THE IPHONE 5 REVIEW

Some of the news won’t come as much of a shock considering the sheer volume of rumors and leaks lately (even Apple let some details slip earlier today) — I’m going to resist the temptation to pontificate on every new feature as it’s revealed (for now, anyway), so let’s get right down to it.

THE IPHONE 5

• We can finally put the debate to rest — Apple’s newest mobile juggernaut is called the iPhone 5 (despite actually being the sixth iPhone to hit the market). It’s 20% lighter than the iPhone 4S, 18% thinner, and crafted out of (what else?) glass and aluminum.
• The long-rumored (and handsome) two-toned design is indeed legitimate, as is the new iPhone’s larger 4-inch Retina Display. And yes, that 16:9 display runs at 1136 by 640 with five rows of icons. According to Schiller, it’s “the most accurate display in the industry” because the touch sensors are embedded in the display as well.
• It’s hardly a surprise at this point, but the iPhone 5 packs support for Sprint, Verizon, and AT&T’s LTE networks here in the States.
• As expected, Apple has also unveiled a brand new chipset for the iPhone 5: the A6, which Schiller says is a full two times faster than the A5 chip in the iPhone 4S
• The iPhone 4S’s battery life wasn’t anything to write home about, but the iPhone 5 seems equipped to do much better — 8 hours of 3G talk time, as well as 8 hours of 3G and LTE web browsing to be precise.
• The iPhone’s audio system has been bolstered with a smaller (but improved speaker). There are also now three microphones in the mix: one on the front, one on the back, and another on the bottom.
• That oft-rumored miniature Dock Connector is real: it’s all-digital, has eight pins and it’s called “Lightning.” Yes, there’s an adapter for it, but no word yet on exactly what it will cost you.
• Despite what a handful of leaks pointed to in the weeks leading up to the event, there’s been no mention of an integrated NFC chip yet.

CAMERA

• Smartphone cameras are really starting to give their point-and-shoot brethren a run for their money (think Nokia’s PureView and HTC’s ImageSense tech), but instead of running up the megapixel count, Apple has stuck with an 8-megapixel camera. That said, the backside-illuminated sensor is smaller, and features much better low-light performance (finally!).
• App developers may be bummed to know that the camera now also has a built-in panorama mode. The revamped camera also supports 1080p video capture, and users can now snap photos while recording video at the same time. I wonder how HTC feels about that.

IOS 6 Features

Apple first previewed iOS 6 back in June at WWDC, but today it showed off the shipping product in detail.

In the intervening time you may have forgotten what it brings to the table, and since it’s actually quite a lot, there’s a good possibility that you have. Here’s what iOS 6 brings to your phone, so long as your phone is an iPhone 3GS or later, or you have an 4th-gen iPod touch, new iPad or iPad 2 (unless otherwise indicated).

Camera Improvements

The camera in iOS 6 does panorama photos on iPhone 5, with 28 megapixel images (measuring the combined resolution of the stitched-together images). It also includes video stabilization, 10-face detection on the rear and single face detection on the front camera.

New Maps

Apple killed Google Maps. Or, rather, it replaced them as the system-level mapping resource in iOS 6 with their own tool, built partly in-house and with a significant helping hand from GPS hardware and software-maker TomTom. This one’s sort of a mixed bag, and how you feel about the change might have a lot to do with how you use your phone.

• Good things: Apple Maps has a pretty great 3D mode with flyover effects that looks stellar if you’re in one of the areas that happens to have been rendered already. And Apple did a pretty good job of adding new areas during the beta period, so even if you’re not on that list now, you likely will be soon. Also there’s turn-by-turn voice-guided directions built in for free. Android users have had that for a while, so it’s about time. Yelp integration is also very nice.
• Bad things: Apple Maps just doesn’t feel nearly as complete as Google Maps. It also lacks built-in transit directions, opting instead to use third-party folks to take care of that. But if you’re in a city and you don’t have a car, Apple Maps aren’t ideal.

