Apple introduced the iPhone 5 to the world by elevating it from a hidden pylon, rising from the floor and literally sitting on a pedestal for the world to admire while precisely focused lights made the thing gleam like a jewel. Clearly, the company is confident that it's knocked it out of the park again, and we have to agree. But, that new design isn't perfect -- not quite a grand slam, if you'll allow us to continue the metaphor.
The iPhone 5 is a clear evolution of the stark, industrial design introduced two years ago with the iPhone 4. That collection of square edges and raw materials was a huge contrast to everything else the company was producing and, frankly, everything else on the market. It was like an artifact from another dimension where ergonomics lost out to purity of vision, and Apple saw no reason to compromise that purity for the 4S nor, as it turns out, for the 5.
Visually, much has stayed the same, but the biggest change is impossible to see. Pick up the iPhone 5 and you're immediately struck by the reduction in weight. At 112 grams it's 20 percent lighter than the 4S, a figure that doesn't seem like it would make much of an impact. It does -- so much so that it's the lightness, not the bigger display or the thinness, that nearly everybody praises when first getting a chance to hold the iPhone 5 in their own hands.
Meanwhile, the changes in dimensions are surprisingly difficult to detect. That's largely thanks to the iPhone 5 being exactly as wide as the 4 and 4S that came before. This continuity of proportions on the x axis brings familiarity, while a slight increase on the y axis adds functionality. The iPhone 5 measures 4.87 x 2.31 x 0.3 inches (124 x 59 x 7.6mm), making it about a third of an inch (nearly 1cm) taller than before. Since all the extra room happens outside of your grip you hardly notice it, and this also shifts the phone's center of mass away from the center of your hand, which we think helps augment the perception of lightness.
The new height makes room for that 4-inch, 1,136 x 640 display -- the most progressive change by a long shot. Steve Jobs famously said that the 3.5-inch screen size is the "sweet spot" and, frankly, it was about time Apple added a little more sugar. The new height results in a phone with more usable space and better presentation for HD content (the iPhone is finally 16:9). Yet, it's still easy to use with one hand. Each corner is comfortably reachable by thumbs of nearly all sizes.
That reachability is also helped by the decrease in thickness: 7.6mm, down from 9.3mm on the iPhone 4S. It isn't the world's thinnest smartphone that Apple claimed it was (the original Droid RAZR is thinner, among others), but this is still an impressively svelte device.
An all-new aluminum construction extends around the back, which is either anodized black or left raw depending on whether you opt for the darker or lighter of the two offerings. The white phone is bright and clean-looking; the black, dark and menacing. We'll let you draw conclusions about personality based on color preference, but we will say that the black surface seems to suck up fingerprints that are difficult to clean. Even so, we're glad the all-glass back has been retired, though traces of it remain: two slivers of the stuff punctuate the top and bottom of the back sides. These glossy bands break up the matte uniformity, but help boost antenna performance.
That said, the antennas still comprise the rim of the device, thinner now and the gap between them filled with a material whose color matches the body -- yet more evidence of the design team's attention to detail. These are the same sort of dynamically reconfiguring antennas used on the 4S and, as with that phone, we weren't able to death grip our way into any sort of signal issues.
The face of the device is still fashioned out of glass (no surprise there) and while Apple wouldn't confirm whether that front is indeed the sort of primate-proof silica produced by Corning, we'd hazard a guess that it is. With the metal back now sitting flush to the chamfered edge of the device, the slightly elevated glass surface gives the profile view of the phone a bit of unfortunate asymmetry -- it's now thicker on top than on the bottom.
But that elevated glass does mean your finger doesn't hit any rough edges or unfortunate surfaces when tracing the edges of the panel. The front-facing FaceTime HD camera now sits centered, directly above the earpiece. The Home button, meanwhile, has moved a fraction of a millimeter down and its resistance feels slightly different than that on the 4S, a touch more progressive with a more definitive detent. Hopefully the internal mechanism will prove more durable over time.
The position and design of the other buttons is likewise largely unchanged from the 4S, with the discrete, circular volume up and down buttons on the left just below the (slightly thinner) toggle switch. The headphone jack now moves to the bottom, a change that will cause some to modify their well-established pocket-retrieval mannerisms. But, as users of the iPod touch will tell you, having that jack on the bottom feels quite natural, and we agree. This is a good move.
The phone's speakers are also positioned on the bottom, playing out through a series of 26 holes that flank another major change in the iPhone 5: the Lightning connector.
