The good: The iPhone 5S
delivers an improved camera, a nifty fingerprint sensor, and a next-gen
CPU and motion-tracking chip. Apple throws in the iWork app suite for
free. iOS 7 adds some nice step-ups, too, including AirDrop file
transfers and the Android-like Control Center.
The bad: External
design is identical to that of the iPhone 5, including a 4-inch screen
that looks downright tiny next to Android competitors. For now, the
fingerprint sensor only works with Apple apps. The 64-bit A7 processor
and M7 motion-tracking chip don't have killer apps yet. iOS 7
differences are potentially jarring for longtime iPhone users.
The bottom line: The iPhone 5S is not a required upgrade, but it's easily the fastest and most advanced Apple smartphone to date
I'm tempted to call the iPhone 5S the iPhone 5P, for "potential."
This is Apple's half-step year, a rebuilding year. It's telegraphed by
the name itself: adding an "S" versus giving the phone a whole new name.
The 5S introduces technologies that could transform the future of iOS
as a computing platform, and maybe pave the way for future products in
2014. But it doesn't manifest these changes right off the bat. Its
promises haven't come to fruition yet.
Last year's
iPhone 5
was the best iPhone we'd ever seen. It met nearly all our wishes and
expectations. It added tons of new features. It had LTE. What did Apple
do this year as an encore? It added...a few new improvements. Enter the
iPhone 5S, which along with the
iPhone 5C
mark the first time Apple's delivered two new iPhones in one year. But
the 5C is really the iPhone 5 in colored plastic. There's really only
one new iPhone, and that's the 5S.
We
wanted a bigger screen,
an improved camera, and better battery life. Apple gave us a
fingerprint sensor, an improved camera, and a faster processor. Faster
is better, especially when battery life doesn't suffer, but the 5S
doesn't feel like a shocking new product.
Apple does this every other year with iPhones -- see the
iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4S. It's a common occurrence in iPads and
MacBooks, too: take a familiar form, and repeat. But, in a phone
landscape dominated by rapid change, it can feel frustrating, even for a
product we loved just 12 months ago. Even
iOS 7,
Apple's graphically overhauled operating system, feels different but
not really all that shocking. Even the new colors -- gold and "space
gray" -- are subtler than you realize.
That doesn't mean there
aren't changes, but many of them seem like roadwork for the future; a
cleverly ingenious under-the-home-button fingerprint sensor, a clearly
better camera, majorly upgraded graphics, a motion-tracking M7
coprocessor, and a new A7 processor capable of 64-bit computing are a
lot of under-the-hood tweaks. But, after a week of using the iPhone 5S,
it's hard to find situations that currently take advantage of these
features, except for the fingerprint sensor and camera.
Check
back in two months; after new apps emerge, maybe the iPhone 5S will
start seeming like a truly new iPhone. But, for now, it's more of
refined improvement. The iPhone 5 has gotten better. How much better
depends on how fast apps and services can take advantage of the
features...or whether we'll be waiting until iOS 8 to see them truly
take shape.
Editors' note:
Updated September 20, 2013, with expanded hands-on gaming section,
updated charts, and new photos. We will continue to update this review
in the coming days, based on subsequent testing. Ratings should be
considered tentative, and may evolve as testing continues.
Design: Take the iPhone 5, and add gold (or 'space gray') The
iPhone 5 was a somewhat subtle but completely thorough redesign of the
iPhone, from screen size to headphone placement. It introduced an
aluminum frame, a thinner and lighter build, and came in two colors.
The 5S is a carbon copy, with some new color
variations. You can get last year's white/silver color, or "space gray,"
which matches black glass and a darker gray anodized aluminum. And,
yes, there's gold. But it's not like a prop from Liberace's home: it's
mellow gold, more a champagne, or a light bronze. Paired with white
glass on the back and front, you might have a hard time noticing the
gold in the wild unless it was held in the sun. Of the three colors, I
liked gray the best: the metal tones might do a better job hiding
scratches, too, a problem I saw pop up on last year's all-black iPhone
5.
iPhone 5 and 5S. Can you tell the difference?
