User talk:Tompkins321

Expanded reply

Hi. I've replied to you at Talk:IPhone_4#Hello, so you might check it out.

Here's part of the reply that's out of scope of discussing in iPhone 4 article talk, therefore I've decided to put that for you here in user talk.

If your wish to very specifically have an iPhone 4 has persisted, consider the following:

• iPhone 4 was first unveiled ten years ago, and it got its last update five years ago in 2014. The Safari browser in iOS 7 is rather outdated, and very probably has unaddressed security vulnerabilities that have been fixed only in iOS 8 and greater;
• To the best of my knowledge, iOS 7, the last major release for iPhone 4, does not have built-in content blocking support for Safari (Safari content blocking support was introduced in iOS 9).
• While Safari mobile on iOS 7 does support TLS 1.2, then many sites have moved on to supporting newer cipher suites (better encryption support) within TLS 1.2, and others have switched to using TLS 1.3, which is supported on iOS 12.2 and greater. This means, that Safari in iOS 7.1.2 might not be able to connect to sites with better security.
• Equally, support by popular must-have apps might no longer be present even for iOS 7.
• It's impossible to install a newer third-party browser (such as Firefox) with a rendering engine other than the built-in WebKit;
• iPhones do not have FM radio support;
• nor do they support mini-SIM cards, for if you'd want compatibility with phones that only support this type of SIM card (might a need arise to switch to a basic or featurephone);
• the iPhones' batteries are not user-removable, making it complicated to prolong the device's lifetime with a newer battery;
• Neither are many apps meant for Android compatible with iOS. There are very useful Android apps without equivalents in iOS, which will never be ported to iOS, such as:
  • Firefox proper and its derivatives (GNU IceCat);
  • Arity — advanced calculator that displays live results;
  • AsciiCam — make photos as ASCII art;
  • DNS66 — a system-wide content blocker;
  • Hacker's Keyboard — has a small memory footprint compared to most other keyboards;
  • MicroMathematics Plus — advanced formula and graphing calculator;
  • NewPipe, a media player known mostly as an independent YouTube client;
  • Suntimes — shows lots of information about sunrise and sunset times, including moon phases;
  • and Vim Touch — a port of the advanced Vim text editor for Android;

Tux Paint and VLC are available on iOS, though.

In my view, some of the functionality mentioned above, I consider vital, and it's simply not present in iPhones.

Of course, in the five years between 2015, since you posted, and 2020, your aspirations for a phone have probably evolved. It is possible to wait for hand-me-downs, or, finances permitting, to buy a much better used device from a respectable store. -Mardus /talk 00:49, 22 June 2020 (UTC)