On September 12th, the world held its breath. Apple, now the world’s most valuable company, was about to announce the next version of their trademark product. The iPhone 5, a phone with one delay and two years of tweaking, was unveiled with rave reviews from critics and fans alike.
The taller 4-inch screen provides a better web-browsing experience, while the phone itself becomes the thinnest iPhone ever created. The already great camera gets an upgrade and is now 8 mega pixels. It puts another apple shaped hole in the photo industries coffin.
But some of best features on the phone might be some of the smallest. The new Lightning Connector charges with great speed. The new iPhone will also stay charged longer and now, with 4G LTE capability, it has lightning fast data service, more than doubling the transfer speed up to 100 mbps (megabytes per second).
Still, no iPhone would be complete without its technology companion, Siri, who gets full integration into the new phone, as does the Facebook account. Siri can now launch apps, write texts, and even check the Cardinal’s game score. Facebook now allows you to post those pictures you wanted to but didn’t because of the slow upload times and the hassle it took.
While the phone came out on Friday September 21st, students have been awaiting it for months.
“I have been waiting for more space on my phone, and the iPhone 5 delivers,” said Hunter Hughes, senior.
Hughes is just one of many who have been waiting for up to two and a half years to toss the old models for this rumor fueled version of Apple’s top selling mobile device. In fact, Apple reported on September 18th that, in the first four days, 3 million iPhones had been pre-ordered, shattering the record sales of 1 million brought on by the iPhone 4S. As of October 8th, 5.8 million iPhone 5s had been sold in just three weeks.
In a world where phones become last year’s news faster than you can learn how to use them, some people think that this model of the phone is a good place to jump on the iPhone bandwagon.
“I don’t have one and it would be nice to experience what everyone else. The iPhone 5 seems like a great time to get in on phone,” said Robert Loaney, junior.
The word around town has been that this will be the reason the phone will become a record seller.
One of the most controversial changes in the phone is the screen size that had been present since the first iPhone launch in 2007. The screen got a little taller, and went from 3.5 inches to 4 inches. The change might sound small in size, but in a market where screen size can make or break a launch, it was key for Apple. The bigger screen also allows Apple to make watching movies and television shows a perfect experience because of the screen’s 16:9 ratio.
“I love the bigger screen,” said Cole Hoskins, junior.
But others have called the screen too much of a good thing. While most Android phones have 4+ inch screens, loyal users liked the small sleekness of the old iPhone models.
While the reviews of the new phone have been overwhelmingly positive, the maps app has been smashed repeatedly for having missing streets and misplaced markers for some extremely popluar attractions like the Golden Gate Bridge.
But some students at WCA will not be getting in on the iPhone phenomenon for other reasons.
“I don’t like how connected it make you feel. Sometimes it feels good not to be,” said Brooke Yeager, senior.
While she thinks that being so overly connected is a turn off, she did say that she would enjoy the Talk to Text feature which allows you to defer calls with a text.
“I really don’t think that the new one is enough of a departure style-wise to get a new one right now,” said Charlie Maurer, junior.
Apple was initially criticized for not departing as much from the iPhone 4, but Apple seems to completely redesign the phone every 4 years, as we saw with the iPhone and the iPhone 3G, which were almost identical in look.
While the iPhone 5 might not be the great departure that some newcomers craved, the phone has done what Apple consistently does best. While some phones are better at one thing, they made a phone that is brilliant across the entire board.
They also continue to fulfill Steve Jobs’ vision for apple, which was to know what we wanted before even we did. He seemed to know exactly what to say and what to squeeze in to make us go even crazier over what Time Magazine called the Invention Of The Decade. While Apple still is a Steve Jobs company, it will be interesting to see what Apple will look like in a few years, when all of Jobs’ plans have run out and we see the real post-Steve Jobs iPhone.
But for now, in the Apple-Android War, a war that should be called the iPhone-Galaxy War, it would seem that the best just keeps getting better and gap between Apple and the rest of the market might have just got a little bit bigger.