A year later, the iPhone 5's design still feels sleek
and high-end in the 5S, great in the hand, and more compact than most
competitor phones. But, it also has a smaller screen (4 inches) than
most of its Android cousins. I love using a more compact phone, but
competitors have found a way to make larger-screened 4.7-inch phones
with excellent feel, like the
Moto X,
which has nearly edge-to-edge screen across its face. The iPhone 5S has
a lot more bezel framing the display, and I couldn't help wondering if
that screen couldn't be just a bit bigger.
A larger screen would have really helped this year: not
because the competition has it, but because Apple's newest features and
apps would put it to good use. I found editing and appreciating the
improved photos and video recording, and even playing games, to be
challenging; the better that graphics and camera quality get, the more
you need a larger screen to appreciate them.
Configurations There's
no 128GB iPhone this year; you'll have to once again pick between 16GB,
32GB, and 64GB, at the same $199/$299/$399 prices. In the US, Sprint,
AT&T, and Verizon are the three carriers to offer the iPhone 5S
under contract; T-Mobile sells the iPhone 5S in an unlocked,
contract-free version that costs $649 for 16GB, $749 for 32GB, and $849
for 64GB.
All versions come with the same A7 processor.
Touch ID: The party-trick tech on the 5S
See that little home button down there? It doesn't have a square on
it anymore. It's also flat and recessed, not concave. That's practically
the only outward-facing indication the iPhone 5S offers to the world,
but lurking under the button is the most interesting piece of iPhone
tech in quite some time. Unfortunately, it doesn't do as much right now
as I wish it could.
"Touch ID" is Apple's fingerprint sensor, a
secret sauce of clever scanning technology that amounts to a home button
that's now both capacitive and clickable. The fact it does both can be a
little disorienting at first, but the clicking is what the home button
normally does, while gently touching the sensor activates the
fingerprint scan.
Touch ID's simple round button works on a simple press,
versus a "swipe" gesture on a lot of previous fingerprint readers. The
scanning technology, when it registers your fingerprint, encourages you
to press from a variety of angles, so your fingerprint can be read even
on its side or on an edge. It's fast: a simple click on the button and
the phone unlocks, the scan happening invisibly. Most people won't even
know it scanned them, but try another finger and you'll see that it
worked.
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A few previous smartphones have added fingerprint sensors before, like the
Motorola Atrix,
but those were more awkward bars that needed finger-swiping. The Touch
ID-enabled home button feels invisible; it works with a tap, can
recognize your finger from many angles, and feels like it has less of a
fail rate than fingerprint sensors I've used on laptops. It's impressive
tech. It worked on all my fingers, and even my toe (I was curious).
Its
only limitation, really, is how little Apple has employed Touch ID into
the iPhone experience at the moment. Scanning your finger takes the
place of entering a passcode in most instances, or entering a password
every time you purchase something from the App Store or iTunes. But,
that's all Touch ID does for now: it doesn't remember your other
passwords on various cloud services, or link to your credit card, or pay
for movie tickets via Fandango.
In fact, you'd better remember
whatever passcode you used to lock your phone, because Touch ID isn't a
pure replacement. If you restart your iPhone, or turn it off and on, or
don't use it for 48 hours, it'll ask for your passcode again before
allowing fingerprint recognition. That's potentially useful as an extra
deterrent for would-be fingerprint thieves, but it proved a little
quirky over a week of use. I never knew when the 5S might insist I enter
my passcode again.
Worried about a kid pressing his finger down over and
over and erasing your phone's memory? Never fear. Touch ID cleverly
defaults to asking for a passcode after three fingerprint attempts, and
after five bad tries, it requires it. Then you still have 10 passcode
attempts before any "erase contents after 10 passcode failures" setting
you've possibly enabled kicks in.
How much time does it save? A
little, especially since this process skips the "swipe to unlock"
gesture. You'll also save a few seconds over entering a passcode. But,
in terms of convenience, I really only appreciated it during the day, in
those little moments when I quickly needed to hop on my phone.
