• Retina display
• Better battery life
• Better camera

Retina

The display is stunning – it is crystal clear and the colors are beautiful. Most apps simply become more crisp (assuming they don’t use a lot of low-res images). I don’t think you’ll see a ton of difference in the way you use apps due to the display, but you’ll enjoy the experience much more and it’ll feel less like a computer screen. This is one of those things where the old technology got the job done just fine, but man, after using this display for a few days now, I can’t wait to see it come to iPad and to traditional computer monitors. Once you get used to retina, all other displays start looking really blurry.

Battery Life

It’s excellent. It still isn’t going to last nearly as long as the iPad, but it seems to last significantly longer than my 3GS did while performing the same tasks.

Camera

For still photography, the camera seems to be improved, but it’s significantly better at low light photography. This is partly due to the new sensor technology, but it’s also due to the inclusion of a small LED flash. Don’t get me wrong, the low light photos are terrible compared to a DSLR or even a mid-range Point & Shoot…but it’s a huge step up from the camera in the 3GS that was barely usable in lower light conditions. Daylight photos (particularly macro type shots) range from good to excellent. If you want proof, check out this shot by a friend of mine. I’d say that under optimal conditions, the iPhone 4′s still camera is very competitive with mid-range Point & Shoot cameras. As for video, it’s 720p in size, but don’t expect anything close to Bluray quality. I put a couple of videos on my Vimeo account…these are “worst case” shots – indoors with low light shooting a dark subject with some fast movement. Quality wise, the video function alone is right there with my Creative Vado…there is absolutely no reason to use a Vado, Flip, etc. if you have an iPhone 4. In fact, when you add on the software (iMovie or otherwise), the iPhone 4 blows those devices out of the water.

Overall Feel

Compared to my 3GS, the iPhone 4 feels better & worse. I love the new design – it’s more sleek and feels even more solid. The downside is I feel more paranoid that I’m going to drop it. With the 3GS, you could drop it and have a pretty good chance of only minor scratches or maybe a small crack in the plastic back. With the iPhone 4, you’re either going to damage the glass on the front or back (and the camera is integrated into that back glass as well) or you’re going to bang up the antennas (since they form the metal band around the outside). In theory, the glass is super strong and not easy to break, but something about it just feels a little more fragile. Speed wise, everything feels fast. If you’ve used an iPad, it’s pretty much the same. I really don’t notice a ton of speed increase over my 3GS for day to day activities – I do know it’s much more powerful though, so I’m sure future apps will widen this gap.

FaceTime

FaceTime is the video calling feature built-in to each iPhone 4. I tried it out with a friend from Twitter and it’s certainly a nifty feature. It works as easily as Apple advertises…call someone, touch a button, and boom – video call. The big gotcha (for now) is that both parties must have iPhone 4s AND be on a WiFi network. I’m not sure I’ll be using this feature all that much, but I also prefer e-mail/twitter/IM to phone calls anyway. I can see it being pretty popular for some people and I do see a few use cases for myself.

iBooks

iBooks is an app I use a ton on my iPad. I was hoping the retina display would make it more readable to me on the iPhone 4. Text & images looks absolutely fantastic – but at the end of the day, I just can’t read on such a tiny screen. It’s not that the font is too small – I can see it fine – I just can’t fit enough content on the screen for my tastes. I read mostly technical (or at least non-fiction books) though, so books with less structured content may be a bit better. Imagine reading the tiny bibles you used to find in hotels – that’s what it’s like reading on the iPhone 4…super crisp text, but a little bitty reading surface. I do like having the ability to look up something in iBooks in an emergency though – so I’ll keep it installed just in case.

