How much smarter will the iPhone 4 be and how much of an advantage will this create for Apple over competitors? The new phone has some significant upgrades. (http://venturebeat.com/2010/06/07/how-apple-is-setting-itself-apart-from-the-pack-of-iphone-clones/) The first being Facetime video call feature which will allow you to quickly add video communication to an exsting call if the other user as video calling with the tap of a buttton. It will be critical for users to get onto WiFi for this type of calling giving the new 2GB cap on data plans by AT&T. Otherwise, it could be a costly feature! The second is the Retina dsiplay which takes the screen resolution to 326 pixels per square inch, about 4 times the 3GS screen resolution. The iMovie app adds the ability to adit custom video quickly using the touch screen interface of the phone. Lastly, the iPhone 4 has a chip based gyroscope which is superior to the accelerometer on the 3GS and can provide much higher precision for game controlling and 3D tracking.
Amidst all this progress and innovation, the downside could be the fracturing of the development environment given all of the 5B apps in the current appstore are clearly not optimized to take advantage of these new features and may even drive some incompatbility issues. This while Andriod has worked hard to drive more convergence on its fractured development environment issues by using the Nexus One as a reference device. (http://mobile.venturebeat.com/2010/06/09/iphone-now-as-fragmented-as-android/) It should be interestng to see how the competition responds with their next wave of devices and how much this pressures the baseline OS to change again.
Amidst all this progress and innovation, the downside could be the fracturing of the development environment given all of the 5B apps in the current appstore are clearly not optimized to take advantage of these new features and may even drive some incompatbility issues. This while Andriod has worked hard to drive more convergence on its fractured development environment issues by using the Nexus One as a reference device. (http://mobile.venturebeat.com/2010/06/09/iphone-now-as-fragmented-as-android/) It should be interestng to see how the competition responds with their next wave of devices and how much this pressures the baseline OS to change again.



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