What would you do if you were in San Francisco on the day a new iPhone goes on sale?
Depending on your level of Apple zealotry, you could camp out at an Apple store. But for htxt.africa’s editor, Christo van Gemert, it meant a whole day of driving around Northern California in pursuit of the newest handset to hit the market. Thankfully he not only managed to avoid standing in long lines, but also snagged a brand spanking new iPhone 5S, which means we can now review the handset from a South African perspective, before it goes on sale later this year or early 2014.
First thing’s first: this looks and feels almost exactly like an iPhone 5. While that phone is no longer available – Apple choosing to stuff its insides into the pretty plastic of the iPhone 5C – its aluminium shape remains almost unchanged. How will you tell an iPhone 5S apart from an older 5? The colours: gold, space grey, and silver, compared to the older phone’s slate and white. And the dual-LED flash on the rear, next to the camera lens.
Our self-bought review unit came in space grey, which contrasts the pure black glass panels with a near gunmetal grey finish on the metal. The front panel sports another visual differentiator: that sapphire glass home button, housing the fingerprint reader.
It’s not a gimmick, either. As we originally speculated, the fingerprint reader in the iPhone 5S scans your finger (or thumb, more likely) while you hold it in place. Previous implementations of biometric finger scanners in devices involved swiping your fingerprint across a scanner, but that’s not the case here. Click the home button with your thumb, hold it there for another half second, and voila. Simple and elegant – just like the finger enrolment process when you first set up the phone.
Apple’s also packed a faster processor in the 5S. Being only a few hours into ownership it’s difficult to see the immediate benefits, but next to an iPhone 5 running iOS 7, the 5S feels snappier in many instances – and it’s definitely not a placebo effect. More importantly, the processor is capable of executing 64-bit code. We’ll only see how it affects performance in a few months, so more on that in our full review.
The biggest deal, though, is the revised camera. Apple’s chosen to stick with an 8-megapixel snapper, and honestly that’s more than enough. Rather than adding megapixels it has made the sensor larger which should make it more sensitive in low-light conditions – actually, scratch that: it is definitely more sensitive. A quick fiddle at a dinner showed that the 5S camera returns sharper results in low light. It also has a new slow-motion video camera. This records clips at 120 frames per second, then normalises playback at 30 frames per second. The result is footage that plays at a quarter of the speed, and it is really fun. It’s possible to shift the time-warp effect, too, so you can edit clips that transition between normal and slow speeds.
There’s plenty more to the 5S, but these are just some quick observances from a few hours with the phone. Watch out for our full review, soon, with testing in local networks and in local conditions.
