Apple
iPhone 5S Review
Launching 2013's most anticipated
smartphone comes with its perils and pleasures. Simultaneously launching a
second handset targeting a completely new demographic, for the first time in
your company's history, is brave as it is hazardous. However, as we've come to
expect from the most Marmite tech company in the world, if anyone can pull it
off, it's Apple.
The iPhone 5s is basically a supercharged
iPhone 5, so the weight, size and overall build are pretty much identical –
7.6mm deep, 123.8mm tall and 112g in bulk. That makes it slimmer than the HTC
One and Samsung Galaxy S4, but not quite as slender as the world’s slimmest
smartphone – the Huawei Ascend P6, which measures in at 6.18mm. Swanking the
same 4-inch, 1136x640 at 326ppi screen as its predecessor, and matching that of
the 5c, the iPhone 5s display feels small in comparison to the Samsung Galaxy
S4
Unquestionably, the standout features of
the iPhone 5s are its newest hardware inclusions and upgrades, namely Touch ID,
the M7 motion co-processor, 64-bit architecture and the all-new iSight camera.
These are not only what differentiate it from the previous iPhone 5, but
justify its place as the flagship iPhone when compared to the iPhone 5c.
Gone is the ever-present round cornered box
on the home button. Now it is a clean, round surface surrounded by a glossy
metal ring — the trigger point for Apple's new fingerprint sensor technology,
Touch ID. There's been a lot of confusion already about Touch ID as people's
spy thriller fantasies divert discussions away from reality. It is not really
what people think of when they hear "fingerprint scanner". It is far
more advanced than anything seen before in a consumer device. A touch of the
finger is all you need to trigger a reading — you don't actually depress the
button — and it isn't reading the outer layer of your skin, but rather the
living tissue below the surface. No one can cut off your finger to impersonate
you, or lift a print off your touchscreen to hack the system.
The iPhone 5s-specific camera features include;
auto image stabilization , 3x video zoom, 30fps panorama with varying light
control , burst mode at 10 photos per second and, best of all, slow-motion
video capture, which is absolutely brilliant. It’s the iPhone 5s's Panorama
moment and you can expect to see your social feeds filling up with
quarter-speed 120fps 720p footage very shortly.
Within the iPhone 5s and each new device
shipping with iOS 7, you get Apple’s iWork apps - Pages, Numbers and Keynote –
for free. Swiping down on the home
screen now reveals the Search bar, while swiping apps up while in multi-tasking
view will close apps. The iPhone 5s has a wider range of LTE bands that every service
provider should be able to support. Apple quotes ten hours talk time on 3G,
250-hours in standby, ten hours of internet use on 3G, LTE and Wi-Fi, with
video playback running to 10 hours and audio stretching to 40 hours.
In the competitive landscape, Apple still
chooses to march to its own beat. With the iPhone 5s, that beat aims to bring
Apple's hardware and software into tighter formation than ever. That union has
always been Apple's strength, and it has clearly built a platform that aims to
take greater advantage of that in the year, and years, ahead.
