IPhone 5 Scores Well, With a Quibble

blueeyes.yu

If you were taking a college course called iPhone 101, your professor might identify three factors that have made Apple’s smartphone a mega-success.

First, design. A single company, known for its obsession over details, produces both the hardware and the software. The result is a single, coherently designed whole.

Second, superior components. As the world’s largest tech company, Apple can call the shots with its part suppliers. It can often incorporate new technologies — scratch-resistant Gorilla glass, say, or the supersharp Retina screen — before its rivals can.

Third, compatibility. The iPhone’s ubiquity has led to a universe of accessories that fit it. Walk into a hotel room, and there’s probably an iPhone connector built into the alarm clock.

If you had to write a term paper for this course, you might open with this argument: that in creating the new iPhone 5 ($200 with contract), Apple strengthened its first two advantages — but handed its rivals the third one on a silver platter.

Let’s start with design. The new phone, in all black or white, is beautiful. Especially the black one, whose gleaming, black-on-black, glass-and-aluminum body carries the design cues of a Stealth bomber. The rumors ran rampant that the iPhone 5 would have a larger screen. Would it be huge, like many Android phones? Those giant screens are thudding slabs in your pocket, but they’re fantastic for maps, books, Web sites, photos and movies.

As it turns out, the new iPhone’s updated footprint (handprint?) is nothing like the Imax size of its rivals. It’s the same 2.3 inches wide, but its screen has grown taller by half an inch — 176 very tiny pixels.

It’s a nice but not life-changing change. You gain an extra row of icons on the Home screen, more messages in e-mail lists, wider keyboard keys in landscape mode and a more expansive view of all the other built-in apps.

At 0.3 inch, the phone is thinner than before, startlingly so — the thinnest in the world, Apple says. It’s also lighter, just under four ounces; it disappears completely in your pocket. This iPhone is so light, tall and flat, it’s well on its way to becoming a bookmark.

Second advantage: components. There’s no breakthrough feature this time, no Retina screen or Siri. (Thought recognition will have to wait for the iPhone 13.)

Even so, nearly every feature has been upgraded, with a focus on what counts: screen, sound, camera, speed.

The iPhone 5 is now a 4G LTE phone, meaning that in certain lucky cities, you get wicked-fast Internet connections.

The phone itself runs faster, too. Its new processor runs twice as fast, says Apple. Few people complained about the old phone’s speed, but this one certainly zips.

The screen now has better color reproduction. The front-facing camera captures high-definition video now (720p). The battery offers the same talk time as before (eight hours), but adds two more hours of Web browsing (eight hours), even on LTE networks. In practical terms, you encounter fewer days when the battery dies by dinnertime — a frequent occurrence with 4G phones.

The camera is among the best ever put into a phone. Its lowlight shots blow away the same efforts from an iPhone 4S. Its shot-to-shot times have been improved by 40 percent. And you can take stills even while recording video (1080p hi-def, of course).

So far, so good. But now, the third point, about universal compatibility.

These days, that decade-old iPhone/iPad/iPod charging connector is everywhere: cars, clocks, speakers, docks, even medical devices. But the new iPhone won’t fit any of them.

Apple calls its replacement the Lightning connector. It’s much sturdier than the old jack, and much smaller — 0.31 inch wide instead of 0.83. And there’s no right side up — you can insert it either way. It clicks satisfyingly into place, yet you can remove it easily. It’s the very model of a modern major connector.

Well, great. But it doesn’t fit any existing accessories, docks or chargers. Apple sells an adapter plug for $30. That’s not just a slap in the face to loyal customers — it’s a jab in the eye.

Even with the adapter, not all accessories work with the Lightning.

Apple says that a change was inevitable — that old connector, after 10 years, desperately needed an update. Still, Apple has just given away one of its greatest competitive advantages.

The phone comes with new software, iOS 6, bristling with large and small improvements — and it’s a free download that also runs on the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S.

The chief attractions of iOS 6 are a completely new GPS/maps app (Apple ditched Google Maps and wrote its own app); new talents for Siri, the voice-activated assistant (she now answers questions about current movies, sports and restaurants); and one-tap canned responses to incoming calls (like “I’m driving — call you later”).

There’s a new panorama mode for the camera, too, that comes in handy more often than you might expect. As you swing the phone around you, it stitches many shots together into a seamless, ultra-wide-angle, 28-megapixel photo. Unlike other apps and phones with panorama modes, this one is fully automated and offers a preview of the panorama that materializes as you’re taking it.

Should you get the new iPhone, when the best Windows Phone and Android phones offer similarly impressive speed, beauty and features?