Multitasking

A lot of people have been anxiously awaiting multitasking on iPhone. I’m not one of them. I would like a few apps to be able to update in the background (Twitter for example) and I’d like to have a live IM client, but that’s about it. I don’t use Skype or Pandora on the phone, but if I did, I’d be happy. For me, this is a nice feature, but the only real benefit I get is that it’s slightly faster to switch between applications. Maybe I’ll be wow’d with what people are able to do with this in the future, but for now, I just don’t see much benefit for the tasks I do today…but I was never the target of this feature in the first place.

Reception

You’ve probably heard about the reception issues with iPhone 4. Steve Jobs said they don’t exist, but if they did, it’s because you’re holding it the wrong way. Apple corporate said they exist on all phones and you should buy a case. Well, they definitely do exist and I’m holding my phone the same way I’ve held every Apple iPhone. I’m going to end up buying a case I’m sure, but I’m really disappointed in Apple over this one. If you hold the phone in your left hand, you’ll connect two of the antennas with your finger or palm. By doing this, your 5 bars of full signal will drop to “No Service” within 30 seconds or so unless you happen to be *very* close to a cell tower. At home, I can do this easily every time I try. In West Knoxville, I had a harder time getting the signal to drop…so it seems to be partially dependent on your proximity to cell towers. I have yet to have a call drop due to this, but I have had SMS messages and data downloads stop/fail due to it…so it isn’t just a display issue – it really is losing the signal. Apple says some type of fix is on the way and if that’s the case, then maybe this won’t be a problem much longer. I expected I would get better reception than my 3GS due to the larger exposed antenna, but so far, my 3GS had a more stable signal. Call quality is as good or better on the iPhone 4 though. I haven’t tried making a call from a noisy area yet, but all of the calls I’ve made have sounded very clear on my end and no complaints from those that I’ve called.

I chose to go with U-verse because I live in an older neighborhood in Knoxville and my high speed internet choices are fairly limited. I’ve had 3Mbps DSL from AT&T for the last 3 years and it’s been decent, but I really needed more upload speed. I’m a software developer so I usually have lots of large software updates I need to download quite often and I frequently have fairly large chunks of data I need to upload to a server on a regular basis (Dropbox, Subversion, etc.). I ended up going with AT&T U-verse since they offer a package with 18Mbps download and 2Mbps upload…this was my main consideration for choosing U-verse, not the VoIP service nor the TV service. I want to make it clear that I didn’t compare the TV and phone services to other providers…so if that is your main focus, this writeup may not be useful to you.

Speed Test – Before & After
All tests were performed with www.speedtest.net on a MacBook running Snow Leopard connected to my wireless LAN – this is my most common usage scenario, so it’s what I decided to test with.  Also, ignore the “distance” in these speed tests…all were performed in Knoxville at the same location.

Before U-verse - Speed Test - Morristown, TN

After U-verse - Speed Test - Morristown, TN

From this quick test, you can see my download rate is much higher, but my upload rate also got a massive improvement.  The ping time got cut in half as well – so it’s a win-win-win with the U-verse upgrade.  The thing is, the download rate isn’t anywhere near the max rate of 18Mbps, so I decided to try a speed test against the Atlanta, GA data center since I would assume they have more capacity than Morristown…

U-verse - Speed Test - Atlanta, GA

Nice huh?  That’s quite close to the max download rate and a very respectable upload speed…and the ping is lower still.  So the bottom line is U-verse blows regular DSL out of the water and it is generally better than cable or at least very comparable.  One of the things I don’t like about cable internet is they use different methods to boost your speeds for short periods of time.  So you may have a 12Mbps package and for 30 secs – 2 minutes, you may get that speed when starting a download, but if you’re downloading something large, you will usually notice your download speed dialing back pretty drastically…whereas I should (in theory) have these U-verse speeds throughout the whole download.  Realistically though, you’re going to be very unlikely to find a single server that can provide you with a download at these rates, so the only way you would be able to get this much data flowing would be to have quite a few downloads going on simultaneously.

