iPhone 5: Longer, Leaner, Lighter and Faster… But Is It Enough To Upgrade?

Frank Gruber Sep 12, 2012 Tweet

Today is the day the tech-geek community has been waiting for – ever since the much needed stop -gap iPhone 4S launched in October of last year. The iPhone 5 is finally here.  The iPhone 5 is longer, leaner, lighter and faster than its predecessors. I don’t want to go into all the details because you can find them all online at Apple, but it sounds like every aspect of the phone has been improved.

Here are the essentials:

• The iPhone 5 sports a 4 inch screen which allows for another row of app icons to show while also giving you more room to work on emails, play games and watch videos. It has an 1136 x 640 screen resolution and 16:9 aspect ratio.
• The iPhone 5 is leaner with it’s thinner width at 7.6 mm or 18 percent thinner than before.
• The iPhone 5 is lighter – 112 grams which is 20 percent lighter.
• The iPhone 5 is faster with a new A6 chip that enables faster processing and mobile connection speeds.
• The iPhone 5 has a better camera both main and front facing.
• The iPhone 5 will use a better operating system – iOS 6.
• The iPhone 5 will have new “lightning” connector that is slimmer than the old Apple connector.

The main camera is a lot better with 40% faster photo capture and panorama photo capabilities. If you are like me, this is a huge deal as I snap thousands of photos a year and sometimes the photo capture can hang and you miss a shot. The front camera is also improved and is now better quality (720p) and you will be able to use it to do Facetime over cellular networks (previously you could only do Facetime over wifi). This improves what I always felt was a major drawback of Facetime and kept me from using it more regularly.

Along with the new phone, there was a great demo of the new operating system, iOS 6.

“iOS 6 is the most advanced OS for any phone. And it powers the iPhone 5.”

The iOS 6 update is extremely important for anyone developing apps for the iPhone. For business travel or people on the go, Apple has added a new feature called Passport that allows you to access boarding passes and tickets more quickly and from the lockscreen. There are a number of other improvements that iOS 6 will bring- too many to cover in this post.

With the iPhone 5 announcement the iPhone 3GS is gone and now the Apple lineup is just the iPhone 4, 4s and 5. The iPhone 5 starts at $199 for 16GB, $299 for 32GB and $399 for 64GB. The phone will be available for pre-order on September 14th and shipped on September 21st. If you are not currently an iPhone user, you can get your feet wet with a basic 8GB iPhone 4 for free with a contract.

The iPhone has been the best-selling smartphone in the world, and there are likely to be many questions about the iPhone 5 and today’s Apple announcements. Let us know your questions in the comments and our team of reporters will try to answer some of them in this post.

Also please take our poll, tell us… Are the iPhone 5 improvements enough to make you want to upgrade?