iPhone 4 Landing in Austria

It’s one of these days there the arrival of a new and shiny Apple toy is diminishing productivity to zero. My iPhone 4 arrived at lunchtime and so I spent my afternoon unboxing and setting up my new iDevice.

I had purchased a black 32 GB iPhone 4 on Apple’s UK store. The kingdom is a tier 1 country which got it at the same time as the US. What’s also great is that the empire’s Apple online store sells the variant without SIM-lock. A necessity if you want to be able to use the iPhone 4 as a phone in your home cellular network. Since I ordered Apple added this paragraph to clarify this:

When you purchase your iPhone from the Apple Online Store, you’ll get it SIM-free. So you can sign up for service with the carrier of your choice and change your carrier at any time

My friend Michael Kaye in London purchased the phone for me (32 GB for 599 GBP) and shipped it via parcel service to Austria. This cost me another 60 pounds, but I had insurance and tracking. The latter was kind of weird, because the original carrier Parcelforce handed off the package to FedEx and so I got incomplete and somewhat strange tracking info. But fortunately it turned out fine.

I’m unboxing the iPhone after the back, check out my YouTube video!

I’m with Orange AT for cellular service and so I needed to manufacture a Micro-SIM, which is not hard to do. I printed out the sizing template of micro-sim.de, affixed it with sticky tape to the SIM and cut away the superfluous plastic material. As Andy Durdin put it: “The iPhone 4 successfully integrates the latest technology with traditional handcrafts.” 😉

If you cover up the chip such that you cannot see its sides under the template then you can easily use nail scissors (which I borrowed from my wife) and a nail file to get it into a shape that fits the Micro-SIM tray.

As a first impression I can only state the obvious:

• I have no yellow blotches on the screen
• I am unable to perform the “death grip”, even with sweaty fingers I never lose service. Are our network’s in Austria stronger than AT&T?
• The proximity sensor seems to also work normally
• The Micro-SIM tray is also made out of metal
• Text is incredibly sharp
• The display looks like there are less reflections than on the 3GS.
• The first synch was fast for the apps and took some time for music and video
• i4 plays my WWDC 2010 HD videos without problem.

My previous case I had to protect my 3GS does no longer fit due to the iPhone 4’s edges. So I guess I’ll just put it into an iSock(TM) until I can get an Apple bumper case for my birthday next month. It’s like this will be my second birthday, after today.

Update: I made a YouTube video to show off the video cam quality.

– video being replaced –

Categories: Apple