The iPhone 5 does nothing to change the pros and cons in that discussion. Windows Phones offer brilliant design, but lag badly in apps and accessories.

Android phones shine in choice: you can get a huge screen, for example, or a memory-card slot. But Android is, on the whole, buggier, more chaotic and more fragmented — you can’t always upgrade your phone’s software when there’s a new version.

IPhones don’t offer as much choice or customization. But they’re more polished and consistently designed, with a heavily regulated but better stocked app catalog. They offer Siri voice control and the best music/movie/TV store, and the phone’s size and weight have boiled away to almost nothing.

If you have an iPhone 4S, getting an iPhone 5 would mean breaking your two-year carrier contract and paying a painful penalty; maybe not worth it for the 5’s collection of nips and tucks. But if you’ve had the discipline to sit out a couple of iPhone generations — wow, are you in for a treat.

It’s just too bad about that connector change. Doesn’t Apple worry about losing customer loyalty and sales?

Actually, Apple has a long history of killing off technologies, inconveniently and expensively, that the public had come to love — even those that Apple had originally developed and promoted. Somehow, life goes on, and Apple gets even bigger.

So if you wanted to conclude your term paper by projecting the new connector’s impact on the iPhone’s popularity, you’d be smart to write, “very little (sigh).” When you really think about it, we’ve all taken this class before.

From: The New York Times

robert237

Wow. That's as bad as coming out with the latest Steve Jobs lunchbox and it not being compatible
with any of the old Steve Wozniak thermos bottles.

Ghosty

robert237 Post time: 2012-9-23 11:03
Wow. That's as bad as coming out with the latest Steve Jobs lunchbox and it not being compatible
wit ...

Robber

if you dont know about technology shut your mouth

Robber, this its serious, you are damaged

I dont know how you are sponsored to post here in that idiotic way and everyday

have mercy of yourself

and keep drinking hot water from your cheap thermos

robert237

Ghosty Post time: 2012-9-22 19:29
Robber

if you dont know about technology shut your mouth

You seem like a typical Apple fan.

Ghosty

robert237 Post time: 2012-9-23 11:32
You seem like a typical Apple fan.

i like it but not a fan

i just try to help you

but

you dont learn

but

dont worry

as soon you make replies

i will be here to back you up

Imbecile

robert237

Apple has a ring in the noses of its fan base. They are willing to see how far they can go.
That's all there is to this 'technological marvel' of a new connector.

Ghosty

It took little more than five hours for the first Apple iPhone 5 to go on sale in the Chinese mainland after being smuggled across the border from Hong Kong, but supplies were short and prices high.
In a crowded building in the southern city of Shenzhen, which lies across Hong Kong's northern border, a salesman stood by as shoppers speaking various dialects scrambled to take photos of three shiny new iPhones on display in his glass cabinet.
"The stock is so limited that people are treating them like gems," said another salesman, surnamed Lin.
New Apple products are typically rolled out in the Chinese mainland after they are in Hong Kong, creating a thriving "gray market" for enterprising traders. According to local media reports, iPhone 5 is expected go on sale in the Chinese mainland by year end.
Vendors like Lin make a year-round living exploiting the lower prices of Apple products and other popular brands in Hong Kong, a free port whose downtown is just an hour from Shenzhen with no duty on many electronics imports.
At the iPhone 5's debut in Hong Kong earlier in the day, small groups of people carrying rucksacks filled with cash waited outside the city's flagship store hoping to snap up phones for resale.
For those able to secure one, the new phone cost HK$5,588 ($720), or about 4,546 yuan, at the Hong Kong Apple store, while they were selling for between 7,500 yuan and 9,000 yuan in Shenzhen where fake and smuggled phones are often hawked.
But in Shenzhen, business was slow.
On Friday afternoon, most vendors in the Shenzhen building still had their stalls filled with the iPhone 4S, promising that the latest model would arrive in the evening, when potential buyers were hoping to get a better deal.
In Hong Kong, the iPhone 5's Friday debut stoked up the Apple craze again, with thousands of fans jamming stores, scalpers scouting for buyers, and telecommunications operators jumping on the bandwagon by soft-launching new services.
The new smartphone is also launched in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Germany, Australia and Singapore.
In Sydney, Singapore and Tokyo, iPhone 5 fans waited hours outside Apple stores or authorized dealers to get the latest model.
In Hong Kong, buyers had to sign up online with Apple to pick up the new model in the local flagship store at a prearranged time. The first customers in Hong Kong were greeted by staff cheering, clapping, and chanting "IPhone 5! IPhone 5!" and high-fiving them as they were escorted, one by one, through the front door.

Reuters and AP contributed to this story.

Contact the writer at oswald@chinadailyhk.com