The iPhone 5 is a clear evolution of the stark, industrial design introduced two years ago with the iPhone 4. That collection of square edges and raw materials was a huge contrast to everything else the company was producing and, frankly, everything else on the market. It was like an artifact from another dimension where ergonomics lost out to purity of vision, and Apple saw no reason to compromise that purity for the 4S nor, as it turns out, for the 5.
Visually, much has stayed the same, but the biggest change is impossible to see. Pick up the iPhone 5 and you're immediately struck by the reduction in weight. At 112 grams it's 20 percent lighter than the 4S, a figure that doesn't seem like it would make much of an impact. It does -- so much so that it's the lightness, not the bigger display or the thinness, that nearly everybody praises when first getting a chance to hold the iPhone 5 in their own hands.
Meanwhile, the changes in dimensions are surprisingly difficult to detect. That's largely thanks to the iPhone 5 being exactly as wide as the 4 and 4S that came before. This continuity of proportions on the x axis brings familiarity, while a slight increase on the y axis adds functionality. The iPhone 5 measures 4.87 x 2.31 x 0.3 inches (124 x 59 x 7.6mm), making it about a third of an inch (nearly 1cm) taller than before. Since all the extra room happens outside of your grip you hardly notice it, and this also shifts the phone's center of mass away from the center of your hand, which we think helps augment the perception of lightness.
The new height makes room for that 4-inch, 1,136 x 640 display -- the most progressive change by a long shot. Steve Jobs famously said that the 3.5-inch screen size is the "sweet spot" and, frankly, it was about time Apple added a little more sugar. The new height results in a phone with more usable space and better presentation for HD content (the iPhone is finally 16:9). Yet, it's still easy to use with one hand. Each corner is comfortably reachable by thumbs of nearly all sizes.
That reachability is also helped by the decrease in thickness: 7.6mm, down from 9.3mm on the iPhone 4S. It isn't the world's thinnest smartphone that Apple claimed it was (the original Droid RAZR is thinner, among others), but this is still an impressively svelte device.
An all-new aluminum construction extends around the back, which is either anodized black or left raw depending on whether you opt for the darker or lighter of the two offerings. The white phone is bright and clean-looking; the black, dark and menacing. We'll let you draw conclusions about personality based on color preference, but we will say that the black surface seems to suck up fingerprints that are difficult to clean. Even so, we're glad the all-glass back has been retired, though traces of it remain: two slivers of the stuff punctuate the top and bottom of the back sides. These glossy bands break up the matte uniformity, but help boost antenna performance.
That said, the antennas still comprise the rim of the device, thinner now and the gap between them filled with a material whose color matches the body -- yet more evidence of the design team's attention to detail. These are the same sort of dynamically reconfiguring antennas used on the 4S and, as with that phone, we weren't able to death grip our way into any sort of signal issues.
The face of the device is still fashioned out of glass (no surprise there) and while Apple wouldn't confirm whether that front is indeed the sort of primate-proof silica produced by Corning, we'd hazard a guess that it is. With the metal back now sitting flush to the chamfered edge of the device, the slightly elevated glass surface gives the profile view of the phone a bit of unfortunate asymmetry -- it's now thicker on top than on the bottom.
But that elevated glass does mean your finger doesn't hit any rough edges or unfortunate surfaces when tracing the edges of the panel. The front-facing FaceTime HD camera now sits centered, directly above the earpiece. The Home button, meanwhile, has moved a fraction of a millimeter down and its resistance feels slightly different than that on the 4S, a touch more progressive with a more definitive detent. Hopefully the internal mechanism will prove more durable over time.
The position and design of the other buttons is likewise largely unchanged from the 4S, with the discrete, circular volume up and down buttons on the left just below the (slightly thinner) toggle switch. The headphone jack now moves to the bottom, a change that will cause some to modify their well-established pocket-retrieval mannerisms. But, as users of the iPod touch will tell you, having that jack on the bottom feels quite natural, and we agree. This is a good move.
The phone's speakers are also positioned on the bottom, playing out through a series of 26 holes that flank another major change in the iPhone 5: the Lightning connector.
Goodbye, venerable Dock connector. Hello, Lightning. For nearly 10 years the 30-pin Dock connector has been ubiquitous, sprouting out of accessories small and large, but ever since iPods started getting thinner we all knew its days were numbered. The giant, clunky connector is a painful legacy of an earlier time that needs to be removed from the ecosystem and, with the iPhone 5, Apple decided it was time to rip off the Band-Aid. Indeed the Dock connector must go and we won't miss it, but Lightning doesn't always feel like a confident step forward.
