The iPhone 5: on the surface
Thursday, September 13, 2012 at 3:01AM On the surface, the iPhone 5 turned out to be everything that we expected. A 4” screen, new dock connector and improvements all round popped up with absolutely no surprises at all. Even the memory capacity is still constrained to 64GB maximum.
By the time the event started we knew that we could pre-order tomorrow and that it would be shipped next Friday, but that is still an impressive achievement. To have so many countries covered so quickly and to get them in the hands of users in a matter of days is remarkable and will no doubt only help sales of the latest and greatest iPhone.
iTunes will be getting a much needed update next week alongside the release of iOS 6 as well and that is about all you need to know about the new iPhone.
The days of being surprised by iPhone announcements are over with so many people involved in manufacturing them, so many websites desperate to offer new iPhone rumours every single day and millions of people happy to play along and eat up anything with ‘iPhone’ in the title. The thing is that the launch of the iPhone 5 would not have been surprising even if not one rumour had surfaced. There is nothing here that is not available in a different form on other high-end smartphones. Serious Android phones will be rubbing their hands together and enjoying every moment of this, but people like me will be buying the iPhone 5.
You see, it isn’t about the specifications or the clever features that make people stand up and think “Ooh that’s great!” and then never use them once they buy the phone. It’s all about the experience for me and the little touches that make the iPhone 4S so damn useful every single day. From the audio quality of the external speakers and headphones to the complete lack of lag when opening apps and doing complex things. From the incredibly intuitive usage to the familiarity that has grown over the past few years, why would I not want all of that to be even faster in a slightly larger space? It makes no sense to pay so much money for what seems like minimal upgrades, but when a device is used multiple times and for many hours each day, why would I not?
None of the above is said without some reservations. Something in the back of my mind believes that Apple is falling behind in the smartphone market, but then I consider that it is still way ahead in the areas that count. The sheer quality of the hardware and each component are still ahead of the rest in my opinion and in some areas they are moving further forward. I have to make decisions based on my usage and purchasing a different phone on a different platform just because it has a huge screen and lots of novel features makes little sense. One thing really struck me- the comment that Apple made the iPhone better rather than changed it completely for the sake of doing so. You may think the simplistic icon layout is old hat, you may think the lack of widgets hampers efficiency and you may smirk at the lack of change since the original iPhone. What you cannot do is suggest for one minute that all of that does not work because it surely does.
I find myself in the unusual position of writing about phones every day, being seriously geeky about all things mobile yet quite content with what I am using and just as content with a simple step up.
Apple will market this as the most amazing thing ever, it isn’t, and some will believe that it truly is because they are deluded Apple fans. Others will criticise it for a number of reasons just because they are obsessed with Android and hate everything Apple does.
Well, I hate Apple as a company and I also have similar hatred for Samsung, Google, Microsoft and the rest. These are huge organisations that are all the same deep down- not to be trusted. However, only Apple is making a smartphone that truly fits me and my life every day. That doesn’t make it better than the competition. That makes it right for me. At the end of all of this, I find myself somewhat irrationally disappointed by the iPhone 5 yet I am still buying it. The rational side of me realises that the iPhone 5 is the perfect step up for someone like me who relies on their iPhone 4S so much. I am not swallowing any of Apple's bullsh*t when I buy it, I just like it and feel that it is worth the money.
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Reader Comments (29)
I watched the keynote speech. I kept looking at my S3 thinking, it already has that and more. I was more excited about the new Nano and iPod Touch. I've made a list of pros and cons vs the S3.
iPhone 5 - brand image, design, Eco system integration, possible better camera than 4S although it seems to have the same optics practically, possibly different audio out options with new connector, Siri
S3 - design , Google Android ICS is better, and jelly bean will polish it off next month, better text entry options eg swift key , great camera maybe not as good as 5, better and easier sharing of anything, better phone options eg lift text message to call user, smart stay keeping screen on automatically, Google apps like Google Navigation is more mature, Bluetooth stereo audio has aptx for high quality sound, micro USB connector, USB host, game emulators without rooting, and then there is another 20 specs the iPhone 5 doesn't have like NFC, voice control of camera, launching apps by voice, smart alarms, business briefing alarms, Plus there is a decent Eco system now but not quite as good as Apple, And the S3 has a fm radio controllable via voice as is the music player too, and other default apps
I am really struggling with the iPhone 5. Most android top end handsets are better by miles and some are thinner down to 7.1mm.
Also the shape is so similar to the iPhone 4/4S. Did Apple really bother to do much to make it better.
And then there is the cost. £529 for the 16gb. Probably £699 for the 64gb. That's very expensive.
I am not surprised by nature of the release. I was not expecting any significant change in the hardware, better (larger) screen & CPU was to be expected. Any real changes would have to come through software, and that's not going to happen for a while based upon Apples current "glacial" pace.
