iPhone 4 Update

After over two full weeks of owning an iPhone4, I wanted to check in and give my second impressions. First of all the headphone situation seems to have resolved itself, I have been able to plug the headphones in and remove without trouble. I believe that was one of my only complaint after just a day of usage.

I think the biggest change for me with this iPhone compared to my old iPhone 3G has been the use of the camera, especially for taking movies. The still camera has a better lens and takes better pictures, but I have found it leaves the shutter open a little longer than I like, causing photos to look blurry and requiring more than one photo sometimes in order to get the shot you want.

I did a quick test drive of FaceTime and it worked well considering I was in bad light in a loud restaurant. I am hoping once the annual iPod announcement is made this fall the number of devices will expand to include the iPod Touch, MacBook and maybe even one way chat with iPad. Once it becomes compatible with the MacBook or an iPhone 3GS I will probably be more likely to use it.

The one application I was dying to try out was the iMovie app by Apple. It only cost $5, so I grabbed a copy and started editing some movies I had taken on the iPhone. As expected the controls are very primitive when compared to the full version on the Mac, but you can do a lot of great editing. The one feature I would love to see in the next version of the app is the ability to split clips. In this version you can resize a clip from the beginning or the end, but can't just split it or crop it. This means you have to import the clip twice if you want to different parts of the clip and since the display is so small it is easy to lose track of which clips you have imported. The best way to get around this is to use the cropping tools in the Photos app and pre-split your clips before importing them into iMovie. My other gripe is with the way each project references clips. If you start a project, import some clips and start working on them all is good. However, things go badly if you are like me and import your photos/movies into iPhoto every once in a while and then delete them off of your iPhone. Once you remove the original movies from the iPhone your project in iMovie won't work correctly anymore. A few years ago when the new iMovie came out they implemented a similar storage mechanism, which I loved, because the older version would import the movies into the project and your quickly eat up space. Keeping a single copy is great on a desktop computer because the file isn't going anywhere, but on the iPhone it is very likely that you will try to conserve space and will delete them (unless you are like a paranoid old person who leaves photos on your camera even after you have downloaded them.) Besides that I think it is a great little app.