Graphics is very sharp
This can be demonstrated by the Netflix app. I installed it the first night right after I got home. Watched a movie, the graphics quality is very very good.
Installed apps
Besides Netflix and other usual stuff (google, twitter, facebook, linkedIn), I also installed NFL Score, Public Radio Tuner (a bit disappointed on this one, not multitasking enabled, so I can not read email and listen to the radio at the same time), Yahoo, iBooks, myWireless (AT&T), WSJ and VTT (Virtual Table Tennis) Lite.
fstream: this little program allows me to listen to Chinese radios via Stream, and it is multitasking enabled (can run in background). The only caveat is it eats the data limit in 2gb data plan fast, more later.
Weakness
Battery: per Apple iPhone battery page
“iPhone 4 offers up to 7 hours of talk time on 3G, 14 hours of talk time on 2G, 6 hours of Internet use on 3G, 10 hours of Internet use on Wi-Fi, 10 hours of video playback, or 40 hours of audio playback on a full charge at original capacity. In addition, iPhone 4 features up to 300 hours of standby time.”
This is about right, as I had to charge my iPhone 4 in the afternoon couple times (early in the week) as I was listening to the Internet radio.
So so speaker-phone? I had this feeling when I talked to my friend this evening.
AT&T Data plan
I picked the common 2gb plan. 2gb is a bit tight for me, I used 425 mega bytes as of day 3. Why? Because I was using this fstream app listening to Chinese radio stations. It’s cool, but it’s also a data hogger: for 64 k per second stream, it’s using about 25 mb in one hour per SuperUser. For the time being, I am using the following approach to relieve the data usage.
1) I am NPR junkie, and I decided to keep my Nokia 5800 listening to local NPR station (instead of the iPhone NPR app, which consumes the 3G data);
2) Listen to 64 k radio (Changsha Music) instead of 128 k radio (Shanghai Oriental), one side benefit is I got better connection using 64k. BTW, Changsha Music radio has very good programming.
3) Watch out the data usage carefully in the beginning of billing period, I even installed the AT&T wireless app on iPhone so it’s easy to check daily usage. The goal is to keep it under 2Gb: roughly 100Mb per working day (this means 3 hours of Changsha music radio + misc 3G usage); I use Wifi at home in weekend.
On the other hand, I don’t need 5,000 nights/weekend minutes (roughly 167 minutes per night or weekend, I don’t have that amount of time to talk even before baby born :-). I don’t plan to hit the 450 anytime minutes either. Can I switch the minutes for data, AT&T, if you are listening 🙂