iPhone 4 impression II

After about two and half weeks of usage, I could confidently say Apple has pulled off a true winner here. 

I absolutely love the iPhone 4. The stainless steel band is striking. I could understand if Apple indeed made a conscious decision to trade off the signal handling for the beauty of this band thing (trade off, you would be surprised, happens everywhere on our everyday life.) Occasionally I would experience the signal issue but by now I got used to hold in the "right" way. I haven't put any case or screen guard yet, I just remember to reserve one side of my pant's pocket just for the iPhone 4. No key, no coin, no nothing in that pocket but the iPhone 4. It sits very comfortable there. With the steel band, and the black "gorilla" glass the iPhone is high end luxury goods.


1. Battery life is good! It gets me through the day no problem even with semi heavy usage doing email, browse, pandora, twitter, taking several pictures, and iTunes for about 8 hours. It is such a relief that you don't need to constantly remember to plug the phone to a charger.
2. The best app for me is Pandora. I am getting bored with my own music (I have only around 300 albums). Pandora is so good at picking the songs once stations are setup, I seldom skip a song they pick. I am exposed to many more good songs now. The question remaining is how do they make money and continue to provide service to us?
3. The retina display is so surreal. I am surprised Apple only manages to come up a "4" to name the iPhone instead of a better name be able to fully capture the wonder of the display.
4. Would the current news/trend that Android out sold iPhone in the second quarter make apple executives nervous? Granted I haven't watch much tv in the summer time but it doesn't seem apple is doing much ad at all. They need to comes up smart ads to spread the virtue out. (on a second thought, I don't mind Apple becomes an underdog again!!!)


Improvements for the iPhone (or touch smart phone generally speaking)
1. Battery, battery, and longer battery life. I would be very happy if the next iPhone could give us a 12 hour heavy use. I am sure there are very heavy investment in the battery tech. It is just frustrating that the battery life is not moving as longer as we expect. Does the battery life follow the Moore law? Sometimes it is just not enough to throw more money and  more people at this kind of thing. It is waiting for a genius to make a breakthrough discovery. Sigh. What I really want to say is that why cell phone makers, cell phone battery makers don't need government subsidize while the auto maker needs government to provide tax break for the electric car. This is the most absurd things for the government to do since this kind of subsidiary is to redistribute the wealth from poor people to the wealthy people in the names of environment. We don't subsidize a BMW purchase, and why would we subsidize a electric car?  Since the subsidize completely distorts the price signal it would only slow the pace of the innovation. And at what point we would say enough is enough and stop subsidizing? After 100,000 sold? 500,000 sold? Or a million?
2. Nano coating. It is still way to easy to smudge the glass, both front and back.  Fingerprint is a nasty thing. Could nano technology help out here? I remembered Docker has pants that uses nano technology that is able to resist spill, dirt, you name it.

3. Camera, both front and back. I don't carry around my point and shoot anymore. But there is still more to be desired from the iPhone 4 camera. and both hardware and software. the camera software is huge disappointment.
4. There is no doubt Apple is working nonstop on the signal stuff.


Listen to this -- the entire work force of the state of Virginia had to have solitaire removed from their computers -- because they hadn't done any work in six weeks.… You know what this is, you know what we're seeing here? We're seeing the end of Western civilization as we know it. -- From You've Got Mail, by Frank Navasky