Thursday 13 September 2012

Iphone 5 - Reinvention or Uninspiring

At this time of posting, it will be understood that many people would have read the review about the latest incarnation by Apple to introduce the new Iphone 5 to the public. The new Iphone 5 is priced from £529 (I would assumed that it will be the 16GB version) and it is £30 more expensive than the 16GB Iphone 4s last year although Apple have maintained that the price is the same for both Iphone 4s and 5.

I would not bore you guys with the specifications of the new Iphone 5 as you could click here to have a look at its specifications. The major difference between the outgoing Iphone 4s and Iphone 5 is the later sport a bigger 4" IPS Retina screen with a different design dock connector which Apple labelled it as "Lightning". I suppose Apple want to introduce a slimmer chasis by doing so. Apart from that, the heart of the Iphone 5 is a complete customed A6 cpu with quadcore gpu provided by PowerVR? It also come with 4G or LTE for many countries including the UK. The Iphone 5 will support dualband wifi and stereo wireless bluetooth. The chasis is now slimmer but taller and yet, lighter. The back camera is the same as installed on the Iphone 4s but slimmer. It will be pre-installed with iOS 6. The front camera has now being upgraded to support 720p recording and it comes with 16/32/64GB variant similar to the Iphone 4s.

Personally, I have nothing against Apple in respect of them introducing the Iphone 5. I find that the Iphone 5 is "innovative" but lacked "punch". First of all, existing dock connecters will have to use a separate adapter for the Iphone 5 so it will mean more money would have to be spent to use the Iphone 5. Secondly, the screen size is still quite small as compared to the Samsung Galaxy S3 and we do not know the battery size until it is being sold. I would presumed that the battery will be much bigger taking into account the LTE chip inside. I would not be surprised if the Iphone 5 will not be able to survive the durability test.

Apart from that, the 16GB variant cost £529 while the 32GB will be £599 and the 64GB will be priced at £699. If one needs 64GB, it will be better for him/her to get a SGS3 16GB and buy a 64GB SDXC memory card which the memory card will only cost around £50. Since the SGS3 16GB cost around £420, the total price for the phone and the memory card will sum up to £470 which is far from the asking price of the Iphone 5 at £699.

Last but not least, the iOS is well known to be a closed system and yet it is quite secured. However, taking into account the cheapest SIM free Iphone 5 will cost £529, it will most probably stop people from buying it out right but "chained" to a 24 months, 18 months or 12 months contract.

If you ask me whether I will change my mind in getting the Iphone 5 instead of continue using the SGS3, I will stick to the SGS3 as I will give the Iphone 5 a miss this time.

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