iPhone 5 Unveiled – Prices, Images and Promises.

Posted by Miles on September 12, 2012 in Culture, Featured, Technology · 0 Comments

It’s what all tech fans have been waiting for and its now that Apple has unveiled a taller, 4G-enabled iPhone 5 at an event in San Francisco at there much anticipated keynote show that has taken twitter and pretty much all news platforms by storm. Likely to go on sale on 21 September, it will feature a larger screen than the current iPhone 4S. Like the earlier phone, the display on the iPhone 5 will be exceptionally high resolution, christened the Retina Display by Apple.

The firm said it was 18% thinner and 20% lighter than the iPhone 4S. The screen measures 4in (10.2cm) which is still smaller than rival devices from Samsung, Nokia, Motorola and HTC. Seems like good marketing from the Apple people to0 push the smaller stuff after the Samsung Galaxies have started to take a threshold in the market.

The smartphone will cost $199 for the 16GB version, $299 for a 32 Gb version and $399 for a 64 gig version, all with a two-year contracts (UK numbers will be around the same) and is set to be on Everything Everywhere’s (EE) 4G LTE network in the UK who run T-Mobile and Orange, so good news for those people who have the 4G options turned on this month also.

Other new features on the phone include iOS 6, the latest operating system. Many of the improvements will work on current iDevices, giving them a new lease of life for those whose phone contracts don’t allow an upgrade just yet. Key updates are the Maps, now provided by TomTom after dispensing with Google Maps, featuring turn-by-turn navigation and super-cool photo-realistic overhead views of some cities.

There’s also a hugely improved version of Siri, the voice recognition program for the iPhone 4S, iPhone 5 and the most recent iPad. Siri can now respond to questions asking it to find stores in the UK, and tell you distances between towns, though whether it will be smart enough to know the time it’ll take to get from Land’s End to John O’Groats remains to be seen. It’s very well informed about movies and some – US-oriented – sports.

Performance-wise, Apple is making some big promises, thanks to the launch of the A6 processor. According to Schiller, the chip is 22 percent smaller than the previous A5, available in the iPhone 4S, but is twice as fast and doubles the graphics performance of its predecessor. Saving an image from an iPhoto app, for example, is 1.7-times faster on an iPhone 5 than on the iPhone 4S.

Despite the LTE and better chip, Apple is promising strong battery life in the iPhone 5. The company claims it’ll deliver 8 hours of 3G talk time and 8 hours of LTE browsing. On standby, the device will last 225 hours on a single charge, the company says.

Though many aspects of the phone were keenly awaited, one was not. The new iPhone is expected to have a smaller connector, so umpteen millions of iPhone speaker docks will no longer connect. Of course, there’ll be adaptors available, but even so it’s a drawback.