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. Even
iOS 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.
Editors' note: Updated September 20, 2013, with expanded hands-on gaming section, updated charts, and new photos. We will continue to update this review in the coming days, based on subsequent testing. Ratings should be considered tentative, and may evolve as testing continues.
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.
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A few previous smartphones have added fingerprint sensors before, like the
Motorola Atrix, but those were more awkward bars that needed finger-swiping. The Touch ID-enabled home button feels invisible; it works with a tap, can recognize your finger from many angles, and feels like it has less of a fail rate than fingerprint sensors I've used on laptops. It's impressive tech. It worked on all my fingers, and even my toe (I was curious).
Its only limitation, really, is how little Apple has employed Touch ID into the iPhone experience at the moment. Scanning your finger takes the place of entering a passcode in most instances, or entering a password every time you purchase something from the App Store or iTunes. But, that's all Touch ID does for now: it doesn't remember your other passwords on various cloud services, or link to your credit card, or pay for movie tickets via Fandango.
In fact, you'd better remember whatever passcode you used to lock your phone, because Touch ID isn't a pure replacement. If you restart your iPhone, or turn it off and on, or don't use it for 48 hours, it'll ask for your passcode again before allowing fingerprint recognition. That's potentially useful as an extra deterrent for would-be fingerprint thieves, but it proved a little quirky over a week of use. I never knew when the 5S might insist I enter my passcode again.
