Just after unveiling the all colourful iPhone 5C, Apple has now moved on to release the iPhone 5S, the next iteration for their flagship iPhone products. Again, the leaks were spot on, with the new home button having a biometrics finger print sensor, but there are also other interesting additions. One is the gold colour variant(Gold, Slate and Silver are the three new colours), which again, was perfectly accurate from the leaks and the other is the new Apple A7 and M7 chips. The iPhone 5S also brings an updated camera and revamped internals, read on to find out what the iPhone 5S is all about.
The Apple A7 is the first 64-bit mobile processor that has 2X the performance of the previous generation. The M7 on the other hand is a co-processor that can detect motion using a trio of sensors – Accelerometer, Compass and Gyroscope. Developers will be able to take advantage of it using their APIs.
Moving onto battery life, Apple stated that the standby time will be better than the iPhone 5 at 250 hours while you can do with 10 hours of browsing on LTE.
The camera also has been updated, says Apple. It now uses a new five element Apple-designed lens with a F2.2 Aperture. It has a 15% larger active area when compared to the older one. The pixels are of 1.5 microns in size, in comparison to the 2.0 microns on the HTC One and 1.1 microns on the several other sensors.
The pixel size bump is pretty huge and should benefit the already impressive performance we have seen from Apple iPhone cameras. In terms of software, the camera software can now do super fast AF with 15 zone metering, all automatically. There is also a new dual LED flash, with one producing the cool light while the other produces a warm light, basically to counteract the weird white balance the LED flash induces on photos.
Interesting implementation from apple here. Apple also introduces Auto image stabilization to the camera, which works by taking a burst of 10 pictures in a second and picks the best one from the lot. Not that new, but Apple’s implementations are always interesting.
Slow motion video is also coming to the iPhone, with 720p 120 fps video capture. Pro Tip – Samsung just announced this for the Note 3 recently. The photo samples Apple showed at the Keynote looked really impressive, as usual.
Biometrics are finally going mainstream with the iPhone 5S. The home button now has a finger print sensor. It’s called Touch ID and resides inside the home button. It is 170 microns thin, senses 500 ppi and even scans your sub-dermial skin layers. The demo established that Touch ID is highly accurate.
The pricing is at 199$ for 16GB and 299$ for 32 GB while at a high 399$ for the 64 GB version. All on a two year contract. There are cases too, the similar silicon case covers that launched with the iPhone 5C, and is available at a higher $39 with different colour variants.
The new iPhone 5s will be available for pre-order on the 13th of September in the US and a week later in some other parts of the world. (No it does not include India :()