gadgets

Billed as the thinnest smartphone ever, Apple's new iPhone 4 features FaceTime, which makes the dream of video calling a reality, and the new Retina display - the highest resolution display ever built into a phone, resulting in super crisp text, images and video.

In addition, iPhone 4 features a 5.0-megapixel camera with LED flash, HD video recording, Apple’s A4 processor, a three-axis gyro and up to 40 percent longer talk time - in an all-new design of glass and stainless steel.

iPhone 4 comes with iOS 4, the newest version of the Apple's mobile operating system, which includes over 100 new features and 1500 new APIs for developers. iOS 4 features Multitasking, Folders, enhanced Mail, deeper Enterprise support and Apple’s new iAd mobile advertising platform.

iPhone 4 will be available in the US, UK, France, Germany and Japan on 24 June and should be in South Africa before the end of September.

FaceTime is as mobile as your phone, so you can see your loved ones and friends anywhere there is Wi-Fi. Using FaceTime is as easy as making a regular voice call, with no set-up required, and you can instantly switch to the rear camera to show others what you are seeing with just a tap.

Apple’s 3.5-inch Retina display has 960 x 640 pixels - four times as many pixels as the iPhone 3GS and 78 percent of the pixels on an iPad. The resulting 326 pixels per inch is so dense that the human eye is unable to distinguish individual pixels when the phone is held at a normal distance, making text, images and video look sharper, smoother and more realistic than before on an electronic display.

iPhone 4 is the thinnest smartphone ever - 9.3 millimeters - with an all-new design and build quality like no other mobile device. The front and back are made of aluminosilcate glass, chemically strengthened to be 30 times harder than plastic, more scratch resistant and more durable. The front and back glass have an oil-resistant coating that helps keep it clean, and encircling iPhone 4 is a highly finished stainless steel band made of a custom alloy that is forged to be five times stronger than standard steel.

iPhone 4 features a new 5.0-megapixel autofocus camera with a 5x digital zoom, a backside illuminated sensor and built-in LED flash that allows you to take pictures even in low light and dark environments. iPhone 4 lets you record and edit HD video and the popular tap to focus feature now works while recording video. You can use the iPhone 4‘s LED flash for both still photography and video recording. The new iMovie app for iPhone lets you combine movie clips, add dynamic transitions and themes and include photos and music, and users can buy it through the App Store right on their phone.

Every iPhone 4 has a built-in three-axis gyro that when combined with the accelerometer provides six-axis motion sensing such as up and down, side to side, forward and backward and pitch and roll, making it perfect for gaming. Developers can access the gyro using the new CoreMotion API to make games and other apps that go well beyond what other mobile devices offer.

With over 100 new features, operating system iOS 4 includes Multitasking, Folders, enhanced Mail, deeper Enterprise support and Apple’s new iAd mobile advertising platform. With Multitasking, users can now instantly switch between any of their apps while preserving battery life. With Folders, users can easily organise their apps into collections by simply dragging one app on top of another. A folder is automatically created and named based on the category of apps selected. Users can change the name of any folder at any time. In addition, users can now customize their lock and home screens with an array of supplied wallpapers or with any of the photos on their phone.

The new iBooks app will be available for iPhone 4 and includes Apple’s new iBookstore. The iBooks app will sync your current place in a book, along with any bookmarks, highlights and notes you have created, between copies of the same book on your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch. iBooks users can also now read and store PDFs right in iBooks.

iPhone 4 delivers seven hours of talk time on 3G networks, up to 10 hours of web browsing on Wi-Fi and up to six hours on 3G, and up to 10 hours of video playback and up to 40 hours of audio playback. iPhone 4 features a second microphone and advanced software to suppress unwanted background noise for improved call quality when in loud places. iPhone 4 also offers 802.11n Wi-Fi networking and adds quad-band HSUPA to provide 7.2Mbps downlink and 5.8Mbps uplink capability.