First, the good: the Lightning connector is infinitely easier to connect. It slots in nicely and does so regardless of orientation, plugging in right-side-up or upside-down. We were able to drive it home without looking the first time, and every time thereafter. (If only the same could be said for the USB connector on the other side.) It's also small, seems infinitely more durable than its flimsy-feeling elder and even stronger than micro-USB alternatives.
Superficially, it's hitting all the right marks, but Lightning comes up short in a number of important areas. It is, of course, incompatible with the roughly 350 million billion iPhone and iPod accessories currently on the market -- a problem mostly rectified by a $30 adapter. But, that's not a perfect solution, as even that won't support iPod Out, the specification used in some cars (most notably BMW and Mini) to enable in-dash control of an iPod or iPhone.
That's an admittedly low number of users left with no way forward, as the adapter will provide the power and analog audio that the vast majority of docks and accessories (and cars) in the world need, but it's still disappointing to see those automotive users, owners of some of the most expensive iPod docks on the planet, left out in the cold.
More problematic is the speed of this new connector. Lightning's name comes as a cheeky play on the Thunderbolt connector, yet Lightning is, at least for now, wholly independent from that standard. In fact, the implementation that comes with the iPhone 5 is based on USB 2.0, meaning that theoretical maximum data transfer rates are no faster than what came before. In practice, though, we were surprised to actually find a tangible difference between the two phones.
To test this we lined up an iPhone 4S next to an iPhone 5 and ran both through a number of syncs with large files. Pulling 5.5GB of data from iTunes to the iPhone 4S took five minutes and six seconds on average. Syncing those same files to the iPhone 5 took three minutes and 57 seconds on average. So, nearly 20 percent faster, but we're not sure how much of this is due to the new connector and how much can be attributed to faster internals in the phone itself.
We confirmed with Apple that the iPhone 5 itself only supports USB 2.0, so a faster interconnect on the other end wouldn't help anything (and it's unclear whether the internal storage could consume data more quickly if it were there), but there's nothing stopping the company from expanding the Lightning standard to work with Thunderbolt or USB 3.0 in the future. For now, at least, the new connector remains confusingly at odds with Apple's own next-generation and similarly named data interconnect. That's no problem if you're using one of the many and myriad wireless ways to pull content directly onto the device (hello, iCloud), but if you're still pushing your media over a cable from your main iTunes library, it's still going to take awhile.
First, the good: the Lightning connector is infinitely easier to connect. It slots in nicely and does so regardless of orientation, plugging in right-side-up or upside-down. We were able to drive it home without looking the first time, and every time thereafter. (If only the same could be said for the USB connector on the other side.) It's also small, seems infinitely more durable than its flimsy-feeling elder and even stronger than micro-USB alternatives.
Superficially, it's hitting all the right marks, but Lightning comes up short in a number of important areas. It is, of course, incompatible with the roughly 350 million billion iPhone and iPod accessories currently on the market -- a problem mostly rectified by a $30 adapter. But, that's not a perfect solution, as even that won't support iPod Out, the specification used in some cars (most notably BMW and Mini) to enable in-dash control of an iPod or iPhone.
That's an admittedly low number of users left with no way forward, as the adapter will provide the power and analog audio that the vast majority of docks and accessories (and cars) in the world need, but it's still disappointing to see those automotive users, owners of some of the most expensive iPod docks on the planet, left out in the cold.
More problematic is the speed of this new connector. Lightning's name comes as a cheeky play on the Thunderbolt connector, yet Lightning is, at least for now, wholly independent from that standard. In fact, the implementation that comes with the iPhone 5 is based on USB 2.0, meaning that theoretical maximum data transfer rates are no faster than what came before. In practice, though, we were surprised to actually find a tangible difference between the two phones.
To test this we lined up an iPhone 4S next to an iPhone 5 and ran both through a number of syncs with large files. Pulling 5.5GB of data from iTunes to the iPhone 4S took five minutes and six seconds on average. Syncing those same files to the iPhone 5 took three minutes and 57 seconds on average. So, nearly 20 percent faster, but we're not sure how much of this is due to the new connector and how much can be attributed to faster internals in the phone itself.
We confirmed with Apple that the iPhone 5 itself only supports USB 2.0, so a faster interconnect on the other end wouldn't help anything (and it's unclear whether the internal storage could consume data more quickly if it were there), but there's nothing stopping the company from expanding the Lightning standard to work with Thunderbolt or USB 3.0 in the future. For now, at least, the new connector remains confusingly at odds with Apple's own next-generation and similarly named data interconnect. That's no problem if you're using one of the many and myriad wireless ways to pull content directly onto the device (hello, iCloud), but if you're still pushing your media over a cable from your main iTunes library, it's still going to take awhile.