Apple Announces Next Gen iPhone 4

7th June 2010 - Apple CEO Steve Jobs has just announced the iPhone 4, the next generation of the iPhone. The new model will include a front camera and an LED flash on the rear camera.  2 microphones are also present to help suppress noise.

Priced at $199 for the 16Gb model and $299 for the 32GB one, the new phone will be available on June 24th in the US and western europe.It will also be available in both black and white. The phone can be pre-ordered from the 15th.

The new phone has an innovative design, with glass panels on the front and the back and stainless steel strips around the side that form the antennas for the cell phone, GPS and WiFi connections. The screen resolution has been increased by 4x to an impressive 326 pixels per inch (960 by 640 pixels), but without increasing the screen size, making the display much sharper. Apple refers to this as a Retina Display, because they claims that it is indistinguishable from a printed book. They also claim an 800:1 contrast ratio.

The iPhone 4 is powered by an A4 CPU, designed by Apple themselves. This replaces a number of components inside the phone, which means that they can increase the size of the battery, providing a claimed 7 hours of talk time. The radios in the new phone also include support for quad-band HSDPA and HSUPA, allowing for up to 7.2 Mbps upstream and 5.8 Mbps downstream connections. It isn't clear at the moment if this will support T-Mobiles 3G frequencies.

The camera in the iPhone 4 has also been updated, shooting 5 megapixels images using a back-illumiated sensor, which should provide better low light performance. It also offers a 4x digital zoom and an LED flash. High Definition video support is also offered, capturing 720p video at 30 frames a second. A basic video editing application called iMovie will also be built into the phone. This can edit the 720p footage, add effects and upload it. Although it remains to be seen how easy it is to use, the demo that Apple showed looks very impressive.

The operating system that the iPhone 4 runs has been renamed: it is now called iOS4. Apple claims over 100 new features and 1500 APIs for developers to use. The new OS also supports a limited form of multitasking, allowing applications to run certain operations in the background.

Thanks to the front-facing video camera, the iPhone 4 can also make video phone calls, with a new piece of software Apple calls FaceTime. This new application sends audio and video at 640 by 480 resolution, but will only work over WiFi connections: 3G connections are not supported at the moment. Apple is also going to make the connection system an open industry stadnard, so (in theory) other devices and programs could connect with it .