If I was an iPhone user, I might have expected NFC to be added this time around, but I think that switching the connector from a large proprietary one to a smaller proprietary one will probably annoy some (out goes backward compatibility with every accessory), if they had to change, I would have thought the standard USB connector would have been better choice.
I guess by the time Apple have a phone for me, I wont need it, as I'll be using my Cybernetics interface for mobile and desktop devices.
The difference between the iPhone 3 and 4 was bigger than the difference between 4 and 5, except that 5 now has LTE support. Looks like Nokia will be doing better now.
Jah - are you considering getting the 5?
Also read that the 4S is a better option as a global phone as there are 4 versions of the iPhone 5 LTE dependant on country. I need to understand more about the audio and video out options and capabilities of the new connector. It appears it is encrypted digital out, which takes away the previous line out option. Could be better. Also, does anyone know if you can use the camera kit on the iPhone 5?
Meant to add, the S3 has a fm radio. Useful.
Not sure what to think at the moment. My intial frustration was mostly around early reports that it was to be contract only (no sim free), and that would have been a killer for me (I'm not changing providers over a phone) (I understand why the original iphone had people moving to O2, but not now).
I never wanted to see feature upgrades for the sake of "because the competition has them", where Apple can and should be focussing is the full package. If they stuck a 2 ghz quad core in the thing, next week one of the androids would be announced with it, and the chorus of "iphone is already out of date" would arrive.
What I'd have liked more is rather than "it's thinner for the sake of being thinner" instead "We worked out how to make it 20% thinner, and filled the space with more battery life instead".
In a way apple couldn't win on the screen either - make it bigger "Copying android" - leave the same "Too small". I'm pleased they didn't make it wider (though I'll wait to see how good the screen really is), as I find the iphone easy to use one handed - something I can't say about the high end androids. Keyboard may be easier landscape too?
Anyway, my "should I or not" is more simple - is it worth upgrading from the 4S? The 4S has a very good processor currently (eg. sgs3 vs 4s both jelly defense, the sgs3 stutters a lot, 4s does not), or at least one that is fine with a lean operating system. I gather the camera is the same too (Software tweaks were mentioned - for 4s too?)
So basically, it's £729 (guestimate) to add a little more to the top of the display? Minus whatever the 4s flogs for.
I guess Apple is targetting 2year upgrade '4' owners, which would make more sense.
Proof will be in the end of year sales figures I guess.
One observation - classic example of why Apple still niggles at me (btw, love my sgs3) - their point that they've changed the screen ratio, but mean time, all apps will work with a black border.
Not great, but a compromise.
I still can't get (or install prior purchases of) so many applications for the SGS3 because they're not available for it.
"all apps will work with a black border." ....really???
P.S. Roll on the Galaxy Note 2... ;-)
I struggle with the idea that this was a disappointing upgrade, although I'm sure Apple will add a helicopter to the 5S! This is an evolution of one of the most refined consumer products you can buy at any price.
I mean; a quite beautiful design (and no more glass back), a better screen, better CPU (and it was already a screamer), better graphics (and they were already excellent), better connectivity, better battery, mild improvements to the already impressive camera (though Nokia is now the clear leader in this category), new iTunes (about time) and an iOS bump. Even the headphones have been painstakingly redesigned. Early hands-on say that the attention to detail and quality is obvious.
Why would we expect more? It's every bit as significant an upgrade as the Galaxy SII to the Galaxy SIII. I will pre-order this on Friday and will look forward to receiving it on launch day - it's the best platform for iOS.
As for the black borders, Joel, that's the preferred option; no one wants the aspect ratio of current gaming (for instance) Apps stretched, so centering them in the middle of the screen is about right. Based on previous specification shifts, a majority of apps will likely have been updated with a month or two - iOS developers move really fast to adapt to new devices so that they don't lose sales.
Shameless sucking up to Shaun here - can I say how nice it is to be part of a site that has sensible conversations and accepts that some like iOS and some like Android.
Read some quarters of the bbc news, apple, and android sites, and you half expect protests outside the respective stores/companies.
I personally believe that Apple is silly with all the patent law suits, on the other hand, the ones they've lost (Look them up) aren't being reported - it's not all one way.
@Gavin, I'll probably get a LTE phone on EE but not the iPhone 5 as it seems more sensible to get a phablet if you have a high speed connection.
Why am I considering ordering a black iphone 5 tomorrow?
Help me!
I'm with Shaun on this. Is it a game changer? No. Does it have anything that I have to have? No. Will I buy one? Yes. And the most annoying thing is that I have to change accessories because of the new lightning plug. That's the thing. Would you buy a disc (CD/DVD/Blu-ray) that had a radically different interface and required different media unless it did something phenomenally new? As much as people say that the Android devices are superior, they really don't do anything that much better. For better or worse, the Apple ecosystem has me. They don't do very much to make me even consider something else.
