Scott Is Beyond Being Beamed Up

by Paul McGoldrick

Steve Jobs hailed the revised iPhone 4 at the Apple 2010 Worldwide Developers Conference as the best thing since the original phone was launched three years ago. Most analysts seem to have more moderate opinions but that may have been because of the earlier leaks created by Gizmodo when a prototype was carelessly left behind in a Redwood City beer house.

The major hype of the new phone i  the additional camera that has been provided on the rear of the casing. This HD (720P) 5 Mpixel camera is backed up with an LED flash – which is permanently powered during video use. It opens up the world of video phone connections in a rather more novel, Skype-like, way than we have seen in the past, using the Wi-Fi connection for communications. Apple is calling the feature FaceTime, but my daughter, about as avid an iPhone user as you can get, thinks such enhancements are quite useless without zoom capability on the camera. The new display offers, apparently, a 326 pixel per square inch resolution to match the HD camera.

The phone’s new case is also totally novel. There have been stories over the last few years of iPhones totally breaking apart after being dropped just a few feet. Both sides of the new phone – which is much more rectilinear than before – are made of an aluminosilicate, a metallic glass, that is said to be thirty times stronger than plastic. The outside rim of the phone is stainless steel, also said to be especially formulated, which also forms the antenna.

How that antenna’s propagation characteristics are not completely messed up by the human holding the phone may be explained by the breaks in the metal’s circumference, suggesting that the top part of the case metal is the real antenna.

Apple’s Senior Vice President of Industrial Design, Jonathan Ive, and his team have produced another elegant product that remains absolutely and immediately identifiable as an Apple. Ive was created CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in 2006 - surely now a knighthood must also be imminent?

Apple has continued, from the iPad’s lead, an investment in new battery shapes with a much longer, but narrower, battery in the iPhone. The capacity has also been increased by about 16% – from 4.51 W-hr to 5.25 W-hr, still at 3.7 V – while the thickness of the overall phone has been reduced to 9.3 mm (although the whole product is, not surprisingly, a few grams heavier). The new battery is supposed to give three hundred hours of standby time, seven hours of talk time, up to forty hours of music, or ten hours of video: not, of course, all simultaneously.

What is quite intriguing about the battery situation is the provisioning of a couple of pin holes on the edge of the case (not the ones provided for the mini-SIM card) that suggest that we may be looking at a replaceable battery scenario: at long last!

The hate affair with Verizon (who turned down the iPhone for its customers when it was first offered four years ago) seems to have continued with the new product, with no mention of the company as a potential carrier. AT&T is already looking to cash in on customer iPhone loyalty by including it as a product in their family plan pricing (hear that, Rogers?)

Apart from not wanting to be in the shoes of the Apple employee who left the prototype iPhone 4 on the bar in Redwood City, I would also prefer not to be “Scott.” He is the employee, in the audience, who was called out by Jobs during his demonstration after wireless connectivity to the phone was lost; the icy coldness of the request for help from the boss will have frozen Scott’s desk in Cupertino right through Christmas: maybe even a Narnia “always winter but never Christmas.” Sorry, Scott.