iPhone 5 Review: Day 2 First Impressions
There’s an iphone 5 in my family (actually two). This meant that I got some demo time with it yesterday asI helped my family set them up. If I were to sum up the iphone 5 in one word, I would say “Zippy”.
The 4G and improved processor make the iphone 5 incredibly fast compared to past models. Web pages load in seconds, and apps are up instantly. CNN articles loaded in Safari quicker than I could count, and apps downloaded quickly enough that not much waiting was involved. This was surprising considering how much extra load must have been on the 4G network due to all the new iphones. The battery life appears substantially improved from the 4S (about as good as the 4 if not better) if you take into account the new, power hungry screen.
The design was another thing that thrilled me. White and black are actually substantially different in design unlike on previous models. For starters, Apple has moved away from the consistent white box, and now they offer black boxes for black iphones and white boxes for white iphones. Both phones offer that nice aluminum finish (in different colors of course), but the aluminum sides are darker on the black than on the white, to match the color profile. In my opinion, we’ll see less people destroying their phones because the aluminum back will be more durable than the previous glass back. And yes, it is incredibly thin and light. This was accurate.
Siri works perfectly well, and she did update me consistently on the score of the Yankee game, although she couldn’t tell me who was up. The new panorama feature worked as expected, although it wasn’t the best looking photo I’ve ever seen. Overall, the camera app is far better than it previously was though.
And that’s about it. It’s thinner, bigger, lighter, more durable, and faster. It’s harder, better, faster, stronger. Apple followed the song well. So I’d consider it a good buy. For an iphone 4S user, upgrading is overkill. For an iphone 4 user, it’s definitely much better, but you can probably hold out another generation. For anyone else, this is a great phone which I would highly recommend.