The Installation

Now that the speed test is out of the way, you may want to know about the installation process.  When I signed up for the install, I was told the install takes between 4 to 6 hours depending on the services I wanted installed and the specifics of my house/neighborhood.  The U-verse install requires two different groups – one is an external group that hooks up your new equipment on the outside of your house and the other group does everything inside the house.  In my case, I heard from both groups at 9am – both called to confirm the appointment and to let me know they were on the way.  The external guy got here around 9:30am and he started checking the lines outside my house.  The internal guys got here around 9:45am and I gave them a quick tour of the places I wanted U-verse.  The external guy worked until 11 or a little after getting everything prepped and getting some electronics added on to my house that connect back up to the utility pole.  While he was doing that, the internal guys explored the attic and crawlspace to determine the best way to run my new wires.

I have an older house and even though I did have coax cables in most of the rooms, the cables were always on the opposite wall from my TVs (I have not had cable for over 3 years…so placement in relation to the cables wasn’t exactly important prior to today).  After talking to the U-verse guys about this, they agreed they should go ahead and run new wires to all of my TVs…but here’s the awesome part: they ran Cat 5e cables to all my rooms *for free* instead of coax!  That was a HUGE win for me…why?  Because now I can add a network switch in any room with one of the new network jacks and I’ve got a way to hardwire in my other goodies…specifically, my Xbox 360 and my Blu-ray players.  If you already had coax cable that was close to your TVs, I don’t think they would run anything for you since they prefer to use existing wiring.  Even if they do run new stuff for your install, *you* must ask for Cat 5e instead of coax if that is what you want.  They can install either one usually unless there are specific environmental conditions at your location – in which case they may not give you a choice.  Anyway, it took them maybe an hour to hour and a half to run the network drops (I had four sets total in my case…all from the crawlspace).

By this time, the outside stuff was done and tested.  Both teams must test the line once it’s ready to go – until that point, you don’t really know whether you can actually get U-verse service or not.  If you can’t, I don’t know what happens…in my case, both teams agreed that I had an excellent signal here so we could proceed with installation of the Residential Gateway (the “RG”).  So, they finished up all of the network jacks (adding faceplates, etc.) and then connected up the RG and the backup battery (a small Belkin UPS…keeps the net and VoIP up for 4 hours if the power goes out).  The RG essentially *IS* the U-verse service…it controls everything.  It has a router (wired and wireless…b/g only), the VoIP system, and the TV connections.  So if this box isn’t happy, nothing is going to work.  It’s important to note that this RG box needs a true, three prong grounded electrical outlet…I have a 50 year old home, but luckily a handful of my outlets were updated to be grounded just before I bought this house.  If you’re thinking about U-verse and you have an older house, make sure you have one of these outlets or you won’t be able to install…you can’t use an adapter for this part, you *must* have a real grounded outlet near the RG.

As luck would have it, my RG was not happy.  No matter what they did, it just wouldn’t connect to the network.  The techs tried everything they could think of, but after about 2 hours of troubleshooting it, they decided it we should try another RG.  At this point, the installation was crossing the 7 hour mark (the guys didn’t even take a lunch break…).  This time, the RG connected properly.  Even when the RG works, the initial setup still takes about 15 minutes while it configures itself.  Once that was done, I had to connect to the RG from my MacBook and finish a few last steps on the AT&T website.  Once all of that was out of the way, the techs connected up all of my TV boxes and let them sync.  All of them had to perform an automatic update that took another 10-15 minutes to complete.  Finally, we did a quick test of my phone system, finished porting my number to the new system, and then they gave me a quick tour of the U-verse software on the DVR.  It was 6:30pm and the installation was completed.

So, was it worth it?