Passbook

This could be iOS 6′s most deadly secret payload. It’s got plenty of potential, though it might’ve been hard for users to see that pre-launch. Over the past week, however, we’ve seen a number of airlines including Virgin Air declare their support, so how it’ll be used starts to become more apparent.

Passbook is about taking consumer activity paperless. That means providing digital coupons, boarding passes, loyalty, reward/gift cards and more. Is it a mobile wallet? Not yet, not quite, but it could be. And that’s why it’s the one to watch in this festival of new software, especially with time and location-based triggers that give you what you need, when you need it. New partners revealed on stage for the first time include Delta and Starwood hotels.

Facebook

Apple built Twitter into iOS 5, and now it’s doing the same for Facebook with iOS 6. There a number of theories why it wasn’t included before, but the short answer is: because of reasons. I get into more detail about Facebook’s place in iOS 6 in a separate post.

Siri

Apple dropped some knowledge on Siri with this update. It now does sports scores and highlights, movies, reservations, app launching and Facebook/Twitter updates. Also, it works on the new iPad (older versions are left out, as is the iPhone 4 and 3GS).

One thing that should be appreciated outside of the U.S. is international availability of the service. Many users in countries around the world were sold on Siri’s promise, but have had a long wait for features like directions and local business search. Does all of this make Siri great? Not necessarily, but it’s progress.

iCloud Tabs

Your Safari tabs can follow you to the desktop in Mountain Lion, or to other iOS 6 devices like the iPad, a nice feature for people looking to keep their online lives entirely in sync.

Shared Photo Streams

Apple should’ve delivered this as a launch component of iCloud, and its absence immediately felt like an oversight. But now that it’s here, you can share photos with other iCloud users on an iOS 6 or Mac device, and check them out on Apple TV, or for everyone else on the web. Shared photo streams over both Wi-Fi and cellular connections, and supports both push notifications and commenting. It’s almost like Facebook’s photos feature tied more closely to hardware and Apple’s ecosystem.

FaceTime Over Cellular

Say what you will about FaceTime and how useful it actually is to everyday life, having to be connected to Wi-Fi to even have a chance of using it wasn’t helping anything. This might get ugly with AT&T limiting access, but carriers around the world largely seemed to embrace hotspot sharing eventually once Apple built it in, and hopefully FaceTime will be treated the same by companies that aren’t AT&T.

Phone Options

If your only option for answering a call is to answer or decline it, you’re living in the past. Now, incoming calls can be replied to with canned or custom messages (SMS or iMessage). You can also set a reminder to make sure you remember to follow up. Just remember: humans are good at figuring out when you’re using a pre-written response, and can become annoyed if it happens often enough.

VIP Inbox And In-Line Image/Video

Mail gets some minor updates, including easier media insertion. The new VIP inbox is great for sorting things, too, and follows you around to various devices when using your iCloud account.

Other Fun Stuff

There’s lots more, including a new lost mode for Find My iPhone that provides a breadcrumb history of where your lost device has been, and geo-fenced alerts in Find My Friends that makes for perfect, much easier stalking. All the stores have been redesigned to general good effect (though the app search results page, inspired by Chomp, might rub folks the wrong way), and Apple has introduced a number of new features for its latest boom market, China.

Maybe coolest of all, iOS 6 adds a lot for developers to play with, including additional camera feature controls, Passbook access, reminder creation and modification, iTunes content sales via in-app purchase, and access to things like text messages, opening up plenty of possibilities for hardware makers.

I 5  Pricing  And  Availability  Revealed:  $199 For 16GB,  $299 For 32GB,  $399 For 64GB,  Ships On Sept. 21

Now that everyone’s appetite for the iPhone 5 has been whetted, when can people actually get one? Apple’s Phil Schiller took the stage after playing a brief video to talk up the new iPhone 5 to finally talk about availability.

As usual, the iPhone 5 will be available in both black and white, and it will be the same price as the iPhone it replaces: $199 For 16GB, $299 For 32GB, $399 For 64GB (on-contract pricing, through partners AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon of course). The pre-orders for the device itself beings on September 14 (that’s Friday, in case you were curious), and the iPhone 5 will actually be released into the wild on September 21.