Thus the iPhone 5s has a chassis that’s all but identical to its predecessor, right down to the positioning of the speaker grilles and the metal bands running around the phone’s edge. The only differences surround the colours – the black iPhone this time has a slightly lighter “space gray” rear panel, and there’s a new gold colour, which is more tasteful than it sounds.
Suffice it to say, if you’re familiar with the iPhone, you’ll know precisely what this latest iPhone looks and feels like: it’s sleek, one of the lightest smartphones around at a mere 112g, and a highly desirable object in its own right.
Make sure, though, you take care how you treat it. The aluminium rear might look tough and hard-wearing, but as we’ve found with the iPhone 5, it picks up dings and scratches rather easily if dropped or put in a pocket with other metal objects.
Touch ID
Aside from the colours, the only physical difference between the 5s and its predecessor is the home button, where the new Touch ID fingerprint reader resides. It’s no longer decorated with the familiar square motif, and it’s a little flatter, but the interest lies not in the way it looks, but the way Touch ID can make your life a whole lot easier.
After registering a fingerprint during set up, you can use that digit to both unlock the phone and authorise iTunes purchases. It’s highly convenient, and works reliably, but not always instantaneously – a pause of three or four seconds before recognition is common.
However, before you go off and change your easily remembered iTunes password to a super-secure, randomised string of characters, stuffed with numbers and other symbols, be aware that the 5s will occasionally ask you to verify your fingerprint by re-entering the password. It isn’t a completely set-and-forget option.
Camera
Flip the 5s over and you may notice the other physical difference: there’s now a dual-LED flash, replacing the single LED of old. Dubbed True Tone, each LED flashes at a different colour temperature. The aim is to avoid the horrid washed-out, ghostly look that traditional flashes can give skin tones – and it’s a success. It’s a real asset for pub and party snaps.
It isn’t all about the flash, however, with a handful of other improvements, including new optics and additional software features. The 5s has a wider f/2.2 lens than the iPhone 5, a larger sensor and improved digital image stabilisation, which combine to deliver cleaner, sharper low-light images, with noticeably more shadow detail than on the iPhone 5.
It isn’t quite as good as the Nokia Lumia 1020 for all-round quality, or the Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom for far-off subjects, but pitch it up against the HTC One and it has the edge. The HTC One produces very good low-light images, but the iPhone 5s is better, its 8-megapixel sensor capturing scenes with far more detail and less grain. The only weak spot is a slight tendency towards overexposure, which means photos can look a touch pale.
Elsewhere, it’s largely good news. There’s a 720p, slow-motion video mode that captures footage at 120fps and plays it back at 30fps. Again, this is tremendously effective, and made to look even better by the way the Apple photo app plays it back, starting at normal speed, then slowing dramatically to quarter speed.
You also get a burst mode, which shoots 5-megapixel stills at 10fps, stacks all the images together and lets you pick the best one.
Performance and specifications
The camera is good, then, but it’s performance where the iPhone 5 really shines. Under the hood is a completely new, 64-bit processor – the 1.5GHz Apple A7 – and this is coupled with 1GB of RAM. It’s unclear at this stage what advantage 64-bit itself brings. In a Windows PC, a 64-bit processor coupled with 64-bit software allows your device to address more than 4GB of RAM. Given there’s only 1GB in the 5s, that’s a moot point.
However, the 5s is ludicrously quick. We ran a selection of benchmarks, and in all but one the 5s posted the quickest score we’ve seen from any phone: a SunSpider time of 404ms, a GFXBench T-Rex HD frame rate of 37fps, and a Peacekeeper score of 1,778.
Only the Samsung Galaxy S4 gets close to it, its quad-core processor outstripping the 5s’ dual-core unit in the Geekbench 2 CPU benchmark test by 3,221 to 2,246. In every other test, though, the S4 lags far behind, with 15.4fps in the GFXBench test, 892ms in SunSpider and 588 in Peacekeeper. Suffice it to say, iOS 7 fairly flies along, and we’ve absolutely no complaint when it comes to gaming.
The iPhone 5s doesn’t keep up with the Joneses when it comes to the rest of its specification sheet, though. Although it now does at least support the full range of 4G frequency bands, it doesn’t have an infrared transmitter, where the HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4 both do, and it lacks both 802.11ac and NFC.
One feature unique to the iPhone 5s is the new motion co-processor. A low-power ARM Cortex-M3 part, its job is to collect data from the phone’s various sensors without having to engage the more power-hungry A7. Fitness apps should be the main beneficiary here, able to track movement and activity without placing too heavy a drain on battery life.
Display, battery life and more
Elsewhere, little has changed. The 640 x 1,136 IPS display is still superb, with its 326ppi pixel density delivering ultra-crisp text and graphics, and top-notch quality. We measured this iPhone at 515cd/m2 maximum brightness and a contrast ratio of 972:1. At its brightest, the screen is viewable outside on a sunny day, and presents colours that are natural, well balanced and don’t veer too much towards the cool or warm ends of the colour spectrum.
The iPhone 5s finds itself lagging behind when it comes to pure size, however. It seems silly to say it, but the 4in screen does feel awfully small compared to an HTC One or Samsung Galaxy S4, and this is most keenly felt when browsing websites and typing longer messages using the onscreen keyboard. The larger phones make it easier to read web pages without zooming and scrolling, and make it far easier to enter text quickly and accurately.
Despite the more powerful processor, though, battery life hasn’t suffered. Our tests, in which we run a number of core tasks while connected over 3G (an hour with the screen forced on, an hour of audio playback, 50MB of data download and a 30-minute phone call), the iPhone 5s retained 60% of its battery capacity after 24 hours. That’s the same result as both the Samsung Galaxy S4 and HTC One, although it’s worth remembering that the S4’s battery is user-accessible, so you can carry spares if you need to.
Elsewhere, we had no problems with call quality or dropped calls during the time of our test, and found the speakers perfectly loud enough for the occasional speakerphone session. It can’t match the two front-facing speakers on the HTC One for sheer output volume, though.
Thanks for the info!
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