On top of all that is an expanded selection of WiFi connectivity options. The iPhone 5 adds That connectivity is now dual-band as well, so you can step up out of the crowded 2.
Bluetooth 4. Looking to get directions up the Road of Bones? You're covered here. The iPhone 5 uses a new 4-inch display that provides a half-inch of additional diagonal extent compared to those iPhones that have come before. Massive difference? Absolutely not, but it does give the phone enough surface area to stay competitive without sizing it beyond the thumb reach of your average consumer. In fact, its four corners seem just as attainable as before, helped by Apple shifting the display down just a few millimeters to get it closer to the center of your hand.
But we've talked enough about how it works in the hand. How does it look? Fantastic, frankly. The iPhone 4S already has one of the best displays on the market with regard to things like pixel density, brightness and contrast, and the iPhone 5 brings that up another notch -- and not just because it has an additional rows of pixels. Putting both under the microscope, indeed, shows the same basic subpixel structure.
If there was one complaint about the 4S display it's that it suffered from a somewhat greenish hue. The 5 fixes that -- if anything, extending just a smidgen to the warm side, but displaying imagery that's much more chromatically neutral than before. The phone also moves up to full sRGB coverage, meaning it can accurately represent every color provided by that spectrum, a claim to fame few smartphones can match.
Apple also promises fewer layers sandwiched between the subpixels and the surface of the glass, the idea being greater contrast when you're outside. Sure enough, the iPhone 5 is a great device for using out in direct sunlight, though to be fair it's a minor improvement over the 4S, which likewise doesn't fear the sun.
The iSight camera here is basically unchanged from the 4S. The overall mechanism has been pared down a bit to fit within the tight confines of the iPhone 5, and the protective bit of glass on the outside has been replaced with a 6mm disc of crystal sapphire for durability, which we rather regrettably did not have a chance to put through a torture test. And, with the bigger screen, we now have a larger shutter release button, which is slightly easier to tap by big thumbs.
Image quality is still among the best out there for a cameraphone, unimproved but quite impressive in varying conditions. What has improved, though, is the speed. Tap that big ol' thumb as quick as you can and the iPhone 5 will keep up, whereas the iPhone 4S eventually fell behind. It's at least on par with the Galaxy Nexus , which also has a ridiculously quick shooter. So, while the camera on the back is minimally improved, the one on the front is a big step forward. Resolution is obviously massively increased, but so too is overall image quality, with far more accurate color reproduction.
Of course, whether or not you actually want a higher-quality front-facing camera depends on just how much time you spend putting your face on before getting your FaceTime on. New with iOS 6 is Panorama mode, where you can tap one button and just sweep the phone around to create a massive image. Resulting files are something like 11, x 2,, with the exact resolution varying based on how smoothly you panned from left to right.
If you wander up or down the display will warn you to keep in line, and you'll want to, as every time you stray you're effectively cropping the resulting image. The file is captured in one seamless motion and the final product is almost always free of the sort of glitches and visual aberrations typically found in these self-stitching panoramas.
That said, it isn't totally error-free. We took one panorama inside the New Museum in New York City, a room full of thin black lines against a white background. It's about as tough a test as Panorama mode will ever see and indeed you can make out some slight glitches in those lines, but in normal cityscapes and country scenes we struggled to find signs of artifacting.
The results are almost always very impressive. Video capture remains the same on the rear-facing camera -- p30 maximum and offering bright contrast and colors plus the same digital image stabilization that we saw before, which results in reasonably smooth shots even when you, yourself, aren't so smooth. Two times faster? Twice the graphics performance? Better battery life? Actually, yes. The iPhone 5 over-delivers on all those promises. Running the Geekbench test suite on the iPhone 4S gave us an average score of The iPhone 5 netted an average of 1, That's more than twice as fast and, while you won't necessarily see such huge increases in day-to-day usage, apps do load noticeably quicker, HDR images are processed in half the time and tasks like video rendering in iMovie are equally expedient.
More important than numbers, web pages load very quickly, snapping into view as fast as your data plan can shovel the bits into Safari and, once there, smoothly reacting to your gestures. Naturally, we'd be telling just half the story if we only talked performance. There's an important question that's left: what kind of battery life can you expect? Power is nothing without longevity and, shockingly, the iPhone 5 copes amazingly well. On our standard battery rundown test, in which we loop a video with LTE and WiFi enabled and social accounts pinging at regular intervals, the iPhone 5 managed a hugely impressive 11 hours and 15 minutes.
