annabel wrote:Ach, I want it >.<
Stupid question, do all your apps stay? Can you just sync them up to your itunes? Take it you don't have to pay for them again or get iphone 4 versions...
How are you finding the screen itself? I did play about a bit, but not much.. It had a hideous background so I had to go in and check you could change it, which luckily you could.. thankfully I just flirted with the salesman so he let me fiddle with it
Yeah, before you start when you get the new phone, sync your old phone one last time. Then, when you sync the new phone after connecting it to iTunes and activating it, it'll ask you if you want to set it up as a new phone or restore from a backup. Just select restore and choose your backup you just made. It restores all of your apps and even keeps the icon order and all of the settings. The only major thing that doesn't transfer over is any of your saved passwords (so for email you need to go back in and manually re-enter the passwords in the Settings app, and it will forget your WiFi passwords). Other apps similarly lose passwords, but don't always give friendly error messages. For example, AirVideo just gave me a "error connecting" until I went in and told it to Not Save Passwords in the settings and then tried to connect again so that it would pop up the prompt to ask me for the password again (after which I was able to re-enable the password saving feature). Other apps were a bit smarter about it (Dropbox just prompted me when I first opened it).
As far as re-paying for apps, you NEVER need to do that. The apps are tied to the iTunes account you're logged into, not to the device. For example, both me and my wife have iPhones. We both sign in to iTunes using a "shared" account and email address. Any apps that we buy, we can get for both of us. We sync to separate computers (me to my laptop, and her to our HTPC), and have separate sets of music and whatnot, but that doesn't matter. If I buy an app on my computer or phone, and she wants it, you just go in on her phone or computer and "buy it again". It'll come up and say "you already own this, so we're just downloading it again with no charge". All of my apps synced over to the new phone without issue, and as I mentioned above, it even kept my icon order and folders and everything (I had upgraded my old 3G to iOS 4 when the GM first came out, and spent lots of time organizing things into folders, so I was glad it didn't mess those up).
There might be some sort of device limit on this (perhaps the same five devices limit that applies to "authorized computers" in iTunes), but I've never run into it.
The screen is really unbelievably nice. You see the difference right away when you hold it next to an older model or other phones. I have access to some "tester" phones through my job, and I've used a Nexus One and an DROID both fairly extensively, and was able to compare it to those this morning (we also have a HTC Incredible, but someone else is using that one, of course). And, especially when you do something like pull up the home page of TR in portrait mode, you can absolutely see the difference. It basically blows all of the other phones I've tried out of the water. On my old 3G, the article text on TR's home page was legible, but the Top Discussion Topics and Top Forum Threads sections were not at all unless you zoomed in (similarly the "featured article teasers" were also very difficult or impossible to read without zooming). On the iPhone 4, the text is tiny (and you have to have good eyes) but it is perfectly legible without zooming in. Larger, more reasonably sized fonts just look crisp and perfect. I know there is all the controversy over the Retina Display claims, but I can tell you this... I have 20/20 vision and I can't see a pixel on text anywhere. Over 300 dpi is darn-good no matter how you cut it.
You can change the wallpaper to anything you choose (your own pictures or one of the included ones), and you can have separate wallpapers for the background and the lock screen. I chose one of the included simple slate-looking picture of a rock for my home screen wallpaper (I plan to get take nice picture myself for the background on my next hike). It works and isn't too busy. I don't see a simple way to turn the wallpaper off completely, but you could just make an all-black wallpaper in Photoshop or Paint or something and then use that.
I also tried out the camera and movie recording last night, and tested out iMovie as well. The camera works amazingly well. Daytime and indoor well-lit shots look just as good as my old Canon S50 point and shoot. It is DRAMATICALLY better in low-light situations, without the flash, than my old iPhone or my wife's 3GS. It also is substantially better than the Nexus One. The flash is kinda crappy. About what you'd expect for a single LED flash. It works, and it is serviceable. It can certainly let you take photos that you otherwise wouldn't be able to take at all, but generally it looks like a crappy flash, especially in complete darkness. I did find it could really help with low-light pictures in some circumstances, but it depended on the composition of the shot (close-ups were often overexposed a bit from the flash). It really doesn't work very well as a running light for the video recording features either. Again, it works, and it is better than no light, but you'll get much better color and less noise if you just turn on some lights yourself (or use a Litepanels MicroPro or something like that).
Still, I don't think I'll be bringing along a point and shoot on hikes anymore or things like that. During the day, it is a perfectly workable 5MP pocket camera. The only large downside is, of course, that there is no optical zoom. The digital zoom looks good though. I expected to prefer to crop-and-zoom after the fact in Photoshop, but it actually does a very good job. The camera app must be doing some sort of auto-correction and sharpening on the zoomed pictures because they came out a little better than I expected from vanilla digital zoom (we're not talking anything amazing here, Genuine Fractals could still do a much better job, but it is decent).
iMovie was a fun toy, but I think it needs another revision or two to really shine. Trimming clips could be clumsy, especially if you want to grab lots of little sections of one big recording. Trimming the In point (the "front" of the clip) was fine. Trimming the Out point (the "end" of the clip) could be an exercise in frustration. The playhead didn't seem to move to show the currently "selected" frame, and so you had to guess and then check it and then re-trim. I've only tried it once though, so I could be misunderstanding how you're supposed to do it. Also, I'm a professional videographer, and I use Final Cut Pro every day for work, so I might have much higher standards than most people. It does do a nice job outputting the video though. The 720p video is ROCK-SOLID at 30fps, which is very nice. One thing you do have to be aware of, though, is that when you upload video to YouTube through the phone itself, it doesn't upload the 720p version but sends a 360p version instead. You can get the full-quality video off of the phone via the normal method you use to get your photos (USB/Sync cord and Windows Explorer or whatever). When you "save" a project in iMovie, it asks you what resolution you want to save it to (240p, 360p, or 720p) and then renders it out to the Camera Roll like any other photo. That part of it works very well. I was shocked how fast it rendered out the little movie I made, and it did a nice job with the transitions.
