Is iOS4 on the iPhone 4 the best ever?
After carrying around a cell phone for 18 years and after having looked at what seems like a million of the things, it’s time to peer at how my iOS4.2 iPhone 4 stacks up to all that came before it.
In Las Vegas in the mid-90′s, a cell phone was a requirement for doing business, so I got one. Prior to that, I was beepable, like everyone else. So, in 1992, I went from beeper to cell phone and never, of course, stopped and looked back very hard. The early ones were fairly nondescript, comparative bulky, sometimes balky, and made telephone calls from almost anywhere. I once did a three-way call from the roadside in the middle of nowhere in Nevada with a man in France and another fellow in the Soviet Union.
Over those early years, there were good phones and there were bad phones, but that is all they were: phones. Then the smartphone appeared and things began to get interesting. Even though I was a Windows guy back then, I did a lot of experimentation with a lot of smartphones and wound up with an iPhone. To be honest, back in the early days, I thought of the iPhone as a really cool toy and didn’t think of it much as a phone at all, even though it did a passable job of basic telephony.
When the iPhone hit the number 3, it was starting to be a semi-serious pocket computer with a cell phone included. I looked at it more as a computer than a cell phone, even though the phone part had gotten much better. All through that time, I talked cell phone / smartphone with the coffee shop crowd. I have touched and played with every smartphone that came down the pike, and had long conversations with their owners about the good and bad sides of their phones.
Then came the iPhone 4, especially with iOS4.2, and the world was suddenly rock solid. This is the current epitome of the smartphone, to my mind. If it were not for the iPhone 4, I would have one of the better Android phones and be quite happy with it. I freely admit that. But from the style of the handset to the smallest structure of the operating system, the iPhone 4 is THE smartphone.
But I’ll keep looking. 
Related posts:
December 5th, 2010
Best piece of technology ever. Epitome of elegance. Plato’s phone. Silly to say phone. Yet nostalgic. It is quintessentially macintische to have a painful homeward journey to the cutting edge.