When it comes to wireless performance, the iPhone 5 didn't disappoint either. Overall, the iPhone 5 did an excellent job at finding and keeping signals, and call quality is quite good. Callers came through loud and clear and said we sounded great as well -- though most of the time we sadly couldn't tell them what we were calling them on. Data transmission speeds were at or above comparable Android LTE devices held nearby, usually in the Mbps range both up and down. The iPhone ships with Apple's latest mobile operating system, and for our full take on that we'll direct you toward our full iOS 6 review.
But, let's discuss a few things that are particularly applicable to smartphones. It's the new Maps app that will have the biggest impact on most users, and in general we found Maps beautiful and fast, a smooth and very aesthetically pleasing way to get from place to place.
But, it isn't nearly as comprehensive as Google's offerings on Android. The biggest drawback is the unfortunate lack of public transportation directions. If you haven't quite mastered New York City's subway system, you won't get any help from your iPhone 5.
When enabled, any new purchases that you make in the iTunes Store, App Store or iBooks Store automatically sync across your devices. In addition to updating when you are otherwise occupied, apps also refresh their content in the background. For example, your Facebook or Twitter feed will update without you manually updating when you open the app.
Helpful, to be sure, but it occupies CPU cycles. Or, you can take the a la carte approach and leave Background App Refresh enabled at the top and turn it off for individual apps from the list below.
Apple uses a number of effects to give iOS a sense of depth as you tilt your phone or open and close apps. These motion effects generally improve your experience, but not if they result in choppy animations.
You can also toggle off Auto-Play Message Effects , but that'll take some of the fun out of texting. Next, head back to the Accessibility screen, tap the line above Reduce Motion titled Increase Contrast and tap the toggle switch to turn on Reduce Transparency. This setting reduces the transparency and blur effects, ostensibly to increase legibility, but it can also serve to speed up performance because it's one fewer graphics task for your device's processor to handle.
Location services chew up battery life more than performance, but if your iOS device is draining its battery at a faster clip with iOS 11, it's time to cut down on the number of apps using your device's GPS to request your location. No longer can a developer offer only Always or Never for the tracking options for location services.
Now, you'll be able to choose While Using the App whether the developer likes it or not. Overall, though, this is still the same iOS you know, and all the steps you took to get things done in the last OS, or in iOS 4, or iOS 3 even — well those are pretty much the same too.
And some of those steps are maddening, or poorly thought out. In particular, Apple's implementation of "unobtrusive" notifications while you're using the phone stands out as one the weaker components of the system. Originally I saw Notification Center as a welcome relief from Apple's pop-up messages and alerts, but the way the company handles these beacons can now be nearly as annoying as the previous version.
As I mentioned, instead of utilizing that new, taller screen to give you notifications removed from areas of the phone you regularly need to access you know, like menus in apps , the notifications continue to pop down over the upper portion of the screen. The result is that you feel trapped, waiting for the message to disappear before you can access buttons you need to get to, or forced to swipe to the left on the message — a hidden function which scurries the dropdown away.
Elsewhere, Apple is still making users jump through hoops to perform simple tasks, like switching to a private browsing window or clearing the cache in Safari. It takes no less than six button presses and home key taps to make that happen while browsing. Settings in general are a mess — wonderful when you first set up the phone "hey! Multitasking remains a black box, not representing app states and forcing what should be "always on" applications like IM clients into a constant state of shutdown warnings.
Twitter won't update in the background nor will clients like Tweetbot , meaning that you're always playing catchup with "realtime" services. Mind you, on Android the Twitter app will load updates in the background, meaning that even if you're disconnected you'll likely have new content to view.
It sounds minor, but when taken as a whole and spread across multiple applications, it makes the OS feel claustrophobic, mysterious, and downright unhelpful at times. There are also missed opportunities. Apple has opened social sharing options up to Twitter and Facebook, which is wonderful, but everyone else is out in the cold.
Want to save a file to a Dropbox folder? Read an article later using Pocket? Post a picture to Tumblr right from the browser? Sorry, that's not possible. There may be some hacky bookmarklet to accomplish the task, but I can't imagine anyone believes that a kludgy line of JavaScript is the most elegant way to accomplish those tasks. And by the way, these are things I do every day on my phone, and things that I know lots of other people do.
They may be fringe to Apple's target user, but they are a real part of the market at large. They are the part of the market pushing what smartphones are capable of and what they mean to users. Apple also leaves developers empty-handed on widgets. It provides the minimally useful weather and stock widgets for the notification drawer, but isn't opening up that space to anyone else. And I must mention this — the fact that the weather icon continues to read 73 degrees and sunny when it is clearly possible to have icons update with at least some information see the calendar icon is now laughable at best, and sad at worst.
