Why I’m Buying An iPhone 4

I’m a tech per­son. I don’t run on the bleed­ing edge, but I keep up on what’s out there. There’s plen­ty of things I want to buy, not a lot I can jus­ti­fy though. I can jus­ti­fy buy­ing a new iPhone 4.

A lit­tle dis­claimer first about car­ri­er. I’ve been on Cingular and AT&T ever since I got a cell­phone, 10 years and going. I’ve never had a prob­lem with ser­vice. I’ve got 3G cov­er­age all over town (Auburn, AL.) I’ve taken a look at the new data plans and made my peace with them. Sure, who would­n’t love one of the old unlim­it­ed plans but band­width is quick­ly becom­ing a hot­ter com­mod­i­ty. I already have Wi-Fi setup to cover the whole house. AT&T is alright by me. We’ll see if my feel­ings change in a cou­ple of weeks. Now, on to the phone.

The mar­ket has final­ly hit the sell­ing point I’ve been wait­ing on. Dual cam­eras. Front and back cam­eras seems like such a sim­ple idea and such a long time com­ing. And then you have the res­o­lu­tion. The back cam­era shoots video in 720p at 30 frames/second. An HD video cam­era in my pock­et, heck yes. It shoots 5 megapix­el still pho­tos. Not bad at all.

On to the front cam­era and FaceTime, the soft­ware that allows video calls. I’m not com­plete­ly sold on FaceTime yet. It only runs on Wi-Fi and only to anoth­er iPhone 4. Still, it’s freak­ing video calls. Also, I’m sure Skype will update soon and tie into that front cam­era, open­ing the range of video calls a lit­tle bit fur­ther. Oh, and when you hit the lit­tle switch but­ton the phone switch­es to the back cam­era and you can start broad­cast­ing what’s in front of you to whomev­er you’re call­ing. That’s an even cool­er part.

I’m not just buy­ing an iPhone 4 for the cam­eras. I’m also buy­ing it for the dis­play. The Apple engi­neers behind the cur­tain have mag­i­cal­ly crammed 326 pix­els into every inch of the screen. Absolutely ridicu­lous. I cried a lit­tle bit as Steve Jobs talked about ren­der­ing typog­ra­phy and anti-aliasing dur­ing the keynote, start­ing about minute 35. Everything just looks so crisp, so nice, so per­fect. And not just the type, but pic­tures and video too.

*This blog is not endorsed by Steve Jobs. I doubt he even knows about it.

And that’s it. Those two fea­tures — improved dual cam­eras and ultra high res­o­lu­tion dis­play — have sold me on the iPhone 4. All the rest of the oper­at­ing sys­tem improve­ments and hard­ware improve­ments, and there are many, are just icing on the cake as they say.

Now the counter argu­ment. Why not go with an HTC Evo or some other Android rel­a­tive? Come on the Evo is 4G — you can even hear the whoosh­ing sound as you surf the cut­ting edge of tech­nol­o­gy. Um, if you live in about 40 cities in 13 states. That sounds too sar­cas­tic and I’m not try­ing to knock the Evo 4G or Sprint or any­thing like that. In fact, the Evo also has dual cam­eras. It even has a high­er res­o­lu­tion with the back fac­ing cam­era, 8 megapix­el. It shoots HD video. It has a larg­er screen and even offers HDMI out­put. I would love to have one. Sprint even has unlim­it­ed data plans. I hon­est­ly can’t find any neg­a­tives as to why not to buy an HTC Evo 4G run­ning on Sprint.

So why am I stick­ing with buy­ing an iPhone 4 with AT&T? I guess it real­ly comes down to stay­ing in my com­fort zone. I have built up a rela­tion­ship with Apple and AT&T that makes me com­fort­able with them and their prod­ucts. I trust Apple to make a great prod­uct. Score one for mar­ket­ing, and two for engi­neer­ing. Have I made the right choice? I’ll let you know on June 24th.