We were at a mall last night and I played with a Galaxy III for a while. Nice machine but it doesn't do anything that I need to do or even want to do that I can't with my iPhone (no wars please). I just don't see any reason to change. And that's what Apple, or any company wants.
Smartphones are becoming more or less standardized or consumerized. They do what they do and there won't be that much more other than better specs to do the same thing. PCs were more of less the same. Were people really thrilled about learning a new interface for Windows? For me, it's "just let me do what I want to do and don't get in the way." iOS does that for me and the phone is the hardware on which it rides.
So, yes, on Friday I expect that I'll pop into the Apple store and reserve the new iPhone.
"You may think the simplistic icon layout is old hat, you may think the lack of widgets hampers efficiency and you may smirk at the lack of change since the original iPhone. What you cannot do is suggest for one minute that all of that does not work because it surely does."
I can't suggest that it doesn't work for you. I can certainly suggest that it doesn't work as well for me, and for many others (Android sells way more than Apple as we all know).
Other than that though I can't disagree with what you've said; you have a personal preference and that's fine.
@David Apple would never go for a standard connector. They don't want Android users to be able to use the iPhone accessories.
@Peter C Jelly Defense stutters on the S3? I'll have to give that a go; my S3's handled far more challenging games than that. Even my old HD2 handled it fine. Also, can't say I'm still seeing many apps I can't install on the S3 but this might help: http://code.google.com/p/market-enabler/ I haven't tried it but I've kept the link handy in case I need it.
@Peter M the CPU in the iPhone 4S is distinctly under-powered compared to the competition, in fact even compared to the competition a year ago. Perhaps that was to conserve battery life. The GPU on the other hand is very fast.
@Peter C no stutters here on Jelly Defense. Perhaps you only get it on later levels, but it could just be that you had something else going on on your phone while you were playing. IO performance isn't geat on most phones and tablets; perhaps market updates or somesuch were happening?
Bug,
iOS proves just how meaningless CPU speed is as a metric of overall device speed. The iPhone 4S is bloody quick. Devastatingly fast. Simply put, in a year of operation I never saw it lag at all - not a jitter. The only conclusion we can draw from that is that iOS is quite a bit more efficient, Mhz for Mhz than Android. Thus, Google's "Project Butter" to make Jelly Bean approach iOS levels of smoothness, which has reputedly closed most, but not all, of the gap.
I'm not up on my Android architecture, but do apps execute in a Java-like VM? IF so, I would definitely peg that as one cause for slightly slower performance, with data access from SD cards and lack of GUI acceleration not helping.
So for the 5 to be almost twice as quick means very little to the normal iOS interface, which will continue chugging along at 60fps, but should be apparent in things like picture taking, app loading and gaming.
Anecdotally, I see more iPhones than Android phones - I was in a meeting last week where 4 out of 5 participants had an iPhone and one had an Android handset (he said he wouldn't buy Apple "on principle", whatever that means). No idea why, as Android outsells iOS. It's likely that I'm just better at spotting iPhones.
For the millions that have an investment in iOS, this latest handset is a polished, quality product that delivers more of what they already like - the iPhone wins every smartphone satisfaction survey by a country mile. It will sell by the bucketload, tailing off, no doubt, when the Galaxy S4 hits retail channels!
Does anyone want to bet that the iPhone 5S will be announced a year from now, with the same form factor, a small speed bump, 12 megapixel camera, NFC and iOS7?
Does anyone know if they have upgraded the notification system? The main reason I have never adopted the iPhone is the lack of snooze features for alerts. I guess it's a hangover from my Palm days but I can't seem to to get by without them. I used my son's old 3GS for about a month but found it a really frustrating experience
@Gavin, this is one of those weak moments you have to fight against. Remember, 30 minutes after unpacking the iPhone you remember all those nice features of the S3 and you start thinking "what was I looking for when buying the iPhone?" ;-)
@Peter M yes there's more to performance than sheer CPU speed and IOS has always made good use of what it had. There've still been areas where it suffered though; I think Javascript performance was poor for example.
Also bear in mind that apart from Safari all iOS browsers have to run on top of Apple's non-pre-compiled engine, which is considerably worse than having to run in a Java VM. Those browsers should see more of a benefit from the faster CPU.
From what I remember Android apps run in a Java VM and one of the big performance improvements a couple of years ago was pre-compiling and optimising the apps. GUI acceleration was added a while back too, although JB now gives the UI a higher priority (i.e. the CPU will run faster if you're using the UI whereas before it'd almost idle) which is the main reason it's more 'buttery'.
