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Apple's launch of the iPhone 4 has seen the greatest excitement for a new phone ever - and with HD video recording, a super high-res screen and ridiculously slim dimensions, it's not hard to see why.
But things are a little different now - not only was the iPhone 3GS something of a non-update to the iPhone range, but there are finally decent alternatives in the smartphone market, with the HTC Desire and Samsung Galaxy S leading the Android fight right to Apple's door.
You can check out our iPhone 4 video review:
Add to that the first major leak of an Apple product a couple of months before launch, and suddenly the iPhone 4 has a lot to do to impress.
At least Apple has unleashed the big guns for this effort - before we get into the headline specs, the design itself is a massive talking point on its own.
Jobs' chats on stage to unveil a new iPhone might have got a little repetitive (best this, magical that etc) but this is the first time since the first iPhone way back in January 2007 that we've seen a variation on the standard iPhone design.
Gone is the traditional curved back and plastic exterior with slightly chunky dimensions; in is a chassis that's only 9.3mm thin at its thickest point and a new stainless steel and glass industrial design.
If you're an iPhone fan, there's a good chance you won't like the look of the iPhone the first time you pick it up - it's the same weight as the iPhone 3GS at 137g, but it's a lot smaller, with dimensions of 115.2mm x58.6 mm x 9.3mm, so it feels like a much weightier and compact model.
The edges are stainless steel, apparently forged by winged unicorns in an iceberg (or something) to be 10 times stronger than 'normal' steel.
The front and back of the phone are made of glass, which has also been treated to be a lot stronger than the normal variety we're used to seeing through and drinking out of.
This claim holds up - not only did we feel the need to drop the phone onto the floor a few times to test, someone nameless of the TechRadar team also knocked it out (an admittedly low level) window onto concrete - and not a scratch.
If you're the protective type, then you can buy an official 'Bumper' for the iPhone 4, which encases it in a small ring of rubber, if you haven't bought the handset only for its slim lines.
The chassis shape isn't the only different thing with the iPhone 4 - the whole ethos has been tweaked. For instance, no longer is there a slightly plasticky rocker switch to control volume on the left-hand side, as it's now two discrete metal buttons with '+' and '-' written on.
The volume silencer rocker switch is above too, but that has also undergone the uber-metallic treatment.
The top of the phone still holds the headphone jack, and the power/lock key. However, the 3.5mm port is now flush to the chassis, and the power button feels much nicer to hit than before.
There's also a separate microphone for noise cancelling next to this as well - we imagine a few people will be pushing paperclips in there before they realise that it's not for the SIM card slot.
The right-hand side of the chassis is still blank - no camera button sadly, which would have been nice given the extra effort Apple has clearly put into overhauling the photography system.
Still, sleek is clearly still 'in' at the Cupertino HQ, and we can't say we blame the designers when you look at the lines.
Actually, that's not true - the micro-SIM slot is hidden away here, rather than on the top. It's the same pokey key thing/slot system as before, but this time the SIM card is much smaller - Apple says to make more room for stuff inside, we say it's just to shake things up a little bit. Either way, we bet micro-SIMs become the norm before very long in all phones.
The bottom of the phone has the familiar Apple connector for charging and connecting and docking etc, and is flanked by another more microphone-y looking microphone slot and the speaker.
The front still has that one iconic button, which is much nicer to press in the new chassis, it has to be said.
Overall, the design might not impress some people the first time they pick up the phone - a number of people we showed the phone to grimaced a little bit the first time they handled it.
It's a sharp and weighty-feeling phone, make no mistake - and it doesn't sit as comfortably in the hand as well as other iPhones of the past have.
But it feels premium, and at up to £600, it had better - that's a lot to pay when you consider you could get a 42-inch 1080p LCD for £200 less these days.
In the box
At least Apple has remained consistent when it comes to the packaging - apart from a new graphic on the front to make the new iPhone 4 look more mysterious, there's not a lot different to the older iPhones.
So that means: a simple Apple USB cable, a three-pin plug adaptor and some headphones. The latter is the same old set from the year before: hands free and a function button on the cord, but slightly poor quality compared to a range of other buds on the market.
Oh, you also get that little tool for removing the micro-SIM card as well - but Apple should just save itself some money and stick a paperclip in there, as 99.99% of people will lose that little thing, panic, then improvise anyway. Well, we have. Twice.
Another big feature of the Apple iPhone 4 is the new high resolution display - Steve Jobs has decided the best name for this is a 'Retina Display' by dearth of the fact it's meant to be so high-res that it's actually more than the eye can cope with. Read more about what we think of that.
