AppleiPhone 5s review

                         
FINAL RATING
   
   

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. EveniOS 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.

 

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.

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.

You can readjust the start and stop points of slow motion with your fingers, much like editing a video clip. It looks great, but the slowed-down footage retains the audio track. You could always edit over it in iMovie (which is a free app, now, anyway). This type of ultrafast recording could earn the iPhone 5S a spot on a skateboarder's helmet or a skydiver's gear in place of the popular GoPro camera.

Now, how different is all of this from competing high-end phones boasting better cameras? The iPhone 5S suffers on physical megapixel count, but its speed/quality ratio are hard to beat. Adding slow-motion recording is gimmicky but works really well, and the improved flash technology is nice to have. But, overall, it's the extra speed and hardware-software-processor integration on the iPhone 5S that produced the best results. The camera is really the iPhone 5S' biggest improvement and feature, even without added megapixels...but it doesn't feel like as dramatic a leap as last year's iPhone 5's camera.

A7 processor: A beast on paper
We're in a pretty great time for mobile phone processors. Much like laptops and PCs a few years ago, impressive year-over-year gains in speed are becoming the norm. The iPhone 5 was more than twice as fast as the iPhone 4S, and true to Apple's claims based on every benchmark we could find, the iPhone 5S and its new A7 processor seem at least twice as fast as the 5 and its A6.

3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited

iPhone 5S (AT&T)

13,858

Motorola Moto X (AT&T)

10,694

Samsung Galaxy S4 (Sprint)

10,526

HTC One (Sprint)

10,369

iPhone 5C (AT&T)

5,691

iPhone 5 (Sprint)

5,688

Note:

(Longer bars indicate better performance)

Linpack Multithread (MFLOPS)

iPhone 5S (AT&T)

1,634.39

HTC One (Sprint)

648.718

Samsung Galaxy S4 (Sprint)

636.478

iPhone 5C (AT&T)

583.87

iPhone 5 (Sprint)

493.23

Motorola Moto X (AT&T)

293.844

Note:

(Longer bars indicate better performance)

Sun Spyder 1.0.1 (ms)

HTC One (Sprint)

1,813.8

Samsung Galaxy S4 (Sprint)

1,135.4

Motorola Moto X (AT&T)

1,049.1

iPhone 5C (AT&T)

720.5

iPhone 5 (Sprint)

702.1

iPhone 5S (AT&T)

416.6

Note:

(Shorter bars indicate better performance)

Geekbench 3

iPhone 5S (AT&T)

2561.8

1412.2

Motorola Moto X (AT&T)

1,964

627

Samsung Galaxy S4 (Sprint)

1,874

686

iPhone 5 (Sprint)

1,296

721

iPhone 5C (AT&T)

1,275.8

707.6

HTC One (Sprint)

1028

644

Legend:

Multicore

Single-core

Note:

(Longer bars indicate better performance)

Numbers are great, but what does speed really mean in a phone? Sometimes it's hard to appreciate. Boot times aren't all that much faster between the iPhone 5S, iPhone 5C, and iPhone 5 -- 26.3 seconds for the 5S, and 31.7 for the 5C (and anyway, how many times do we even boot our phones?). Games and applications load up quickly and play smoothly, but the iPhone 5 felt the same way last year, and the iPhone 5C still feels pretty fast for everyday phone tasks.

The types of games and applications that can really take advantage of the iPhone 5S and its faster, more graphics-rich A7 processor aren't here yet at the time of this review, but expect them soon. I'm just sensing, perhaps, that there will be a limit as to how much pop you'll truly notice on a 4-inch display.