New iPhones

By now you must have heard about today’s Apple event. I’ll spare you the details of what has been announced and jump right into what I think of these two new iPhones.

(As a side note, I don’t know if it’s age or force of repetition, but I’m slowly starting to despise Apple’s marketing talk and this over-abuse of adjectives. The two videos, especially when Jony Ive talks, are excruciating to watch.)

The iPhone 5c

(Note the lowercase “s”. The iPhone 4S had a uppercase “s”.)

I like this one. It is all that is great about the iPhone 5, with none of its downsides. (Well, except for that gigantic screen that I despise so much.)

The plastic looks real nice, but as with the iPhone 5, we’ll have to see how it fares the long run. I was very, very disappointed by the iPhone 5 and the aluminium casing that chips too easily. The glossy back of the 5c calls for scratches. Let’s hope it’ll do a better job at that than the aluminium. The iPhone 5c is a hair thicker than the iPhone 5 but I’d be OK with that as long as the weight’s the same; But it isn’t: 132 grams versus 112 grams for the iPhone 5.

They did say however that the battery was slightly larger than last year’s iPhone, so I suppose that’s where the difference comes from. A better battery life is nothing to shun.

The colors are great, and while I don’t like them all, the yellow one is very enticing to the eye. Of course, the white is very classy. I’d be torn if I had to choose between the two. I’m a bit disappointed by the black façade. Well, I’m more disappointed by the lack of customization to be precise, but I suppose Apple had to start somewhere to make it cheaper.

This brings me to the cases. I like the material, it’s very solid and the matte colors contrast with the gloss of the 5c’s back. But I’m really not fond of the patterned holes that Apple as used for the back of the case. It looks weird and acts strangely with the various texts on the back of the iPhone. In this case, the colors clashes and it’s very hard to find the arrangement tasty.

As for the radio, Apple says this phone has the largest, widest array of LTE bands of any other smartphone. It’s a welcome improvement, and noticeably so because so many operators are stuck with some frequencies that weren’t supported by the iPhone 5. This year’s iPhones will support LTE in practically every country, and that’s great news.

The rear-facing camera, the so-called FaceTime HD camera, has been improved and this also is a very welcome improvement. Although I’ve been doing more and more video calls, and each time cried a little for a better camera, it has always been the person I’ve been chatting with that had a worse camera. That’s not going to help it.

Finally, I was very surprised by the price. The 16 Gb version goes for $599 unsubsidized, while the 32 Gb one goes for a hundred more. They are not aggressively priced in their unsubsidized form, but I imagine Apple has let more of its margins go for the subsidized phones.

Like everyone else, I expect Apple to sell a shitload of these.

iPhone 5s

First, let’s get away with the boring stuff.

The new iPhone 5s is available in three colors: silver (white), “space gray” (slate) and “gold” (champagne). It’s a good thing Apple has gone away with the black color: my black iPhone 5 is but a shadow of its former self, and all its edges are chipped. Personally, I’d choose the silver one, but that’s because I’ve always loved the white iPods, and because I now hate my black, chipped iPhone 5. But I hear that Jim Dalrymple will get the gold one.

It has a new A7 system-on-a-chip, which Apple boasts is the first 64-bit processor to ever be put in a smartphone. Cue Samsung’s next month efforts to release a 64-bit Galaxy S4… But that’s not very interesting.

What is, though, is the new M7 motion co-processor. This tiny processor’s sole role is to monitor the phone’s every movement, the phone’s position at all times, and report it back to the OS for apps to use. It will open a considerable amount of data to fitness apps that are already flourishing on the App Store, even though they are currently using a very primitive set of APIs and are doing “guesstimations” at best when it comes to paces, speed, etc. I think this will prove to be a major selling point.

You must have heard that the iPhone 5s has an integrated fingerprint reader. Apple calls it Touch ID. The Home button now reads the user’s fingerprint when touched, and this can be used to unlock the phone and confirm purchases on the App Store. But in the wake of the NSA scandal, users are wary of the touted “security features” while they all know that nothing is secured. For this reason, Apple has chosen not to expose the fingerprint information to other apps, nor to backup the signature on its servers. The signature is only stored on the phone (in a place Apple calls very secure), encrypted, and transmitted neither to apps nor to iCloud or any other service. That will severely limit the usefulness of this feature (it’d have been great to approve web purchases with a fingerprint) but I think Apple made the right choice, for now.

The new camera and sensor in the iPhone 5s may need a section altogether.

“Bigger pixels means better pictures”

That’s Apple’s motto with this year’s top-of-the-line iPhone. And I couldn’t agree more.

(Although it’s a bit ridiculous. Compare the iPhone 5s’s pixels size to the iPhone 5’s and the Canon 5D Mark II’s: respectively 1.5 µm, 1.4 µm and 6.4µm. A seven percent increase is not that amazing.¹)

However, Apple claims the sensor in itself, while not offering more megapixels, is 15% larger. So, in the end, it’s far better than last year’s iPhone. Which, in itself, is very, very good.

The aperture is a larger f2.2, compared to f2.4. It isn’t very meaningful because of the very large depth of field imposed by such a system, but it will allow the camera to perform a tiny bit better in low light. Also a good thing.

Apple has also improved its software to allow for greater dynamic range, to retrieve more details in the highlights and in the shadows, and to produce less noise in dark areas. I’m not sure to which extent these improvements will trickle down on the iPhone 5, and I’m afraid Apple will only enable those on the new 5s.

There are also new systems, such as image stabilization and photo burst, that have more to do with software than hardware – although the 64-bit A7 processor surely helps make it snappy. The image stabilization is a clever trick: it takes four pictures near instantaneously and merges them together to reduce motion. The photo burst mode, while certainly restricted by the hardware itself, also uses a software trick: it process each image taken during the burst and finds the best one, the keeper, in the lot. Helpful.

The new sensor is also able to shoot 720p video at 120 fps. The new photo app later allows to set parts of the video at a slower speed (a quarter the speed, so 30 fps) to produce beautiful, smooth slow motion. A very welcome addition.

Finally, Apple has improved on the backside LED flash. It now has two LEDs, white (cold) and “amber” (warm), the combination of which is used at varying ratios to ensure that the scene is lit with the most natural light possible. It produces very nice skin tones and overall a much greater experience when using the flash.

Conclusion

I like these new iPhones. I would love to get an iPhone 5s, silver please, to replace my horrible, chipped iPhone 5.

But my mind, and my bank account, tells me to be reasonable. Even the thought of letting go of my “old” photo gear and trying to use the iPhone has my sole camera isn’t a shiny prospect. I still love photography too much to go down that road, and the other improvements made to the phone are not enough for me to switch.

However, if I still had my iPhone 4, or had an iPhone 4S, I would get a 5s right away.