Finally, after dozens of reports, leeks and rumors, Apple has taken the wraps of its latest flagship smartphone, the iPhone 5s. As expected, the design is pretty much the same as it is on iPhone 5, its predecessor. However, iPhone 5s comes with a lot of upgrades that we’re going to discuss today.
At yesterday’s WWDC, Apple spent some air time talking about three main upgrades in the iPhone 5s: the brand-new A7 chip, upgraded iSight camera and the groundbreaking fingerprint scanning technology named Touch ID. But before getting there, we’d like to discuss the look of the new iPhone.
Design
As we mentioned earlier, iPhone 5s looks similarly to its smaller brother iPhone 5. The home button has dropped the square logo from its center, resulting into a simple, nice-looking ring that activates the fingerprint scanning. The iPhone 5s resembles the proportions of 2.31 x 4.86 x 0.3 inch of the iPhone before it, but it comes for the first time in 3 types of aluminum: Silver, Space Grey and Gold. Basically, Silver is the white version of iPhone 5, Space Grey is quite similarly to the black version and the new Gold one adds champaign-gold bezels and back cover to the white one.
Apple A7 chip
For the first time in smartphones industry, Apple is the company that has made a jump to the modern 64-bit “desktop-class architecture”. The new A7 chip is a huge leap forward in mobile performance. Apple claims A7 is twice as fast as the previous A6 chip in iPhone 5 and 40 times faster than the original iPhone. On the graphics side, the A7 supports the latest standards – OpenGL EL, which is console-level graphics.
A 64-bit processor doesn’t mean you won’t be able to run the existing 32-bit apps from App Store. In fact, iOS 7 has been built with both 64-bit and 32-bit in mind. Moreover, Apple says that the developers will be able to re-compile their apps to 64-bit without much struggle.
With the new A7 chip, Apple has definitely left behind its competition in terms of processor and graphics performance. We can’t wait to see how developers will make use of this powerful mobile processor. Here you can see what could achieve the guys from Epic Games using the power of A7:
M7 Motion coprocessor
In addition to A7 chip, Apple announced the M7 motion dedicated processor. The purpose of M7 is to constantly track motion data from the built-in accelerometer, gyroscope and compass. This opens new horizons for developers of health and fitness apps. An example is the brand new app called Nike+ Move:
The new iSight camera
The second biggest upgrade of the iPhone 5s is its new Apple-designed camera with five lenses. Apple claims that there’s no point in the run for megapixels. The key for a more beautiful and vivid picture is the pixels size. Apple has made them larger – 1.5 microns, which is 0.4 more than on its rivals. A bigger f/2.2 aperture and image sensor means significantly better photos in low-light conditions.
Thanks to A7 chip, Camera app now takes multiple photos and combine them so that the final picture looks amazing even if the object was moving. The whole process takes place in background with no delay; you won’t even know it’s here.
*taken on iPhone 5s
Burst mode is a new feature of the Camera app. If you want to take photos of a fast moving object, just press and hold the shot button whilst it takes around 10 shots per second. At the end, the app recommends you the best ones you can choose from.
Slow-motion video is also a new cool feature. The new iSight camera will be capable of taking video of up to 120fps in HD720p resolution. Here you can see a sample:
Touch ID
The iPhone 5s labels Apple’s introduction of a new, innovative technology – fingerprint scanning. The home button in the iPhone 5 was redesigned to include a sensor that captures and identifies your fingerprint on the way. The button itself consists of sapphire crystal that protects the sensor underneath.The metallic ring around it feels your finger and tells Touch ID to start reading your fingerprint.
Touch ID takes security to a new level. Users want their documents, contacts, passwords in a safe place but always with them at the same time – here Touch ID comes in extremely handy. It also defines the way you are going to use your iPhone. You can now unlock your device just by putting your finger on the button – no presses, no slide to unlock.
We believe that Touch ID is the thing that separates the iPhone 5s from its competitors, making it really unique. Take a look at Apple’s video giving you a more detailed overview of how Touch ID works:
And that’s the new iPhone 5s. We are extremely impatient to get one and see how it stacks against its current rivals. Tell us what you think of this new product in the comment section below.
Apple iPhone 5s Review