White iPhone 4 First Impression

I just received my White iPhone 4 yesterday. I bought it on the 30^th of April 2011 and it arrived nine days later. As usual with any gadgets, I feel excited even though it was only a nine days wait. The package contains a unit of White iPhone 4, a headphone, a USB cable, an adapter and a user manual.

Build Quality

I have seen and briefly used the black iPhone 4 in the Apple Store before and the white one is no different. The build quality is great but at the same time, it feels fragile. It is a whole block of phone without any covers and that’s make it great to hold and look sturdy. There are no creaky and plasticky sounds when you press hard on the screen. However, it feels as though there is no loose space inside the unit and I wonder if any random knocks will make a dent on its cover.

Startup

Powering up the White iPhone 4 took a few seconds. It then asked to connect the iPhone to a computer with iTunes installed. My MacBook Air comes in handy and it immediately recognised the iPhone and started the configuration. The iPhone is on iOS 4.3.2 and I hesitated a bit when iTunes prompted me to update to iOS 4.3.3. In the end, I chose not to update first and see what IOS 4.3.2 has to offer. Once the iPhone has gone through all the iTunes configurations, the famous iPhone home screen appeared.

Hard/Software and Performance

The Retina Display is impressive. It looks crystal clear and the capacitive touch screen responses to every single touch. I left the plastic protector on while waiting for my real screen protector to arrive in post. The iOS is very responsive too with every apps launched in a matter of seconds. Immediately, I headed into the app store and downloaded Facebook. I am a total Facebook fan but that was the first app that I could think of and it’s free, of course. It connected to 3G instantly and sometime later, it did ask me whether or not to join the available WiFi networks.

I welcome the addition of Personal Hotspot as sometimes; my home broadband can be quite unreliable. My HTC Desire used to do the job but since this iPhone comes with a 1GB data plan while my HTC Desire is on Pay As You Go, it seems sensible to utilise my iPhone as the hotspot. The weird thing was the Personal Hotspot setting was under the network setting before I setup my Apple ID. And once my Apple ID was setup, Personal Hotspot is on the main settings page.

Problems

The issue of loss signal depends on how you hold the phone. It doesn’t cause any problem to me as I believe a phone case would solve the problem. I thought the creation of Apple ID was a bit long winded but thankfully, I only need to do it once. Once everything is set, iPhone is as easy to use as ABC.

Finally…

With millions of iPhone users around the globe, I don’t see many reasons to be worrying about the problems that I have experienced. They are kind of minor problems and wouldn’t have crippled the phone. It is the most popular phone at the moment and I can really see why now that I have one. There are certain things that iOS should learn from Android but the iOS itself looks as stable as it can be. Thus, why change something that already works for millions of people?