I’ve had the service for less than a day as I write this, but I can say that this was 110% worth it for my purposes.  Heck, just getting these great upload and download rates makes it worth it for me, but getting my house wired with a wired gigabit network was an unbelievable bonus.  Will I watch all 450+ TV channels?  No, I’ll probably watch 20 or less any given week.  If you like TV though, this package has as much as any of them.  I don’t use the landline phone much, so I’m not sure how useful the VoIP upgrade will be…call quality sounds much better (I had some noise prior to this upgrade), but I wanted to keep my Knoxville number, so I kept the phone service for the moment.  I think a typical install in a newer home that already had existing coax (or ethernet) cable in all the right places would be much, much shorter than my install…maybe 2-4 hours.  So if you’re thinking about getting U-verse, don’t let the length of my install deter you – it’s very unlikely it’ll take longer than 6 hours max.  All of the guys I dealt with during the install were a pleasure to work with – other than the technical issues with the bad RG hardware, everything went as smoothly as one would want.  The real question is the long term support – will AT&T keep up the great customer service I experienced or will they drop the ball now that I’m committed to U-verse?  Only time will tell, but I can certainly recommend U-verse at this point.

UPDATE (10/30/2009): It’s been a couple of days now and I’m still very happy with the service.  The only “issue” I’ve found is that I misunderstood the stream limit with U-verse as far as TV programming.  I thought all boxes would be able to watch any channel (HD or SD) and the DVR box could do 4 channels (all recording or watching 1 and recording 3).  What I didn’t realize was that your entire U-verse system can only support 4 channels simultaneously and of those 4, only 2 can be HD.  So if you have three boxes like I do, you can’t watch live HD content on all three boxes at the same time unless you’re watching the same show(s) on two or more of the boxes.  If you have lots of TVs in your house, you may hit this issue pretty quickly.  In my case, I hit the issue because three of the shows I like to watch come on at the same time on the same day of the week…when I tried to set the DVR to record all of them in HD, it told me I couldn’t.  I can drop one of the shows down to SD and it’s fine, but while the recording is going on, I won’t be able to watch any other channels in HD (it gives you a blue screen and tells you no more HD channels can be used until the recording has stopped).  For me, this isn’t a deal breaker, but I thought I should put a note on here since this limit wasn’t clear to me…I knew the limit of 4 streams on the DVR box, I just didn’t realize that was a limit on the whole U-verse install.

• TextMate
• Things
• 1Password
• Delicious Library 2
• Quicksilver

Other Noteworthy Apps

• Adium
• VMWare Fusion
• NetNewsWire
• CyberDuck
• Transmission

I did notice that one of the top 10 apps (#9 currently) is “iBeer” – it uses the iPhone’s accelerometer to display “beer” on the iPhone’s screen that looks as if it were in a glass when you tip the iPhone up to your mouth.  I think it’s an interesting use of the hardware and all, but I can’t believe it’s a top 10 non-free app.  I mean, this thing costs $3 + tax…  Just amazing what people value these days (but congratz to the developer for coming up with that – paying off big time I’m sure). 

So, now my MacBook is transitioning back to OS X Leopard (looking forward to Snow Leopard though if they really do speed things up), but my main workhorse is my trusty old desktop.  I really hate not using Vista since I purchased it at retail, but XP just feels better (and Vista doesn’t like my desktop…but XP flies on it thanks to the ton o’ RAM and 10K RPM SATA drive).

I’m really surprised that I didn’t like having a dedicated Vista laptop, but it just didn’t feel right once everything was said and done.  With this new setup, things seem just right…old habits die hard.

So why am I not already getting in line for 2.0?  Well, the first thing is that the 2.0 software will run on the 1.0 hardware.  So any bug fixes, new core application updates (e.g. scientific calculator), and other improvements will work just fine on my original phone.  The only real hardware features that matter for version 2.0 of the hardware are 3G network chip and the A-GPS hardware. 

2G is certainly not setting any speed records – but for the most part, it gets the job done fine for me.  I use the web more on the iPhone than I have on any other phone, but it’s still nothing at all compared to my web use on a real PC – so 3G would be nice, but it’s nothing I can’t live without.  The main issue with the 3G support is that my phone bill will go up by $10 per month for 2 years – so $240 total increase on top of buying the $200/$300 iPhone 2.0.  It’s not a horrible price increase, but in my particular situation, it’s harder to justify the benefit outweighing the cost there. 

