iPhone 4
Retina display, Apple's first in-house A4 chip, glass-and-steel body, front camera for FaceTime, and the antenna story.
Released June 24, 2010 · Discontinued September 10, 2013 · From $199 (16 GB, with contract)
An Apple engineer left one in a bar in Redwood City and Gizmodo published photographs before the launch, which is how a lot of people saw the iPhone 4 first. It shipped June 24, 2010 in a case that dropped curved plastic for flat glass front and back held in a stainless steel band, and that band was also the antenna. The screen was the headline. 640x960 in the same 3.5 inches, 326 pixels per inch, which Apple called Retina on the argument that you could no longer pick out individual pixels at normal reading distance. Text on it looked printed. Inside sat Apple's own A4 and 512MB of RAM, double the 3GS. The rear camera went to 5 megapixels with an LED flash and 720p video, a front camera arrived for FaceTime, and a gyroscope joined the accelerometer. Then people started holding it. Bridging the gap in the steel band with a palm dropped signal badly enough that the story got its own name, and Apple spent a press conference that July handing out free cases and insisting every phone on the market did this. It outsold everything anyway.
Reviews & Reception
Reviewers praised the Retina display, the camera and the call quality, and split on reception. Some measured fewer dropped calls than the 3GS, others found it a mixed bag, and the antenna argument ran for months afterwards.
network reception was a mixed bag. Compared with the previous model, the new iPhone dropped marginally fewer calls
Sound is much better on both ends of the call, thanks in part to a noise-canceling microphone
The battery life on the iPhone 4 has been outstanding thus far, exceeding our expectations
we had far, far fewer dropped calls than we experienced on our 3GS
Apple has built a beautiful smartphone that works well, adds impressive new features and is still, overall, the best device in its class.