Although the follow up the the iPhone 4 appears to be just around the corner the current phone still seems to be selling well and is still one of the best phones available despite being almost a year old. Apple have brought out the newest version of the iOS (iOS 5.0) and it seems inevitable that a phone will be following. Although much debate rages whether it will be a proper upgrade (i.e. iPhone 5) or a variation of the iPhone 4 (i.e. iPhone 4S or iPhone 4G) the current phone is the one we will focus on here.
The big issue was (and still is) the well known "death grip" that caused a lot of noise when the phone was first released. The "death grip" caused the signal (and as a result calls) to suddenly vanish due to the way users held the phone. Apple's unhelpful response was to tell users "You're holding it wrong" (which, understandable annoyed customers) and never actually got properly sorted.
The cause of the death grip was holding certain parts of the phone, almost in a natural position as you would do for a call and it did lead to huge negative press for the company. Despite the "death grip" the phone sold well and Apple even managed to fleece extra money from customers by selling them a "Bumper case" just to try and prevent the signal loss. Effectively they asked for more money to make their very expensive piece of kit work properly rather than took a financial hit themselves and recall the unit.
The bumper case did solve the problem pretty well, especially for Apple, though it wasn't the only problem with the phone, it was, by far, the most embarrassing.
The camera, on release was also a major issue. It ranged from the virtual shutter just shutting and staying shut to an innate ability to make white appear yellow in indoor pictures. Whilst these issues have, seemingly been fixed since the early releases some people have still had issues with the camera in the past few months so just be aware of this if you do fancy getting one. It is also worth noting that the main Camera is just a 5MP one, and this is below what seems to be the standard for top phones at the moment (expect this to be upgraded when the next release is available).
Whilst the phone is a cracking handset that makes full use of a wonderful OS and wonderful hardware the phone is starting to show signs of it's age (at last). As mentioned above the main camera is "only" 5MP (with the standard now set at 8MP) as well as just 512MB of RAM (this is on par with devices such as the HTC Wildfire S and the Samsung Galaxy S). If you are fancying getting an iPhone I'd strongly advise waiting to see what they are to bring out. The device, although still having a high price tag, wasn't really the leap forward that many had hoped for and whilst it did add a number of nice new features it's certainly not the phone that really "Changed everything", it just raised the bar and others have since raised it which is why it's showing it's age.
