World’s thinnest smartphone is here
TODAY is iPhone day. Apple’s new handset, the iPhone 5, goes on sale and it’s no surprise that the phone is thinner and faster than ever before. Its lack of surprise might be the only immediate criticism.
Overall, Apple has incrementally upgraded virtually every single aspect of the iPhone. The new handset features an improved 4-inch panoramic screen with 44% more saturation than the previous model.
Apple has redesigned the way that the phone’s touchscreen works. Instead of having two layers – the pixels of the display and then the touchscreen sensors – the pixels on the new display perform double duty. They act as touch-sensing electrodes while displaying the image at the same time.
The most significant effect of the newly designed display is image quality. There is nothing between the glass and the pixels, so the image is clearer and sharper.
The new touchscreen is also critical to the iPhone 5’s thinness, which is 18% less than its predecessor. At just 7.6mm, it’s the world’s thinnest LTE smartphone.
The iPhone 5 supports all standards for high-speed connectivity via HSPA+ (high speed packet access), DC-HSDPA (dual carrier) and LTE (long term evolution), making it much faster than the iPhone 4S.
According to Apple, its single-chip solution works everywhere, across any network.
Also updated is the iPhone 5’s camera, which has a new dynamic low-light mode and sapphire crystal to protect the lens. It is virtually invulnerable to scratches. Like the previous iPhone, it has five-element optics and an eight megapixel sensor, backside illumination, a hybrid infrared filter and an aperture of f/2.4 which ensures fast, sharp exposures.
It also features 1 080p FullHD video capture – as did the previous iPhone – but Apple claim to have improved the image stabilisation as well as add face detection.
It also allows users to take still photographs while recording a video at the same time. In terms of brain power, the new iPhone has been boosted by an A6 processor which Apple claims is twice as fast both in CPU and graphics processing.
Apple have made impressive claims when it comes to the iPhone 5’s battery life, promising 225 hours of stand-by time, eight hours of talktime or LTE web browsing or 30 hours of video playback.
The handset uses a new, smaller, all-digital dock connector dubbed “Lightning”, has eight connectors and an adaptive interface to suit the device you connect it to.
It’s hard to find fault with the phone. Perhaps the iPhone 5 is not a revolutionary phone, but an evolutionary one.