But the main point is the screen is so packed with pixels - we're talking 326 pixels per inch, and a 960x640 display, making it ridiculously high resolution for a phone with a 3.5-inch display.
This beats the Nexus One, iPad and pretty much every other phone on the market at the moment - it's immense and we can't really do it justice by describing it; essentially you have to see it to believe it.
The idea is that the days of pixellated images are over - now it's all smooth and sleek lines for everything.
This claim is certainly shown when looking at a web page on maximum zoom; sure, the old iPhone 3GS' effort looked a little ragged, but we accepted it because of the high zoom level and the fact that, well, we didn't care.
But when you see things like that on the Retina Display, things just change completely. It's crisp and pure the whole way in, and while we're not saying that it's the most necessary thing out there, it's really cool and adds an element of wow-factor.
It's not just the smoothness that impresses either; it's the contrast ratios and overall image processing that comes to the fore when you see the iPhone 4's Retina Display for the first time.
Video looks simply sublime on the 3.5-inch screen, and while it's not an OLED (rather a TFT LCD with IPS backplane switching - here's a dull link to an explainer if you're into that kind of thing... and we sadly are) it still looks every bit as good as the display on the HTC Desire.
We might argue that the 800:1 contrast ratio, while stunning, isn't better than an OLED version, which has the advantage of no backlight so the blacks will always be that little bit purer.
We also think that perhaps the colour reproduction isn't as saturated - but given that some people claim that OLED screens are a little too colour heavy, this may not be a bad thing.
Overall - Retina Display is a great thing, although not necessarily better than WVGA OLED screens we see in a lot of high end phones these days; but we can only hope that it's a trend that's followed by more manufacturers in the future.
When Steve Jobs releases a new phone, it always comes with an updated firmware too - and the iPhone 4 is no different. The new iPhone OS has been dubbed iOS 4 now, seeing as it's being used on the iPad too, and it's bringing a lot of upgrades that people have been hankering for for years.
But we'll quickly run through the high points of the iPhone for the uninitiated: the same iPhone home screen is offered, where it's a simple grid of icons to select applications.
If you want to re-order these, simply long press on any one, and they all start to wobble around, allowing you to flick them in whichever order you like or if you want you can delete them by pressing the X.
You can't delete the pre-loaded applications though: for instance, nobody cares about Stocks, but you have to have it there. We'd love to know if anyone has ever created a decent portfolio based on the fact they had to stare at the Stocks icon all the time and finally cracked.
Most applications, like Settings and Contacts, take you to a menu-based system, with list options to tap and drill down to further things you can interact with. All very simple really.
But this is one of the key places the iPhone has always excelled - little animated transitions make things look so cool when they flick around under the finger, and it really makes people that try the phone for the first time think it's awesome.
iPhones of old have often struggled to keep up with these animations - talk of 400MHz processors should tell you why. But this is an ARM Cortex-A8 Apple A4 1GHz processor running things here: we're sure Apple is underclocking this to save on battery life, but it doesn't matter - each change is seamless and that's what we want.
And of course, Apple's simple way of navigation is still present - simply tap the home button at any point and you're back to the familiar home screen. Simples, as a certain member of the mongoose family may or may not say.
Multitasking
The main change with the iPhone 4 is the fact multi-tasking is now on offer, something that has put Apple behind the smartphone competition for many years.
Want to listen to Spotify and browse on Safari? Nope, not possible previously - but now it is, and that's what we call a Good Thing.
Of course, Apple being the gleaming machine it is, we couldn't have simple multi-tasking like on other platforms - Jobs has apparently 'solved' things with this cunning new method.
We mean cunning in an ironic, Tony Robinson-way, because essentially all that has happened is Apple has decided to control this element as well: only certain applications which have been verified to not eat all your battery and then kill your pets (well, the first one) will be allowed to run in the background, rather than all and any third party applications.
This is slightly annoying when you have things like social networking options that you want to be able to leave and come back to, and see all the updates without waiting.
But overall: Apple's way of multitasking is the right way - you simply double tap the home button, and a little row of icons at the bottom of the screen pops up, with the most recent application opened on the left.
You can scroll along to choose the running application you want and go right back in where you were before. This means an open email you're writing, a web page, video, or something like a third party internet radio.
Scrolling to the left of the icon dock again will offer two more options - music control with basic commands, and the chance to lock the orientation - handy if you need to keep twisting the phone when watching video for some reason.
