Apple yesterday finally took the wraps off its new iPhone 5, which has a larger screen than its predecessors and works on high speed LTE wireless networks.
All Apple phones so far have had 3.5" screens, but the iPhone 5 has a 4" display, Apple CEO Tim Cook said at a launch event in San Francisco, according to Macworld’s live blog.
That might be a response to the popularity of phones with bigger screens sold by Samsung, and it provides more real estate for apps and games. It also allows Apple to add an extra row of application icons on each page.
Despite the bigger screen, Apple said its new phone is its thinnest and lightest yet. It weighs 22g – 20% lighter than the iPhone 4S – and is 7.6mm thick, or 18% thinner, it said.
It comes in black or white and the prices are the same as for the 4S – $199 for the 16Gb model, $299 for 32Gb and $399 for 64Gb, when bought with a two-year carrier contract. The phone can be ordered from Friday and will ship a week later in the US, UK, Japan and other countries, Apple said. An Irish release looks likely for 28 September. As of this morning Applestore.ie devoted a page to the new handset but without the option to pre-order or informatino on what carriers would be offering it.
The iPhone 5 gets a speedy new chip, the A6, which marketing chief Phil Schiller said doubles the speed of both CPU and graphics operations over the A5. Operations like launching apps and viewing attachments will be twice as fast, he said.
He showed Real Racing 3 and claimed the new phone offers "console level graphics".
The new phone also has faster wireless, including the addition of LTE wireless, which is also coming to Amazon’s new Kindle. LTE offers a theoretical maximum download speed of 100Mb/s (as fast as many fibre connections in the Irish market).
A big change is a new connector to replace the pin socket used since the first iPhone. Called Lightning, the new connector is faster, but it means users who want to plug the iPhone 5 into an older accessory, such as a speaker dock, will need to use an adapter.
Display
The bigger display size also creates a slight hiccup: Existing apps now have to run with a black border around them to fill the screen.
But the new display offers several benefits too, besides being larger. It has a retina display of 326 pixels per inch and 1136×640 resolution. It provides 44% more colour saturation and the touch sensors are integrated into the display itself, making it 30% thinner and giving a sharper image with less glare in sunlight, Schiller said.
And Apple has updated its own apps to take advantage of the bigger display – the iCal app has a new five-day week view in landscape mode, for example.
The device also includes a new technology, wideband audio, intended to make voice calls sound more natural.
And the new phone gets a new OS, iOS 6. It has better mapping, with turn-by-turn directions and sharper satellite imagery. The Safari browser will have full-screen mode, among many other improvements.
An upgraded camera has an 8MP sensor with a five-element lens and a faster f/2.4 aperture, which should give better low-light photography. A ‘sapphire’ cover protects the lens and gives sharper pictures.
The new iPhone adds 1080p video with better image stabilisation and the ability to capture stills while recording video.
The iPhone 5 also betters the battery life of the iPhone 4S, according to Schiller, with eight hours of 3G or LTE talk time or browsing and 10 hours of Wi-Fi browsing.
It also has better Wi-Fi, according to Schiller, including dual-channel 5GHz 802.11n that gives bandwidth up to 150Mb/s.
The phone has a single baseband chip for voice and data, and a single radio chip, all of which helps reduce its size and weight.
There was speculation that Apple might also announce a new iPad Wednesday, but that wasn’t to be. It did roll out new iPods, however, including a new iPod Touch that has a similarly larger screen.
The iPhone 5 launch comes as Apple fights to recover its dominance in the smartphone sector. Rival Samsung shipped nearly twice as many smartphones as Apple in the second quarter, as Apple buyers held off making purchases pending today’s launch, according to iSuppli in July.
IDG News Service
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