8 June ★

iPhone 4

Apple’s stock dipped a little after Steve Jobs’ keynote, presumably because most of the things everyone expected to make an appearance — a new Apple TV, a revised Mac lineup, “Magic Slate”, Mobile Me, iTunes.com — didn’t (Apple did release a new version of Safari as expected, although it wasn’t mentioned in the keynote; instead, Apple chose to quietly announce it in a press release1). In a way, maybe we were wrong to expect anything else; Apple hinted at the utterly iPhone-centric nature of the conference a month ago when they revealed an exclusively iPhone OS (now iOS) slate of design awards. So, with no new products2 to announce, Jobs treated us to two hours of iPhone 4.

There was almost nothing we didn’t already know about the new iPhone in terms of functionality or specification; in fact, I believe the Gyroscope is just about the only hardware addition that wasn’t revealed when Gizmodo ‘acquired’ a prototype back in April. FaceTime was probably the biggest surprise of the keynote. Everyone knew the iPhone was getting some form of video chat — the front-facing camera revealed as much. What was surprising is that the implementation looks so smooth and elegant that it actually appears to be worth using, unlike every other video chat implementation, ever. Also, the fact that Apple wants to standardise FaceTime is pleasantly surprising and welcome, Google would do well to get on board3.

A few other observations:

  • The Gyroscope is a nice addition, although it’s up to developers to make apps that use it in interesting ways.

  • The display looks absolutely incredible, although we knew it would given the monstrous pixel density. It'll be interesting to see if and how developers will be able to take advantage of the new resolution, beyond just including higher-resolution graphics in apps. John Gruber made some good observations on this a couple of months ago.

  • The iBooks update seems solid. I especially like the PDF support (this will all but kill off the low-end PDF-reader market).

  • It’s disappointing that we didn’t see iOS 4 running on an iPad.

  • The iPad now badly needs a front-facing camera; FaceTime for iPad will be a big selling point for the next model.

  1. Long term Mac users have got to be a little worried that their platform has been gently put aside by Apple in order to focus on iOS devices. I’m not too concerned — 10.6 is a great operating system, and I’m patient enough to wait another year or so for 10.8 — although it would have been nice of Apple to have included a couple of OS X design awards. I think the real test with be next year’s WWDC.

  2. I’m not really counting iMovie for iPhone as a new product, although it does look amazing.

  3. Interoperability between iOS and Android stands to benefit the latter more than the former given their respective market-share.