I
have a bigger dream for Touch ID, of its fingerprint scan acting as a
password replacement for third-party apps or even a way to make
payments, or check in to flights. It could be a mobile wallet killer
app, and a companion to Apple's somewhat dormant PassBook app that
launched with iOS 6. But those extra features won't be coming anytime
soon. Apple currently intends Touch ID and your fingerprint -- which
gets encrypted as mathematical data, according to Apple, not an image --
to stay on the A7 chip of the iPhone 5S, out of reach of third-party
apps or cloud services. That could be good for added security, but it
means Touch ID isn't a magic remember-every-password savior or credit
card replacement yet.
That being said, I expect Touch ID to make
its way onto every Apple device: iPads next, and eventually Macs. Why
not? It's easy to use.
Camera Touch ID may be getting all the
headlines lately, but the iPhone 5S' improved camera is probably its
biggest selling point. Cameras are no longer afterthoughts on
smartphones: they're becoming the most important feature, for many, as
they slowly but surely replace point-and-shoot cameras.
If you're
getting a new iPhone for its camera, get the 5S. A suite of new and
useful upgrades help make the already-good iPhone 5 camera into
something even better...but, in a landscape riddled with increasingly
impressive phone cameras, the iPhone stands out a little less than
before.
Unlike many megapixel-packing smartphones (41-megapixel
Lumia 1020,
I'm looking at you), the iPhone 5S camera stays at 8 megapixels, the
same on paper as last year and even the year before. The sensor, as
Apple will proclaim, however, is 15 percent larger: the pixels are
physically bigger (1.5 microns), even if there are the same number of
them. The camera's aperture is larger (f/2.2). All of these elements add
up to better low-light exposure.
Newer A7-driven processing also enables true burst-mode
shooting: hold down the shutter button and you'll snag as many shots as
you desire. The iPhone 5 could take multiple shots with quick taps, but
the iPhone 5S can capture rapid-motion activities like sports events
(or, in my household, random baby tricks). Instead of spamming your
Camera Roll with identical-looking images, the new iOS 7 camera app
cleverly bundles them in a subfolder, and even autopicks what it
considers the best shots. This decision is based on image crispness and
other factors; sometimes it's on the money, but I also saw it pick a
blurry image of my 7-month-old over a sullen but crisp side profile. You
can pick your own favorites easily, and delete the rest at the touch of
a button.
Nice frog.
I took a bunch of shots in a ton of conditions, from
indoor photos in a zoo's reptile house to still-lifes of flowers and
colorful kitchen accessories. Close-up photos show off pretty incredible
detail and a shallower depth-of-field effect, which feels more
"SLR-like." See this rug picture, for instance.
Close-up of fabric, coming right up.
Kid photos in lower light conditions were less blurry
when magnified. Blurriness is a common problem I've seen on many of my
iPhone 5 photos taken in lower light that look good enough on-phone, but
don't hold up quite as well via Apple TV on a 59-inch display. These 5S
pictures looked a lot better, and more consistently so.
Local garden photo
Apple credits this to a new image signal processor
(ISP) on the iPhone 5S' A7 processor. It does result in quicker
autofocus, faster snapshots, and less blur all around. Considering how
shaky the average person's hand is when taking casual phone shots, it's a
necessary improvement.
Apple has made a big change to the built-in LED flash,
too, doubling its size and creating an intelligent "True Tone" flash
that senses the photo environment and serves up the appropriate flash
tone from separate white and amber LEDs.
It's a splashy endeavor,
but the results do look significantly better, and warmer, than the
iPhone 5's flash pics. I avoid flash on my smartphone whenever humanly
possible, but this year's improvements may have changed my opinion.
The 1080p video recording also gains a little more digital
stabilization, 3x digital zoom thanks to iOS 7, and there's a new Slo-Mo
recording mode, which is separately toggled in the camera app. The
iPhone records 720p video at 120 frames per second, and applies the
slow-motion effect afterward, playing at 30 frames per second