The A-GPS is a bit more appealing though.  I have a handheld GPS unit from Garmin, but it’s meant for hiking/geocaching type activities and not for navigation.  I do like the idea of buying a cheap dash mount and then my iPhone could be a very decent auto navigation system that moves around to different cars easily.  Of course, this all depends on what GPS software is released for the phone, but I’m sure we’ll see great things in this area.  The other thing is that we really haven’t had a small GPS device that had an always on broadband-link internet link – that could allow for all kinds of interesting situations that make the GPS ability of the iPhone unlike anything we’ve seen (for better or for worse).

At this point, my feeling is that I’m going to hold off for a bit and see what applications come out that make use of iPhone 2.0 hardware features.  If they are compelling enough, then I may make the jump, but I’m starting to get to that point where I need to see real world benefits from new gadgets instead of just the conceptual greatness of them…  Even on July 11th, the really amazing applications for iPhone may not even be ready because of the way Apple has chosen to limit the developer program – from the latest Apple keynote, it sounds like some developers (and some SDK functionality) won’t even be ready until September anyway.  We’ll see how things play out, but for now, I think I’ll be keeping my $440.

Xcode itself is not even comparable to Visual Studio (I realize VS isn’t free, but even the free Express Editions are much, MUCH better than Xcode). I found out how to turn on the autocomplete functionality in Xcode, but it’s so unhelpful that I may turn it back off since it seems to get in the way more than it helps. I’m so accustomed to intellisense in VS – if you know nothing about a library, you can use intellisense to get up and running in a flash (usually), but not in Xcode. In Xcode, if you don’t know the frameworks you’re using in and out, prepare to be checking out Safari constantly. The whole Interface Builder application doesn’t really make sense to me yet, so I won’t really comment on it yet. The error messages from Xcode have been fairly useful so far, so that’s a good thing. The editor is decent in that it color codes syntax for you and it does have the ability to jump directly to specific functions from a menu (very similar to VS on this one).

Perhaps the bigger issue for people coming from a non-OS X background is the knowledge of all of the frameworks. It’s not nearly as expansive as the .NET framework, but it’s quite different – so you’re not going to be able to just pick up the frameworks and hit the ground running. The documentation on Apple’s dev center isn’t terrible…it takes a little bit to find what you need, but it’s usually there somewhere. The naming convention does make it pretty clear what you’re doing when calling a method, however, this is realllllllly irritating without intellisense. I’m still trying to figure out which classes do what and how to structure the View/Controllers in my application. The sample apps are really helping out there. It does seem like I have to write quite a bit of code for even fairly basic stuff. I just feel really unproductive at this point..I know that’s mostly the learning curve that I’m working through, but I would have thought Apple would have a better developer toolset in this day and age. I don’t think the Objective-C language will be that hard to pickup since it seems pretty logical once you get the syntax for methods and method calls. The frameworks are going to take some time and I’m sure things will still be changing between now and June, but hopefully I’ll get this stuff figured out soon so I can have my little app up and running in the simulator.

In the technical world, so many people still believe the “platform” is the key to everything. There are always discussions about which platform is the best – laptop vs desktop vs PDA, Windows vs OS X vs Linux, Nikon vs Canon, Ford vs Chevy – you get the point. That’s all fine and dandy and I don’t disagree that sometimes there are certain benefits to using a specific platform. But the kicker is that this is a stupid argument to begin with.

People don’t care about the platform. Even if you think you care, you probably don’t when you get right down to it. For example, when I’m using the Windows platform, I keep my current TODO list in Microsoft Outlook. Now that I also work on a Mac, I decided to move my TODO list to an online platform. Sure – I moved to a different “platform” because it made it easier to get to my TODO list from either OS, but it’s not the platform I really care about, it’s the data.

