I ordered my iPhone from the Apple UK store, and had it shipped to me back in Singapore. It finally arrived (on a Sunday night, kudos DHL) and I have my grubby hands upon it!
Oooo it is Le iPhone
Fresh out of the box
First thought as I held it in my hand: the flatness of the back makes it feel odd in the hand. I’m used to the curved back of the iPhone 3G.
Second thought as I held it in my hand: it feels “expensive”. I’m not sure how else to convey it but there you go. It feels solid and expensive, and actually feels a fair bit heavier than the 3G even though it’s only a few grams heavier.
Onto the hairiest part of getting my iPhone: cutting my SIM to micro SIM size so that it would fit in the iPhone 4 micro SIM tray. I followed some directions online and cut my SIM down to the requisite 15mm x 12mm. You can apparently buy cutters to do this for you, but I thought it was a bit silly to buy a one-time-use device. So I pulled out an old nail file, a pair of scissors, a ruler and my old SIM card, and got to work.
This is what you will need
After some cutting with scissors and some patient filing with an old nail file the newly minted SIM card fit perfectly into the tiny tray.
A perfect fit
I plugged it in, the phone synced up and I had access to my phone.
The first thing you notice is the incredible screen. It’s like a glossy magazine – I can make out the pixels if I squint really really hard, but for all intents and purposes they’re not visible.
3G on the left, 4 on the right (click image for actual size)
I made a couple of phone calls to test the iPhone 4′s antenna issue. General consensus online is that if reception is good, the attenuation caused by your hand will not disrupt your connection. But if you have borderline usable reception, touching the antenna will toast it. I can confirm this; my room gets some pretty bad reception and the antenna issue reared its ugly head. I can’t make calls on the iPhone 4 from a particular corner of my room. Worse than my 3G! Happily, 1m away there is no issue. This antenna issue may be a deal breaker to some of you; your mileage may vary.
Fired up some games to play on it. It’s fast. I’m upgrading from a 3G so the speed difference is amazing. It’s the performance gap between a voodoo and a voodoo 2 or between a regular hard drive and an intel SSD. Once you upgrade you can never go back. It gets warm quite quickly, however.
I haven’t had enough time fiddling with it to give impressions on the battery life, and I’ll update Squarebrain with new information when I can.
Hi,
Can you tell me if you had it shipped directly to yourself or you got someone (a friend possibly) in the UK to open the pack and then ship it across?
Need to figure out the scene with customs.
Been trying to get one myself but haven’t been able to figure out how.
And if it was shipped directly, how come you didn’t order it from the US store where it is cheaper? I can’t seem to find a no-contract option on the US store though.
Cheers,
Shivram.
@Shivram:
I ordered it through borderlinx. It’s a service similar to vPost. You sign up, get a shipping address for the UK/US, which is a borderlinx-manned address, and when you place your order you put in that address. Apple ships it to that UK address, the staff at borderlinx process your order and you can get it shipped back to yourself.
I didn’t get the US one because the US iPhone 4s are locked to AT&T. Apple UK sells them unlocked.
[...] people around me have been asking whether the iPhone 4 has reception issues. Like I said in an earlier post, the answer is “Yes, but it’s not an issue with a case or when you have full reception [...]