Now that all the fuss over the new iPhone5 has calmed down a bit, it is time to take a look at the iPhone5. Okay, so what fuss was there amongst anybody other than the die-hard Apple fans who would buy any iPhone5 without considering whether or not it was carved out of a pile of petrified rhino bile? Well of course there was the media crowd jumping up and down in excitement at the prospect of an expenses paid trip to somewhere exotic.
But not many others.
It isn’t as if the iPhone5 were a bad phone; when you come down to it, it is a sensible upgrade from the iPhone4S. The key new features are :-
- Most “exciting” of all (which is itself a bad sign) is the new dock connector which effectively makes all previous iPhone add-ons redundant. Understandably this has annoyed many people, but it had to be done sooner or later. After all the old connector was nearly 10 years old which is positively geriatric in the technology world.
- The processor was a little bit faster, and there is a little bit more memory.
- The screen is “bigger” … or rather taller. Nice enough I suppose, although it is hardly a Galaxy SIII or a Galaxy Note (1 or 2).
- Apple have realised that there are a few people outside North America who might want to use 4G network speeds, and so their LTE support covers more frequency bands. Although despite having three variants of the iPhone5 which cover different frequency bands, they still cannot offer LTE in all markets. And of course having three different phones not only makes manufacturing more costly, but prevents customers roaming so easily as they could do with the iPhone4S.
- The new phone is thinner and lighter than the old iPhones, although those who have encountered problems with the aluminium case getting scratched may prefer the old weight of the stainless steel case which was more robust in this sense.
- And of course the iPhone5 now uses the even fiddlier nano-SIM.
Ignoring the software side of things, this all looks a little depressing. All very sensible, but one person’s sensible is another person’s resting upon your laurels. And if you keep that up, sooner or later someone comes along and tips you into a muddy ditch.
Just ask Nokia.