 Lucky number 4
By Tallulah Habib
The iPhone 4 was officially announced by Apple CEO Steve Jobs last night at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference.
The latest addition to the Apple family seems to be firmly tied to the number 4: it's the 4th generation of iPhone, has an A4 chip, and is 24% thinner than the iPhone 3GS. Its display has four times the pixels of previous iPhones, boasts a 40% increase in talk time and is made to run iOS4 - which will be a free update for all users on June 21.
The iPhone 4 offers more power in a smaller space by utilising the new A4 chip (also used in the iPad) and graphic engine. With a bigger battery and better power management, it still manages to promise 300 hours of standby and seven hours of talk time
Going all-out with the graphics, the iPhone 4 has a high-density 940x640 display, with 326 pixels per inch - four times the pixels of previous iPhones. Colours are also bright and clear due to an 800:1 contrast ratio. There's a 5MP camera on the back and a VGA one on the front (mostly for video calls which Apple has labelled "FaceTime"). The video camera promises to record in HD. For your convenience, an editing app is also provided.
 The phone supports iAds - Apple's new business set to launch 1 July which runs on iOS4. iAds means that applications will now carry interactive out of browser advertising. There are positives to iOS4, though: simple app-switching, software audio control and easily changeable background art.
For those who enjoy gaming or app development, the new iPhone has six-point motion sensing and an additional three-axis gyroscope to sense the phone's pitch, roll, and yaw.
"The new iPhone looks great, I want one," says Richard Barnett, an Apple fundi, “but it wasn't the 'wow' moment I was expecting. Lots of the new features were leaked beforehand and things like iAd make me dislike the platform rather than like it more."
The release date is 24 June in the US along with five other countries, the rest of the world set to follow a month later.
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