10 days with the iPhone 4

With a celebrity piece of hardware like the iPhone 4, at a certain point you have stop oohing and ahhing and discuss the reality of using the device. You can’t get that real-world feel in a day. You need to use the thing for at least a week and subject it to the degredations of life before you get a clear picture of how it will really fare.

I’ve had my iPhone 4 for about 10 days, and I’m still trying to make up my mind about it. There’s no doubt that the benefits of the phone are genuine — it’s the best smartphone out there, feature for feature. The screen is amazing. The gyroscope is exceptionally cool, especially with games like Eliminate: Gun Range that are among the first to take advantage of it. The speed is stellar, the aesthetics are fantastic, and FaceTime is awesome.

It’s indisputably the best iPhone ever made. It’s also bugging me.

We begin where we must: the much-discussed reception issues. I’ve always used a case with my phones, but I wasn’t forced to, as I am with the iPhone 4, in order to reduce reception problems. That leads to other difficulties, like dock connections with a variety of already purchased products. I used a very tiny Incipio case with my iPhone 3G S that allowed me to hook up basically whatever dock I liked; it slid nicely into my original Belkin TuneBase car mount. It was a no-brainer: When I got into my car, it took all of a second to slide the 3G S into the dock, where it was instantly charging and available at a handy elevation.

The iPhone 4 will fit into the TuneBase just fine — unless there’s a case on it. The slimmest cases I’ve found for the iPhone 4 still prevent it from docking. Suddenly, I’ve gone back a step and have to dig out a car charger for the iPhone 4, leaving it to slide around on the passenger seat. Sure, I could buy the newer version of the TuneBase, but I’m not thrilled about dropping another $70 to replace a functional device.

All right, so much for kvetching — FaceTime is awesome. I happened to be sitting in a small deli in the backwoods of Vermont over the weekend, eating a sandwich. The deli happened to have free Wi-Fi, and my brother happened to pick that moment to try FaceTime. I pulled the phone out of my pocket to answer what I thought was a phone call, and an instant later, my brother was looking at me. It was the first time I’d used FaceTime, and it was every bit as cool, usable, and fast as it should have been.

We talked for a few minutes, played with the front/rear camera switching feature, noted the sound quality — and generally geeked out. Over my shoulder I heard a few Vermonters talking in hushed tones about the event. I’m not sure if they knew anything about the iPhone 4, but from the snippets of conversation I caught, I might as well have been a Martian.

Through the past week, I’ve treated the iPhone 4 as I do any other phone. I threw it in my pocket indiscriminately, tossed it across the room to a friend (who caught it, thankfully), and dropped it a few inches onto the kitchen counter like I always do. I had it on me when I was gassing up the lawnmower, and I made and received several calls with oily hands while working on a car. I took pictures at a whim and recorded some video of a local band playing a gig on Saturday night, passing the phone around to the band during a break. These devices are supposed to withstand all kinds of activities like this. Yes, I’ll admit the device had an Apple Bumper case on it — but no screen protector. So far, my iPhone 4 has been fine.

The rest of the iPhone 4 reality is still to come. Thousands of apps need to be rewritten to take advantage of multitasking and the other new features. Just about every app needs to update its graphics due to the shocking clarity of the Retina Display. Over the next weeks and months, I have no doubt all this will happen, and I eagerly await updates to some of my core apps like iSSH. It will be a relief to finally be able to maintain an SSH session to a server from my phone while I flip back and IM with a colleague. Multitasking alone ratchets up the usability of this device as a true pocket warrior.

My iPhone 3G S sits in its box now. I haven’t sold it or given it away yet because I wanted to hedge my bets after the early reports of signal issues. I’ve seen them firsthand, and I know there are problems. I hope that they can be reduced in the firmware update that Apple claims is coming. But I haven’t experienced dropped calls or any significant communication problem using the phone so far. I even hit 3Mbps down and 1.2Mbps up with a clear 3G connection a few days ago.

Reception issues aside, this really is a “magical” device. If the reception issues turn out to be a design flaw that cannot be remedied through software, then history may not be kind to the iPhone 4. But the features and raw capability of the device cannot be discounted. If the iPhone 5 can deliver the same or better user experience with a more robust antenna design, then I’ll have nothing left to complain about.

I guess we’ll have to wait a year to find out.

This article, “10 days with the iPhone 4,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Paul Venezia’s The Deep End blog at InfoWorld.com.