Switching between the applications spins the chosen application into view in a very pleasing fashion, indicative of the way Apple does things with the iPhone.
But things are a little different now - not only was the iPhone 3GS something of a non-update to the iPhone range, but there are finally decent alternatives in the smartphone market, with the HTC Desire and Samsung Galaxy S leading the Android fight right to Apple's door.
You can check out our iPhone 4 video review:
Add to that the first major leak of an Apple product a couple of months before launch, and suddenly the iPhone 4 has a lot to do to impress.
At least Apple has unleashed the big guns for this effort - before we get into the headline specs, the design itself is a massive talking point on its own.
Jobs' chats on stage to unveil a new iPhone might have got a little repetitive (best this, magical that etc) but this is the first time since the first iPhone way back in January 2007 that we've seen a variation on the standard iPhone design.
Gone is the traditional curved back and plastic exterior with slightly chunky dimensions; in is a chassis that's only 9.3mm thin at its thickest point and a new stainless steel and glass industrial design.
If you're an iPhone fan, there's a good chance you won't like the look of the iPhone the first time you pick it up - it's the same weight as the iPhone 3GS at 137g, but it's a lot smaller, with dimensions of 115.2mm x58.6 mm x 9.3mm, so it feels like a much weightier and compact model.
The edges are stainless steel, apparently forged by winged unicorns in an iceberg (or something) to be 10 times stronger than 'normal' steel.
The front and back of the phone are made of glass, which has also been treated to be a lot stronger than the normal variety we're used to seeing through and drinking out of.
This claim holds up - not only did we feel the need to drop the phone onto the floor a few times to test, someone nameless of the TechRadar team also knocked it out (an admittedly low level) window onto concrete - and not a scratch.
If you're the protective type, then you can buy an official 'Bumper' for the iPhone 4, which encases it in a small ring of rubber, if you haven't bought the handset only for its slim lines.
The chassis shape isn't the only different thing with the iPhone 4 - the whole ethos has been tweaked. For instance, no longer is there a slightly plasticky rocker switch to control volume on the left-hand side, as it's now two discrete metal buttons with '+' and '-' written on.
The volume silencer rocker switch is above too, but that has also undergone the uber-metallic treatment.
The top of the phone still holds the headphone jack, and the power/lock key. However, the 3.5mm port is now flush to the chassis, and the power button feels much nicer to hit than before.
There's also a separate microphone for noise cancelling next to this as well - we imagine a few people will be pushing paperclips in there before they realise that it's not for the SIM card slot.
The right-hand side of the chassis is still blank - no camera button sadly, which would have been nice given the extra effort Apple has clearly put into overhauling the photography system.
Still, sleek is clearly still 'in' at the Cupertino HQ, and we can't say we blame the designers when you look at the lines.
Actually, that's not true - the micro-SIM slot is hidden away here, rather than on the top. It's the same pokey key thing/slot system as before, but this time the SIM card is much smaller - Apple says to make more room for stuff inside, we say it's just to shake things up a little bit. Either way, we bet micro-SIMs become the norm before very long in all phones.
The bottom of the phone has the familiar Apple connector for charging and connecting and docking etc, and is flanked by another more microphone-y looking microphone slot and the speaker.
The front still has that one iconic button, which is much nicer to press in the new chassis, it has to be said.
Overall, the design might not impress some people the first time they pick up the phone - a number of people we showed the phone to grimaced a little bit the first time they handled it.
It's a sharp and weighty-feeling phone, make no mistake - and it doesn't sit as comfortably in the hand as well as other iPhones of the past have.
But it feels premium, and at up to £600, it had better - that's a lot to pay when you consider you could get a 42-inch 1080p LCD for £200 less these days.
In the box
At least Apple has remained consistent when it comes to the packaging - apart from a new graphic on the front to make the new iPhone 4 look more mysterious, there's not a lot different to the older iPhones.
So that means: a simple Apple USB cable, a three-pin plug adaptor and some headphones. The latter is the same old set from the year before: hands free and a function button on the cord, but slightly poor quality compared to a range of other buds on the market.
Oh, you also get that little tool for removing the micro-SIM card as well - but Apple should just save itself some money and stick a paperclip in there, as 99.99% of people will lose that little thing, panic, then improvise anyway. Well, we have. Twice.
Another big feature of the Apple iPhone 4 is the new high resolution display - Steve Jobs has decided the best name for this is a 'Retina Display' by dearth of the fact it's meant to be so high-res that it's actually more than the eye can cope with. Read more about what we think of that.