IO to the internal flash memory is pretty slow on most, if not all phones and tablets, although it's worse on some than on others. Slow IO has been blamed for a lot of the Prime's instability; I have to say my repaired Prime (with a new board) is running far better and I've yet to see any instability; a big improvement over how it was.
At some point hopefully phone and tablet makers will use controllers and flash that are closer to what's used in SSD drives; that should make a big difference. Perhaps Apple uses something better in that area; not something I've heard any info on and Apple tends to play these things close to its chest.
My gf has commented that she sees more Androids than iPhones, and in particular she's been seeing a lot of S3s. I've been seeing a lot of S3s too. Perhaps we're all suffering from confirmation bias.
Gavin find a Christmas tree bauble, put it on a piece of string and get someone to dangle it in front of you ;o)
Graham is there a snooze feature for Android notifications? I've used Tasker to do it, which was pretty easy (silencing notifications during the night), but I'm curious to know if there's another way to do it.
@ Bug There are third party apps which sit on top of the Android notification system. I use something very imaginatively called Calender Snooze which gives complete control over alerts. There is a similar app for iOS but it doesn't work as well because Apple don't allow developers full access to the Alarm API. So, for example, if you miss an alert you can set it to repeat either every minute, which is far too often, or every hour, which is not often enough.
For SMS I use Handcent which can be set up to repeat a notification every 'x' minutes if you miss it.
Hi Bug - Sorry, I was misleading, trying to keep short, full story on Jelly Defense:
- Play Whipped Cream Soft Core
- Play it the right way to get a silly score (I've only just been knocked off number one in game centre)
- During last few rounds, you can be at 10-20million in the bank
- Piggy bank can be producing millions of coins.
Short point of 4s vs SGS3 is that 4S starts to stutter at around 1million coins. SGS3 is stuttering at about 200,000 coins (ie. 1/5).
Not a totally fair comparison I realise (maybe a port, who knows). All my point is, is that Android OS seems to need more CPU to run, the 4s feels as smooth, and it's an 800mhz dual core. Maybe it just uses both cores better?
I see plenty of S3's. Probably because they're about a foot tall, you could serve your tea on them and they're kind of hard to miss.
Actually Murray and a bit of a surprise the S3 is only 1cm wider and longer than the iPhone 5. And 1 mm thicker. And that's for a screen that's nearly and inch bigger.
Thanks Graham; I might get that for my gf's phone as she keeps it beside the bed.
@Peter C yes that could be due to any number of factors, both on the phone and in the code. I can't say I've seen anything that's taxed the S3 so far, and I generally play the latest and heaviest games. I even enable Tegra 3 effects where possible (using Chainfire 3D) and it copes.
@Gavin that's interesting, especially when you see this screen comparison that's been doing the rounds: http://blog.clove.co.uk/2012/09/13/a-dimensional-comparison-of-the-iphone-4-s-iphone-5-s-iii-note-ii-razr-g-nexus-screens/
It really brings home how big the Note 2's screen will be too.
I didn't expect everything in the rumours to come about, but I must admit to being disappointed that the iphone5 has been playing catch-up to some extent. Sure, there was lots of hype, sure the crowds were crazy, but I didn't see anything game-changing.
I though that Apple with their card and ticket app would have added NFC, because if anyone can get businesses and banks and carriers to unite on some scheme it'd be Apple. iTunes cracked the problem of online music, bringing together a vast range of publishers into one shop. Surely then Apple could have done the same with NFC and electronic wallets? Maybe that will appear in the i5S?
The proprietary connector was not a surprise after the rumours, but I think it's arrogant of Apple to assume the squillions of accessories out there will be automatically retrofitted with adaptors. How about an adaptor which presents a microusb port for charging + usb host, and 3.5mm headphone socket? It could even have a microSDHC card slot in it!
I thing 3G and 3GS owners will strongly consider upgrading, 4 owners somewhat but 4S owners less likely as it doesn't give them anything radical and different.
I read that only Apple is allowed to make the adapters. That makes you wonder if manufacturers will be allowed to make their accessories compatible with both the old and new docks, because presumably there'd have to be some form of adapter (I guess they could just have two ports). You'd think Apple would have to let them, but this is Apple we're talking about...
So I set the alarm on the S3, with options for smart alarm, or briefing alarm, with adjustable snooze intervals. Gonna miss many features of the S3.
Undecided again.
I feel your pain Gavin. It's like having to choose between a starter and a dessert. I usually go for both which is why I'm a bit fat! I love the openness and configurability of Android but there are just some things which iOS does better. I carry two devices around and whilst it is a bit of a pain it works for me.
Must go. The breaded mushrooms were delicious and the steak was exquisite but my monster chocolate ice cream with marshmallows and brownies is beginning to melt