And what about actionable notifications? Notifications in Jelly Bean can be acted on without having to jump into an app, which is a fantastic addition to Android. I use them all the time. I would have loved to see Apple innovate in this area — especially considering the fact that iOS multitasking still doesn't represent an "always on" experience. Don't get me wrong, iOS is a beautiful and well-structured mobile operating system — but it's begun to show its age.
It feels less useful to me today than it did a couple of years ago, especially in the face of increasingly sophisticated competition. I always have this sense now in iOS of not knowing where I am, what my status is — constantly having to load things and reload them. It feels tiring. Maybe you'll call me an Android fanboy for saying this, or maybe it's because much of my business utilizes Google apps and its communication tools, but it didn't take me very long with the iPhone 5 to start thinking about getting back to the Galaxy Nexus and Jelly Bean Android 4.
For what I do, I think it's a more effective, more elegant, and more powerful OS right now. What it may lack in polish and consistency, it makes up for in power and flexibility. The new Maps application in iOS 6 is really handsome. It's smooth, fast, and now provides free turn-by-turn navigation. The new Maps also shows off some of Apple's new technology, partnerships, and acquisitions with its 3D Flyover mode, Yelp integration, and hooks into and out of Siri.
But for me, and for many people I know, the new Maps application is a big step backward for iOS — a " downgrade ," as John Gruber called it in his review of the iPhone 5 — and one that will take time, perhaps years, to become great again.
It's not impossible to see Apple building its Maps into something stellar, but the company needs data that it simply doesn't have right now. Apple previously relied on Google's mapping prowess to power this application on the phone. That relationship has ended — linked undoubtedly to the ever-growing animosity between the two companies — and that has left iOS users with a vastly inferior product.
In fact, the product becomes even more inferior in the face of the latest Android Google Maps app, which continues to build on Google's rich mapping data and content partnerships. The new Maps can be great at times, mind you. Turn-by-turn worked very well for me, and its interface is smartly and cleanly laid out.
I had a couple of issues where the GPS seemed to lose signal or navigation stalled out altogether, but that's happened on other phones, so I don't know how much it's the fault of the iPhone 5 or Maps. TomTom is powering the navigation, and it seems like there are still kinks to be worked out.
Traffic data, for instance, was scarce when compared side-by-side with Google Maps. The Flyover mode I mentioned is a nice effect, but compared to what Google now offers — extensive Street View, indoor maps for some stores or museums — it's hard to be too impressed by detailed renderings of buildings.
It's beautiful, but not exactly useful. But perhaps the biggest issue with the new Maps is its complete lack of transit data.
This may not be an issue in other parts of the world, but in New York, having up-to-the-minute subway info can be seem like a matter of life or death on some days. Apple seems to be relying on developers to provide apps that will handle this data, and there are some apps that do the job decently right now, but it seems like a cheap and counterintuitive way out of this problem.
Since when does Apple choose to let developers pick up the slack of its first-party applications on the iPhone? Mail is largely unchanged, save for a few new features. Firstly, you're able to pull down to refresh, which is a nice addition. Secondly, Mail now boasts a "VIP" inbox, where you can assign specific contacts, sort of like Google's "Priority Inbox," but much more manual.
It's also easier to flag messages in Mail, though it never seemed like too big of a hassle for me in the first place.
Most of the changes are for the better, if subtle. One thing that hasn't changed, however, is Mail's inability to search message content. It didn't do it before, and it doesn't do it now. That can be a little trying when you're on the go and need information, but don't know the best way to get at it — it seems like a minor addition to index those messages, so I'm not sure why Apple isn't doing it. Is it to hurt us? A future update? Who can say. I'm happy to report that Siri — while still not out of beta — seems far more capable on the iPhone 5 and frankly, on the updated 4S than ever before.
Not only can the new Siri now do things like Tweet and post to Facebook for you, open applications, give you sports scores and detailed information on movies, but she generally just seems to be better and faster at finding all kinds of information. A number of times while testing the iPhone 5, I used Siri to handle tasks that I didn't have my hands free for. The service responded quickly and got the correct information I was looking for or carried out the requested task on the first try.
A noticeable improvement from the previous generation, though I'm certain that the LTE connectivity when out and about is helping Siri get connected much faster. Passbook is kind of like an answer to a question no one asked. At least, I'm not asking it. Maybe this is the kind of thing that will be really hot somewhere that I don't hang out very often — like the South?
Okay, I just checked; one member of The Verge team is really excited about this idea. Regardless, the new app — which collects the QR codes and vital info from plane tickets, Starbucks cards, movie tickets, etc. Right now, Passbook feels as if it could be very useful An experiment gone horribly wrong. Only time will tell, as many of the apps which utilize the functionality don't seem to be working yet for me Fandango, for instance.
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