iPhone 5: skinny li'l fella with better display, camera, software
No surprises – and no NFC – but a thoroughgoing upgrade
Rumor has it that an Eritrean goat-herder with the unlikely name of "Bob" was unaware of the fact that Apple would unveil its iPhone 5 on Wednesday.
Frankly, we find that hard to believe. In all of recorded gadget history, few product announcements have had as much pre-event hype as did today's iPhone 5 roll-out at an event in San Francisco hosted by Apple CEO Tim Cook.
On second thought, there was the debut of the original iPhone. Then the iPhone 3G. Then the iPad. Then ... oh, never mind.
Apple certainly knows how to create an itch and then scratch it in public, and at precisely 10:13am Pacific time, Apple's head pitchman Phil Schiller relieved the masses' anticipatory discomfort by unveiling – surprise! surprise! – Apple's new smartphone.
Will the iPhone 5 drive Apple's profits through the roof, as many have predicted? Will it rev up the US economy, as JPMorgan Chase suggested?
You be the judge – but to our fanboi eyes it's a fine little phone.
Well, not all that little, to be accurate. At 4 inches, its 1,136-by-640 pixel, 16-by-9, 326ppi "Retina Display" display is larger than that of the iPhone 4s's 3.5 inches, and the iPhone 5's body has stretched vertically to accomodate the extra displayage.
That's not as much display real estate as, say, Samsung's Galaxy III S and other smartphones, and we can assume that the debate over how much display is practical in a pocketable device will now commence.
Schiller also told his audience that the display has 44 per cent better color saturation than the one in the iPhone 4S, shows less glare in sunlight, and is 33 per cent thinner.
iPhone 5: longer, lighter, thinner, faster
That extra space, by the way, will allow you to add a fifth row of app icons to the iOS home page. Don't worry about your existing apps looking stretched out into the new screen real estate – Schiller assured us that they'll run in the same format as before.
He also assured developers that it'll be a simple task to adapt their apps to the new display's form factor, and provided examples from CNN and OpenTable to support his point.
It's also a skinny li'l fellow: 7.6 millimeters thick, which is 18 per cent slimmer than the iPhone 4S, according to Schiller. At that width, its glass and aluminum self weighs in at a mere 112gm, about 20 per cent lighter than the iPhone 4S' 140gm.
Next page: Wireless acronyms galore
COMMENTS
There really is no NFC?
Wow, this is a bigger piss take than letting the fanbois think they were getting the iPhone5 last year then just giving them the same one with an "S" at the end.
Seriously - this is what they call innovation?
Its a larger screen, of the kind the Android handsets had 2 years ago.
Its got LTE, of the kind Android handsets had well over a year ago.
Its cameras and speed now match the Android handsets from a year ago.
Its adapter has changed from one proprietary format to another just to take the piss.
A bundled app found on every platform over the last 2 years to stick photos together is trumpeted as a huge breakthrough.
And existing apps look shit because they only stretched the screen in 1 direction, and are new to fragmentation unlike Android which has been dealing with this for years.
This could almost make microsofts offering look good.
And?
As an iPhone user I say UNDERWHELMING, I cannot see a need to upgrade my 4S at all, the comparison spec sheet on the Apple site confirm what I know.
If I was Samsung, I'd be extremely fscked off. The new iPhone is a blatant copy of the Samsung SII.
Re: And?
Maybe not a good upgrade for your 4S, but it looks like a nice replacement for my 3GS!
You don't *have* to change your phone every 12 months!
So with the release of the iPhone 5 Apple are finally admitting that the glass back idea was stupid, the screen was always too small and a proper 16:9 aspect ratio is better.
