An iPhone 4 video call, and a little Grip of Death

ABOVE: The small installed base of iPhone 4 users meant I had to place a call to PC World's Ted Gibbons and Miro Slabbert at Fairfax Business Media, in Russians-shaking-hands-with the-Americans-in-space fashion. Apologies for the Friday afternoon production values (don't drink and film, kids). Next time I'll orientate my Motorola Milestone the right way. 

My iPhone 4 arrived today. The 3GS had become my default phone, or the one that felt like home among my many handsets. With its retina display and more solid feeling case, my gut reaction is that the iPhone 4 will become my new number one.

Facetime with Fairfax
One of the first things I've done is make a few video calls using the handset's Facetime video chat app, which takes advantage of one of the iPhone 4's new features - a front-mounted video camera.

I was wondering how the video quality would fare on 3G, but in truth there's not much of a "call" part to a Facetime call.

To initiate Facetime, you dial someone's mobile phone number, then tap a Facetime icon. 

But that's about as far as it goes on 3G. Both parties must be on a wi-fi network as well for Facetime to kick in - which takes several second (and which I'm assuming is facilitated by iTunes over the internet in much the same manner as Skype hosts a video call).

The quality of my video clip of my video call, which I recorded from a Motorola Milestone Android phone in my other hand, is a little (cough) Friday afternoon.

Still you can get a rough idea. The video is pretty good, unless somebody moves quickly, and audio is clear. 

The wi-fi requirement, and of course the relatively small base of other iPhone 4 owners, for now, does restrict Facetime's utility.

If you've used Skype for video on a laptop, it's a similar level of quality. It's user-friendly, and well-implemented. 

Certainly, video "call" quality is far superior to that I've ever seen on any 3G handset. 

Video calling from a phone is a decade-old technology. But though slick implementation, this seems to be one of those areas - yet again - that Apple will popularise.

The Grip of Death
My review unit didn't come with a bumper (retail and online buyers are directed to an AppStore ordering app to claim their free case), so I spent my day exposed to the grip of death.

If I'd just arrived from Mars, and didn't know about the reception issue, I don't think I would have noticed anything amiss. I did have one call cut out - and noticed that afterward I had my hand on the killer lower-left corner of the handset. 

But in general, call quality was fine.

At NBR's office, making a concerted effort to bear-grip the lower left hand cover, I could watch as five bars of reception steadily degraded to two. But even though the person I was calling complained about degraded quality, the call wasn't lost.

Every phone has a grip of death
Speaking of PC World, the frachise's US website has carried out an interesting technical test of Steve Jobs' assertion that every smartphone suffers degraded call quality when handled in a certain way.

"Apple’s assertion that antenna attenuation is a common problem on smartphones is clearly true," the article concludes, after much field testing and technical graphs.

"Every one of the phones we tested experienced some degree of attenuation when held firmly in a position that covered the device’s antenna.

"On the other hand, our informal tests indicate that different phone models do not exhibit attenuation to the same degree--and the iPhone 4 performed far worse when attenuated than did most of its competitors in our tests.

"Most significantly, the iPhone 4 - almost certainly because of its “innovative” external antenna--was the only phone we tested that has a distinct (and easily reachable) weak spot capable of ending a call with a single touch.

Read pcworld.com's full report here.