(@"a+b=%i",c);
c = b + a;
NSLog(@"b+a=%i",c);
c = a - b;
NSLog(@"a-b=%i",c);
c = b - a;
NSLog(@"b-a=%i",c);
c = a * b;
NSLog(@"a*b=%i",c);
c = b * a;
NSLog(@"b*a=%i",c);
c = a * b + 5;
NSLog(@"a*b+5=%i",c);
c = a * (b + 5);
NSLog(@"a*(b+5)=%i",c);
c = (a * b) + 5;
NSLog(@"(a*b)+5=%i",c);
c = b * a;
NSLog(@"b*a=%i",c);
c = a / b;
NSLog(@"a/b=%i",c);
c = b / a;
NSLog(@"b/a=%i",c);

return 0;
}

Simple, right? Maybe to you nerds out there. All that does is output this to the console (Got rid of the timestamps):

run
a%b=2
b%a=1
a%a=0
a+b=5
b+a=5
a-b=-1
b-a=1
a*b=6
b*a=6
a*b+5=11
a*(b+5)=16
(a*b)+5=11
b*a=6
a/b=0
b/a=1
Debugger stopped.
Program exited with status value:0.

Besides your math homework, what does it look like to you? "Nothing" should be your answer. But to me, that's my first Objective-C program. I'll explain a few things about the code to the best of my ability.

First off, I'll skip from the very start of the code to the NSLog deal. NSLog is basically a command to output some text (Or numbers or whatever) to the console outside of the user interface. Pretty simple.

With the int a; int b; and int c; stuff, I'm declaring the variables as integers, but they don't yet have a value. They just exist, but don't do anything. I give each variable (Symbolized by a letter after the int statement) a value by simply saying a = 2; b = 3; and c = a % b;

One thing about ints, they're whole numbers. So if you were wondering why 3 divided by 2 only equaled 1 and 2 divided by 3 equaled 0, the program rounded the numbers to whole numbers. It's easy to use decimals by just switching int with float.

To be honest, I'm kinda confused about the % deal. The books I'm reading haven't explained it in too much detail yet.

The return 0; statement makes the program end with a value of 0. As I understand it, it has to do with the computer's random access memory (More commonly known as RAM) and such. Could be wrong, though.

Even though I already knew it would be harder than Java, Objective-C is going to be a somewhat bigger challenge to learn than I originally thought. One step at a time.

Anyway, all this is a (very) simple summary of all I've learned today (And all night last night) and I have a lot of work ahead of me. I'll talk to you guys later.

Until next time, play nice. =)

Kyle