But the main point is the screen is so packed with pixels - we're talking 326 pixels per inch, and a 960x640 display, making it ridiculously high resolution for a phone with a 3.5-inch display.
This beats the Nexus One, iPad and pretty much every other phone on the market at the moment - it's immense and we can't really do it justice by describing it; essentially you have to see it to believe it.
The idea is that the days of pixellated images are over - now it's all smooth and sleek lines for everything.
This claim is certainly shown when looking at a web page on maximum zoom; sure, the old iPhone 3GS' effort looked a little ragged, but we accepted it because of the high zoom level and the fact that, well, we didn't care.
But when you see things like that on the Retina Display, things just change completely. It's crisp and pure the whole way in, and while we're not saying that it's the most necessary thing out there, it's really cool and adds an element of wow-factor.
It's not just the smoothness that impresses either; it's the contrast ratios and overall image processing that comes to the fore when you see the iPhone 4's Retina Display for the first time.
Video looks simply sublime on the 3.5-inch screen, and while it's not an OLED (rather a TFT LCD with IPS backplane switching - here's a dull link to an explainer if you're into that kind of thing... and we sadly are) it still looks every bit as good as the display on the HTC Desire.
We might argue that the 800:1 contrast ratio, while stunning, isn't better than an OLED version, which has the advantage of no backlight so the blacks will always be that little bit purer.
We also think that perhaps the colour reproduction isn't as saturated - but given that some people claim that OLED screens are a little too colour heavy, this may not be a bad thing.
Overall - Retina Display is a great thing, although not necessarily better than WVGA OLED screens we see in a lot of high end phones these days; but we can only hope that it's a trend that's followed by more manufacturers in the future.
When Steve Jobs releases a new phone, it always comes with an updated firmware too - and the iPhone 4 is no different. The new iPhone OS has been dubbed iOS 4 now, seeing as it's being used on the iPad too, and it's bringing a lot of upgrades that people have been hankering for for years.
But we'll quickly run through the high points of the iPhone for the uninitiated: the same iPhone home screen is offered, where it's a simple grid of icons to select applications.
If you want to re-order these, simply long press on any one, and they all start to wobble around, allowing you to flick them in whichever order you like or if you want you can delete them by pressing the X.
You can't delete the pre-loaded applications though: for instance, nobody cares about Stocks, but you have to have it there. We'd love to know if anyone has ever created a decent portfolio based on the fact they had to stare at the Stocks icon all the time and finally cracked.
Most applications, like Settings and Contacts, take you to a menu-based system, with list options to tap and drill down to further things you can interact with. All very simple really.
But this is one of the key places the iPhone has always excelled - little animated transitions make things look so cool when they flick around under the finger, and it really makes people that try the phone for the first time think it's awesome.
iPhones of old have often struggled to keep up with these animations - talk of 400MHz processors should tell you why. But this is an ARM Cortex-A8 Apple A4 1GHz processor running things here: we're sure Apple is underclocking this to save on battery life, but it doesn't matter - each change is seamless and that's what we want.
And of course, Apple's simple way of navigation is still present - simply tap the home button at any point and you're back to the familiar home screen. Simples, as a certain member of the mongoose family may or may not say.
Multitasking
The main change with the iPhone 4 is the fact multi-tasking is now on offer, something that has put Apple behind the smartphone competition for many years.
Want to listen to Spotify and browse on Safari? Nope, not possible previously - but now it is, and that's what we call a Good Thing.
Of course, Apple being the gleaming machine it is, we couldn't have simple multi-tasking like on other platforms - Jobs has apparently 'solved' things with this cunning new method.
We mean cunning in an ironic, Tony Robinson-way, because essentially all that has happened is Apple has decided to control this element as well: only certain applications which have been verified to not eat all your battery and then kill your pets (well, the first one) will be allowed to run in the background, rather than all and any third party applications.
This is slightly annoying when you have things like social networking options that you want to be able to leave and come back to, and see all the updates without waiting.
But overall: Apple's way of multitasking is the right way - you simply double tap the home button, and a little row of icons at the bottom of the screen pops up, with the most recent application opened on the left.
You can scroll along to choose the running application you want and go right back in where you were before. This means an open email you're writing, a web page, video, or something like a third party internet radio.
Scrolling to the left of the icon dock again will offer two more options - music control with basic commands, and the chance to lock the orientation - handy if you need to keep twisting the phone when watching video for some reason.
Switching between the applications spins the chosen application into view in a very pleasing fashion, indicative of the way Apple does things with the iPhone.
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