iPhone 4

Daddy's got the new iPhone!

I'll get the interesting bits out the way first so most of you don't doze off during my subsequent diatribe :-)

So what's the iPhone 4 like?

I have to say I'm been a bit underwhelmed, don't get me wrong I'm not disapointed but it's just not the groundbreaking experience your first iPhone was.

The high resolution screen is very nice and, compared to the 3G, its very fast to use with a much better camera. It's a bit early to make a call on battery life as I've literally only been using it for 24 hours now (which it's been connected to the PC for a significant portion of) and it got pretty hammered setting all the apps up but I'm at almost 50% in 5 hours so it appears that it might be better but not by a huge amount than the 3G.

I was pleased to see Apple have removed the cap on how many Exchange server accounts you can sync with (previously only 1) which is one less reason for me to jailbreak but I'm already missing SBSettings.....

The other new bits are pretty much just gimmicks:

Facetime isn't going to see much use if both of you need iPhone 4 _AND_ a wifi connection (I wonder how many people bothered with Skype voice calling on iPhone while it was only over wifi?)

The front facing camera is probably going to see little use because of the limitations of Facetime unless other app developers (Skype, Stickam) make use of it (and Skype voice over 3G isn't going to be free forever nevermind video!)

I have to say my biggest problem with the phone so far has been iTunes v9. This may sound odd until I give you a bit of background. Because I hate myself and have a tendancy to early adopt I've been running XP 64bit edition for the last few years, one of the downsides to this is that iTunes doesn't officially support XP 64.

I say 'officially' because, until version 8, you could simply take the Vista 64 version of iTunes, remove the launch condition on the executables using Orca and then install eveything piecemeal.

Unfortunately iTunes v8 prevented you from getting a 100% working install under XP64 as the iPod helper service refused to run, which was fine if you only have an iPhone (I probably ought to mention I have a 3rd gen iPod about now) so I stayed on v7. To round things off my old G4 mac (OSX 10.4) can only run an even older version of iTunes that won't even talk to my iPhone 3G so that wasn't an option either!

The new iPhone requires iTunes 9 (as does the iPad I have arriving any day now) so something had to give, I've been promising myself a new PC (on which I won't run XP 64) but that wasn't going to happen before I needed to sync my stuff to iPhone. Fortunately I have an XP 32 dual boot installed that I used before I got 'everything' working under XP 64 so I booted that up, installed iTunes 9, copied over my library (the music and video are already on my file server) and then ran out of disk space due to having multiple copies of all my apps (which insist on living under 'My Music' and in the previous iTunes library folder).

My second biggest problem was the lack of mechanism to copy app settings (not the apps themselves) from the old iPhone to the new (can it really be that hard Apple?), I did some searching but then only thing I could find was trying to restore an backup of my old iPhone to my new one. I doubt this would have worked even in the best of cases, it certainly wasn't likely to work for me considering:

a. My 3G is not running OS4
b. My 3G is jailbroken

So after all the apps had been sync'd I got to run each of them and enter all the usernames and passwords again, joy!

So how did I get one?

Well quite by accident I found myself queuing outside an O2 shop last Sunday morning that the O2 website claimed had some stock of the new iPhone 4 - I was considering going Saturday afternoon as the website had said it had stock at 8:45 that morning, but then the update around 13:00 reporting the stock level from 9:00 so I wasn't going to risk a wasted trip.

I say by accident as I failed to check what time the O2 shop opens on a Sunday so, rather than lose my whole morning to Star Wars lego with my son (as I had done the previous day), I dragged the pair of us into town 45 minutes before they opened........... and there were already 5 people in front of me!

The purchase of the iPhone 4 was relatively uneventful save for the store assistant telling me the SIM number porting was handled entirely by iTunes, which it isn't (I had my doubts but I wasnt about to waste even more time in the shop debating it with someone who obviously didn't know)