iPhone 4 Review

The glass sandwich with a stainless steel band is the design Apple kept coming back to, and in June 2010 it arrived carrying the 960 by 640 Retina display at 326 ppi, a density nothing else could touch and the one that sent the whole industry into the pixel race. Under it sat the A4, Apple's first in-house chip, at 800 MHz with 512 MB of RAM, double the 3GS, and a 5-megapixel back-illuminated camera with an LED flash and 720p video that made the iPhone 4 the most used camera on Flickr within a year.

The front VGA camera existed for FaceTime, the first video calling ordinary people actually tried. iOS 4 brought multitasking, folders and a unified inbox, and updates ran through iOS 7.1.2 in 2014, four major versions, though iOS 7 crawled on it. The reliability mark is where it pays. The steel band was the antenna, bridging the gap at the lower left with a bare hand dropped bars and calls, and Apple's answer was a press conference, a free bumper case and a revised antenna on the Verizon model in February 2011.

The glass back cracked from short drops, and the 1420 mAh cell managed about seven hours of 3G talk, respectable for 2010. AT&T sold it at $199 on a two-year contract; the no-commitment price was $599 for 16GB and $699 for 32GB, which is the figure recorded here.