Whether my TODO list is on the web, on my desktop, on my iPhone, or on my physical notepad, the platform is of little importance to me as long as my list is there and it’s accessible when I need it. The platform only comes into the picture when it can better enable me to manipulate my data in ways that make me more efficient and effective. In reality, forget the platform and focus on the data (or on the actions driven by the data) and you’ll see that the platform being the key is a fallacy in this day and age.

I ended up going with a black 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo version. It came with 2GB of RAM, but that’s not really enough since I want to run VMWare Fusion so that I can have Visual Studio 2005/2008 running in unity mode as well as SQL Server 2005/2008. So I had the MacBook upgraded to 4GB DDR2 RAM. Apple wanted $400 extra to add 2GB, but I used Crucial memory and did the upgrade myself for a grand total of $111 including tax & shipping. Not a bad deal since I effectively saved nearly $300 by spending about 10 minutes swapping the RAM sticks out.

So far, my impression of OS X is favorable. I’ve found replacements for everything I typically used on Windows (except development tools and Quicken) and I’m fairly happy with the way things work. For the first week or so, I wasn’t sure that I was ever going to like OS X, but it’s one of those things that grows on you. I wouldn’t make the claim that a lot of people when they say Macs are easier to use than Windows. I think usability (as a whole) is pretty similar between the two. OS X does have some standards that most applications seem to follow which is better than on Windows, but the big difference is that the “graphic arts” background of historical Mac users has resulted in software developers taking more time to refine the user experience to the point that things are a bit more logical than they are in Windows-based counterparts.

I’m really happy with the battery life on this thing. As long as I’m just surfing the net, typing up blog posts, reading e-mail, and other light tasks, I get fantastic battery life. I have a feeling even playing a DVD will still result in good battery life, but it may not be the 4 or so hours I get now. Time machine seems useful, although I keep forgetting to eject the disk before I unplug the backup drive – so I think I’m going to end up getting the Time Capsule before long, but I don’t really want to spend that money right now.

The one thing that is slightly disappointing thus far is that the MacBook gets a little choppy when playing World of Warcraft with everything maxed out. It’s not terrible and I do realize this machine has an integrated graphics card, but WoW isn’t *that* demanding…either way, it’s still plenty playable, but it’s just a little disappointing that it’s not as smooth as I’d like.

After I’ve used OS X for a few more weeks, I’ll post my updated impressions, but so far so good.

No Tasklist.  I don’t know why Apple decided to include all of the other PIM applications (contacts, calendar, notes), but decided to leave off a tasklist.  I really miss that feature from my Windows Mobile phone.  Hopefully Apple will add this soon.

Random Crashes.  It isn’t clear why it happens, but every once in a while, the iPhone will freeze and I’ll have to reboot.  Most of the time, I can just use the home button to kill the application and things are fine (although you usually lose whatever data you were updating, if any, when you do this).  It doesn’t take long to reset (maybe 20 seconds), but it’s still a bit of a pain.  My Windows Mobile phone and my PocketPC seem more stable (and I don’t have non-Apple applications on my phone).

No local downloading.  You can browse anything you want via Safari, but you can’t save anything.  I had one time when I really wanted to save a PDF document for viewing later or even e-mail it to myself…but the iPhone doesn’t support that.

No copy & paste.  There have been a couple of times when I needed to take a snippit of a webpage (or even copy a URL) and paste it into a note or e-mail, but at present, there is no ability to copy and paste on the iPhone.

Of coure, there are still the original issues of not having Flash support and no Assisted GPS.

But other than these few issues, the phone really works well.  The photo viewer works great, the call quality has been excellent, the EDGE network in my area is certainly speedy enough for everything I’ve needed, and the battery life is better than I expected.  It may not be the perfect phone, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction.