iOS 7
Here’s iOS 7 on the iPhone 5S
iPhone 5S Box
Note that the new box really highlights iOS 7
iPhone 5S Box Side View
The lettering is gold.
Apple iPhone 5S Front
This is what it looks like when you take it out of the box.
Apple iPhone 5S Back
Yup, that’s Gold, but it doesn’t look ridiculous.
Apple iPhone 5S Side View
From the back and even sides, it’s pretty hard to tell the difference between the iPhone 5S and iPhone 5
Apple iPhone 5S iSight Camera and True Tone Flash
The iSight camera is all new and the flash has two LEDs.
Apple iPhone 5S Setup
Setting up iPhone is so easy these days.
Apple iPhone 5S Hello
The device welcomes you in many different languages.
Apple iPhone 5S Touch ID Setup
Apple guides you through the fingerprint reader set-up process.
Apple iPhone 5S Touch ID Setup 2
Apple walking you through the process
Apple iPhone 5S Touch ID Setup 3
Reading my thumbprint
Apple iPhone 5S Touch ID Setup 3
Building the profile
SIRI Setup
SIRI got an upgrade.
iOS 7 Bottom of the Screen
With less curves and shading, everything has more breathing room.
Slo-Mo Mode
Taking slo-mo video of Olive the dog.
Shoot with Live Filters
Instead of applying filters after you shoot, you can see what they look like live.
New Control Center
Sweep up from the bottom of the screen and you have access to many often used phone features and settings.
SIRI Controls Brightness
I said “Brightness” to SIRI and this is what I got. Well done, Apple.
LTE Performance
It was strong and consistent.
A New View
I’m not sure if this side-scrolling task view is a bug or a feature.
iOS 7 on the iPhone 5S
It looks real good.
Apple’s iPhone 5 was the best iPhone I’ve ever touched or used — until the iPhone 5S came along. The Cupertino, Calif. company’s new hero handset is not a radical reimagining of this winning product, but the combination of new components and the fundamentally refashioned iOS 7 does make the iPhone 5S feel fresher than you’d expect it to be.
The Body
You’ll be forgiven if you can’t, at a glance, tell the difference between the iPhone 5 and the iPhone 5S. The chassis are virtually identical, save for the new home button that also houses the Touch ID fingerprint scanner, a new dual LED “True Tone” flash and the two new metallic color options. For my tests, I got a lovely gold device. Not the least bit garish, the gold is more of a champagne hue and, like fine jewelry, all the iPhone 5S’s bevels shine with extra brilliance.
If you’re looking for a really different design from Apple, you might consider the iPhone 5C, which is a lot like the iPhone 5 — especially component-wise. However, the body is wrapped in tough, glossy plastic (including the buttons). Plus, it starts at just $99. The iPhone 5S starts at $199 for a 16 GB model. I tested the $399, 64 GB model (all prices are with a two-year contract).
The Touch ID button, which you’ll use as much as you did the traditional iPhone home button, not only looks different (the older versions have a square in the middle), it also sounds different. Perhaps because it houses a lot more technology than the traditional tactile pressure sensor, the Touch ID button is, well, “clickier.”
The rest of the 5S’ body is unremarkable. Measuring 4.87 inches by 2.32 inches by 0.3 inches and weighing in at 112 grams, the specs are virtually identical to the iPhone 5. Its screen is exactly the same 4-inch diagonal 1133-by-640 resolution as the 5; so if you’re like me, and enjoy the look and feel of the iPhone 5, you’ll like this the 5S (and perhaps appreciate the new colors).
Touch ID
Fingerprint detection and reading technology is not new, but I have never seen it so elegantly integrated into a consumer-electronics product. Placing the fingerprint reader under the home button is a brilliant idea — even more so because the execution is nearly flawless (Apple filed a patent for the sapphire laminate layer that sits on top of the sensor).
The idea behind Touch ID is simple: Use up to five different fingerprints to unlock your phone, and make iTunes purchases. This cuts down on having to reenter your four-number pin every time you want to unlock the phone, and having to reenter your iTunes password every time you want to purchase or update an app.
One of the reasons Apple’s iPhone has been so successful is that it is virtually unmatched in creating useful and comprehensible software. To enter a fingerprint, you train the sensor to recognize the soft pad of your finger; it’s a seemingly complex task that Apple turns into child’s play.
As soon as I selected “Add a Fingerprint” under Passcode and Fingerprint in the settings app, iOS 7 helpfully guided me through the process, telling me to “Lift and rest your finger on the Home button repeatedly.” As I did this, I felt a gentle pulse under my finger, which was a signal for me to lift it. At the same time, I could see Touch ID building an image of my fingerprint, bit by bit, on the screen. What’s more, it also asked me to “Adjust my grip,” so it can recognize my finger even when it’s not right on top of the home button. (I registered both thumbs and index fingers, and would recommend this for other iPhone 5S owners since our smartphone habits are pretty ambidextrous.)
After setup, I was soon unlocking the iPhone 5S with my fingers. If the screen is on, but locked, I only need to place my finger on the home button to unlock it. The other method is to press the home button between half a second to one second.
For iTunes and the App Store, making a purchase prompts Touch ID to pop up as one of the verification options. I simply put my finger on the home button, and the purchase was complete. The only time Touch ID would not read my finger was when it was wet, which may be a problem in the winter or on rainy days.
Overall, Touch ID feels easy and secure. And speaking of security, your fingerprints are not stored with Apple; instead they’re locally encrypted at a hardware level. It’s a smart move, and I applaud Apple for getting this right out of the gate.
Bigger Brain
With each new iPhone generation, Apple delivers a more powerful CPU. The iPhone 5S comes with the powerful, dual-core, 64-bit A7. It’s nearly twice as fast as the A6 CPU in the 5 and iPhone 5C. In anecdotal benchmark tests between the iPhone 5S and iPhone 5, the 5S was, in some areas, twice as fast as the A6 chip (i.e. math operations and image rendering). In real-world use, everything moves fast on the iPhone 5S. There are no pauses or hiccups — just smooth, responsive action.
The A7 chip plays a crucial role in delivering better gaming performance and providing the horsepower to drive some of the best digital photography I have ever seen on a smartphone.
Camera
Rebuilt from the ground up, the iPhone 5S iSight camera now matches that of Samsung’s Galaxy S4, boasting a five-element lens with an F2.2 aperture. What’s more, if you look at the iPhone 5 and 5S side by side, you can see that the latter’s lens is bigger (it actually looks like a more sophisticated camera). Behind that lens is a larger image sensor; Apple made an interesting decision, here: While Samsung now packs the Galaxy S4 with 13 megapixels, the iPhone 5S still has 8 megapixels. So, what did Apple do with the extra space on the image sensor? They made the pixels larger.
In picture after picture, I found that the colors were truer and the level of image distortion was lower. I took photos indoors and out, and compared them to both the iPhone 5 and the Galaxy S4. In almost every instance, the 5S images looked better than those shot with the 5, and sometimes better than those from the S4. The iPhone 5S also appears to have a wider lens than the Galaxy S4; for instance, despite taking photos of my subject from the same distance, the 5S pulled more of the scene into the frame. (The unretouched photos of plates, above, give you a sense of how the image quality compares between the two phones.)
The combined powers of the iPhone 5S’ high-quality iSight camera and the new A7 chip also adds a few other SLR-level tricks, although neither of them are groundbreaking: The handset can now shoot slow-motion video and in burst mode.
Samsung’s Galaxy S4 also has a burst option under “Drama” mode, but it isn’t as easy to use as Apple’s version. To shoot non-stop frames on the iPhone 5S, I simply held down the camera shutter, and it shot 10 frames per second. When I let go, the 5S let me scan through all the shots in a sort of film strip, where it identified the best ones. Usually, the handset got it right, finding photos that had the best exposure and were the least blurry. In the case of people, it found images of faces that were composed the most naturally.
The iPhone 5S’ slow-motion video is tons of impractical fun. Again, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen slow-mo capabilities, but as you would expect, Apple’s version is smart and easy to use. To shoot slow-mo video, I simply selected “slo-mo” by swiping to the desired shooting mode in the camera interface.
The video ended up inside the camera roll, where I could both trim the video (either permanently or save a copy of the clip), and select the portion of video that would be slow-motion and the portion that would be normal. Although I wished I could set multiple instances of slow-mo action, Apple only presented me with one that I could easily expand and contract. Even so, the final result was pretty cool. Once I saw what I could accomplish with 120 frames per second, I began wishing for 240 frames per second.
You can see some of my work in the embedded Instagram video, below. Note that to get a slow-motion video on Instagram, I had to mail it to myself, download it and then upload it to the photo- and video-sharing service. Otherwise, Instagram only processed the videos at normal speed.
Apple’s other innovation is its True Tone flash, which is a marked improvement over the iPhone 5’s single, image-busting LED flash. In tests with skin tone under standard lighting, the 5 would occasionally make people look like they were suffering from anemia, while the True Tone flash did a much better job of showing true skin-tone colors.
The iPhone 5S’s front-facing FaceTime camera features the exact same specs as the iPhone 5, but the image quality for FaceTime calls is vastly improved thanks to — once again — larger image pixels, as well as improved low-light performance. Interestingly, this is the same FaceTime camera buyers will find on the iPhone 5C.
iOS 7
So much of what’s different and excellent about the iPhone 5S can be attributed to iOS 7. The new operating system is a visual, information-architecture and interaction overhaul. At every single level, it’s an improvement over iOS 6, and creates a near-perfect marriage of hardware and software.
For a deep dive on iOS 7, check out our Senior Tech Analyst Christina Warren’s in-depth review. I agree with her perspective that the new operating system even makes the 12-month-old iPhone 5 feel brand new. On both the iPhone 5S and 5, icon and interfaces zoom in and out, so you feel like you’re diving into apps and then zipping back out of them. With its flippable card deck of web pages, Safari is now a real pleasure to use, and may be my new favorite mobile-web browser. At any moment, I can use a simple flick gesture to remove a page from the pack. Similarly, I can now sweep through full-page thumbnails of all running apps, and flick them up to stop them.
iOS 7 borrows pretty heavily from current and previous mobile OSes: Multi-tasking app cards are from WebOS, and Notifications and the Control Center are from Android. Apple did a great job of reorganizing Notifications, and the Control Center has more options than you’d find on any Android device, including Airdrop and Airplay.
Airdrop is Apple’s answer to NFC sharing; it basically works via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, and is completely proximity-based. In my tests, Airdrop worked smoothly.
Calls and LTE
While we spend more time texting, and using games and apps, the iPhone 5S is still a phone — the good news is that Apple has not forgotten this. Call quality is excellent, and I noticed that my LTE signal is more persistent than on the iPhone 5.
Siri Upgrade
I switched over to Siri’s male voice on both the iPhone 5S and 5 (also running iOS 7), then let them simultaneously navigate me to the same destination. The echo effect was bizarre, but it also became clear that Siri on the 5S sounds a lot less robotic.
I also love that Siri can now manage many of my settings. When I said “Change Brightness,” it responded, “Here you go,” and displayed the screen-brightness slider. When I said “music,” Siri started playing a shuffled version of my music library. And when I said, “Wi-Fi,” Siri told me that it was off, and asked if I wanted to turn it on.
Samsung’s Galaxy S4 actually has two versions of voice control: One is S-Voice and the other is simply Voice Control. The latter is pretty sophisticated; you can set it up so that the camera takes a picture when you say “cheese” or “smile,” but the S-Voice is far more versatile. You can access it by saying “Hi Galaxy” and use it, for example, to change settings, find people in your contacts and push social-media updates. However, when I said “Brightness” to S-Voice, it responded, “I’m not sure what you mean by ‘brightness.’”
S-Voice is also harder to get to. On the iPhone 5S, I hold down the home button to access Siri. To find S-Voice, I have to switch to the app, and then either say “Hi Galaxy” or hold down the software button.
Overall, I prefer Siri’s ubiquity, simplicity and effectiveness.
64 Bits
There has never been a 64-bit mobile phone until now. As with its desktop counterpart, the benefits of all those extra bits is not immediately apparent. In theory, a 64-bit processor widens the processing highways so much that the iPhone can compute far more efficiently. In the iPhone 5S, the operating system and native apps are now all 64 bit. New apps can be, as well, although the iPhone handled all of my 32-bit legacy apps just fine.
To really understand the potential of a 64-bit processor, you need to run apps that demand extreme –- at least on a mobile device –- levels of processing power. Epic Game’s Infinity Blade III, which was released simultaneously with the iOS 7, is that kind of app; it’s console-level gaming on a tiny retina display.
Infinity Blade III features rich three-dimensional images, atmospheric effects and physics. There are CGI lens flares, reflections and transparencies. Every single one of them puts a burden on the A7 CPU and the 64-bit processor. During my tests (I know, it’s hard to call gaming a “test”), the game looked amazing and never stuttered once — even during the most intense gameplay.
There’s also a new M7 motion coprocessor. It takes on the full-time job of measuring input from the accelerometer, gyroscope and compass. This is designed to take that burden off the A7 chip, but also provide a new way for third-party companies to interact with these sensors. It’s a bit too early to measure the impact of the M7 on overall performance.
Battery Life
Apple told me that they gave the iPhone 5S a larger battery, and their performance ratings indicated that it added about two hours of talk and browsing time over the iPhone 5.
During intense use, however, the back of the iPhone 5S got pretty hot. Although the iPhone is rated for 10 hours of browsing on an LTE connection, heavy use — including gaming, video shooting, burst-mode photography and video consumption — decreased that significantly. In one day, I came very close to running out of power after roughly seven hours. On another day, where I did far fewer of those activities (likely a better reflection of average use) battery life held up well into the evening hours.
To be fair, though, I have yet to see an off-the-shelf LTE phone that impressed me with its battery life.
Conclusions
The iPhone 5S is, without a doubt, the best phone Apple has ever made. It’s the top choice for anyone who wants a smaller phone with a high-resolution screen, formidable power and an unmatched mobile operating system. Still, Apple has no answer for those who demand larger screens. If that’s your desire, you don’t need to look any further than Samsung’s Galaxy S4.
The two devices offer very different approaches to mobile phones. Samsung squeezes tons of functionality and even multiple options to perform the same task into its device (not typical of an Android phone). The Galaxy S4 can actually watch you, so it knows when to stop and start video, and even lets you navigate a website with your eyes. These are amazing features, but not necessarily ones I want.
Apple’s approach is focusing on users’ most common tasks, and polishing the associated features until they gleam. By not overloading the iPhone 5S with options people may never use, Apple keeps the iPhone clean, yet incredibly powerful (although the S4 is no less powerful).
It’s become quite clear to me that people are now confusing “new features’ with “innovation.” Samsung wins the feature war (by a pure count basis), but with its perfect screen size (for me, at least), stunning operating system and unlimited fun, the 5S wins my heart.
Apple’s iPhone 5S is now available on Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile and ATT.
The Lowdown
The Good: Excellent design inside and out. Near-perfect marriage of hardware and software. Best fingerprint security integration on a consumer-electronics device to date.
The Bad: Battery life not quite as good as expected, but certainly on par with competitors.
Bottom Line: Apple fans will love the iPhone 5S.
Image: Mashable
Kindle
Amazon’s Kindle app now has an all-new design, as well as a new “Collections” feature to help them organize their books, documents, and magazines. You could, for instance, have a collection for your “Favorite Kids Books” as well as “Good Road Trip Books.” Content can be added to multiple different collections, so you could potentially include the same book in both.
Evernote
Evernote has a new home screen, which brings all your personal and business notes, notebook, tags, shortcuts and announcements onto the same page, new Quicknote feature, and image and PDF markup. Notes can also be shared with others through the app using iOS 7’s new Airdrop feature.
Shazam
Shazam has a new look and feel inspired by iOS 7. In addition to the new look, the app now reminds you of the last thing you Shazamed when you open it. Sharing to facebook is easier and faster with the new app, and a new enhancement lets you include location, friends and comments when you share your Shazams with your friends.
Flipboard
In addition to a new look, Flipboard improved the speed of its app. The iOS 7 version of the app also includes the ability to delete unwanted comments directly in magazines, and report inappropriate users and comments. Parallax in iOS 7 also brings your magazine covers to life.
Foursquare
Foursquare updated its app’s user interface, and added a new icon.
eBay
eBay’s iOS 7 app adds search improvements to help you find what you’re looking for, enhancements to saved searches and seller, and improved upload speed when uploading items for sale.
TED
TED’s iOS 7 app sports a fresh new user interface, improved audio bar with time seeker and more.
“For this latest update, we simplified our app’s interface to make its functionality more useful – a combination of efforts inspired by our own TED design ethos and Apple’s vision for iOS7. As Apple puts it, “good design is design that’s in service of the experience.” As a result, the TED experience for iOS7 feels lighter, airier – yet familiar,” says Thaniya Keereepart, the in-house product development lead for the app.
Pandora
Pandora released a new iOS 7 version of its iPhone app and a compleately redesigned iPad app Wednesday.
“We’ve taken all of the things that we’ve learned about the lean-in experience about Pandora on the web and our phone applications, and brought that the tablet with a new user experience built from the ground up around the larger screen environment of the tablet,” Pandora CTO Tom Conrad told Mashable.
Optimized for larger screens, the app makes it easy to add variety to a station with artist suggestion, helps you explore more about an artist or album on screen while you listen, and provides a detailed timeline customized for each individual listener. Social sharing also comes to the iPad for the first time with the release, giving users the opportunity to publish their music activity to Facebook, or share links to their favorite stations on Twitter.
Quora
Quora’s new iPhone app includes a new user interface, as well as new swiping and gestures for an improved Quora reading experience on mobile.
Night Sky 2
Night Sky 2 brings new 64bit support for the iPhone 5S, an added option for imperial units and an improved Nigh Sky Community.
Twitter
Twitter for iOS 7 got a whole new look. iOS 7 as a whole also ads a number of new Twitter features including the ability to search twitter using Siri, use Shared Links in safari to see links that have been tweeted by people you follow, and its own #music station on iTunes Radio.
Yahoo Weather
Yahoo Weather offers an new enhanced experience for iOS 7 and incorporates Yahoo’s new logo.
Facebook
Facebook released an iOS 7-optimized version of its app.
The most noticeable design change is that the app’s main navigation bar has been moved to the bottom of the screen, replacing the old navigation bar at the top of screen. The new design also eliminates the tool bar that slid out from the left-hand side of the app in the old version.
Photo Editor by Aviary
Photo Editor for Aviary has an all-new interface for iOS 7, and introduces a “Supply Shop” where you can find all of Aviary’s Photo Filters, Frames and Sticker Packs in one place.