First Hand Touch on the new iPhone5

You better believe the title. Being such a geek, even if I am not agreeable to a company's business ways or the way they make their device, I still love to get my hands on new things. Yesterday was any normal working day in the office and suddenly my colleague started unwrapping something in his hands. I was looking at it and the first thing that hit man was OMG that is an iPhone 5. Don't believe me check this out....

That is the first look of a genuine iPhone 5 from the Apple company itself. First thing you will really notice about this phone is how light it is. Yea a lot of people have commented about it, however until you really feel it with your hands, you will never really notice how light it is. It is light but it still feels like a very well built device. It is not something like a Galaxy SII which is plastic and light and generally feels not that sturdy. The phone 5 was built to look good and even the edge of the glass has a very nice slanted shape to it.

Overall the phone is much thinner then the iPhone4. Amy was in the office and we did some comparison but forgot to snap some pictures. The lightning connector in my mind was long overdue and Apple should have done what other phone manufacturers did from the start which is to start with the smallest connector they could go with. If you look at the picture of the bottom of the phone with the lightning connector and the 3.5mm jack you can see what I mean by the glass has a slanted shape. Look at the edge of the glass where it meets the metal.

The rear of the phone is the standard iPhone look at feels very nice. It doesn't feel like the phone will slip out of your hand anytime soon. Much has been talked about the size of the screen and once playing with the iPhone5 I do believe in what Apple says. The width of the screen still allow for me to thumb the screen from left to the right. However the extra height and my short fingers do not allow me to go all the way to the top of the screen. 

The new notification of iOS6 is very much like that if Android and it looks very nice. However what is still disappointing is Apple has not seen the need to have "shortcut" buttons to say turn on/off data, turn on/off Wifi etc. It has been a standard on HTC Sense for a while and it has been standard in the Android platform since Ice Cream Sandwich. It took me close to 5 mins to menu dive to look to turn off the Data and after 10 min I gave up looking on up to turn off the GPS. This one thing that irritates me about the iOS where people say it is so easy to use but just to perform simple functions I need a manual.

The only so call new application that ios6 has brought along is the passbook which allows you to store boarding passes and tickets and coupons in a single app. I have nothing to test it with and I seriously doubt it will work any where other then in the US anyway. By the time it comes to Malaysia we would be saying hello to iPhone10.

Now I have no idea why Apple has decided to go with a nano sim when so far I would say the microsim is good enough. I am sure one day the telco operators would get fed up of Apple keep doing this thing because now telco operators have to stock 3 types of sims which to me is kinda stupid. 

Celcom doesn't support nano sim yet and my colleague almost went to Maxis. However I told him get the microsim from Celcom and lets see if we can do something about it. Took me about 15 minutes to cut the sim down to the right size and to my surprise it fits perfectly.

So we have a fully working iPhone on the Celcom network and I am sure my colleague's daughter is gonna be a very happy camper tonight as she is probably one of the few people in Malaysia to have an iPhone5. Now with all the pictures all done lets look at how the device performs.

I have been reading alot of news about the new A6 processor and it seems that it was design by hand instead of by a computer. This apparently means that it would perform much faster but it takes a longer time to design. From the start up time here it looks pretty dem fast. Again sorry no comparison can be made since we do not have any iPhone users in the office. I would say even with a 1Ghz dual core processor in the iPhone it seems really fast and zippy.

Much has been talking about the new map App from Apple and from my limited testing it is OK but it will take some getting use to. I like the hybrid map thing but it would be very confusing to use when you are driving and trying to navigate. I think it is a bit of a gimmick but hey those are the things that sells nowadays. Nothing much else to add about the map because there is very limited things I can do about it without going out in a drive with it.

Now comes to performance. Oh yea believe it the A6 processor is fast and I think in most circumstance it will hold its own to the Samsung Galaxy SIII and the HTC One X. I have read that in most benchmarks iPhone5 has beaten both the top of the line Android phones but I have yet to see one actual performance comparison such as when playing games and all that. I think those are more important and most manufactures nowadays are aware of the benchmark programs out there and tailor their software to score high but may not give real world performance.

What surprised me is the web browsing performance of the iPhone5. Apple have been touting their Ultra Wireless and how you can browse faster. Well in the video above you can see that is not the case. It was so slow that I could actually bring in my 2 year old HTC Desire in to the picture after maybe 30 seconds of allow the iPhone5 to load and my phone still outperformed it.

Many of you might say ah maybe it is on a different network blah blah blah. However Apple on their website side WiFi is faster too. So here you go a side by side comparison....

I used a neutral website which both phones have not gone to before so it is not cached. Yes it is the website of my company and many Apple people might be cursing me because they know I would check my company website often. However I just flashed a new Jelly Bean Rom into my phone which means it is completely wiped cleaned and it has never been to my company website before. In the final 20 seconds of the video it shows that both phones are running on WiFi and both on the same network and again the iPhone5 performed significantly slower then my HTC Desire. It even loaded it completely but the iPhone 5 never loaded it completely.

Last but not least is of course a comparison of the 8MP camera on the back....

I didn't have any other phone to compare it against so my poor HTC Desire was used and you can see the vast difference in quality. I purposely left the size as it is to see the difference between a 5MP and 8MP picture size. You can see the iPhone5 has superior colors and sharpness compared to the HTC Desire. I think in terms of camera the iPhone5 is pretty good but not sure how it compares to the Galaxy SIII and the HTC One X.

One thing I have to add is that it took me over 30 minutes to get 2 pictures out of the iPhone5 and it took me 10 minutes to transfer 17 photos from my phone and close to 300mb worth of videos from my other colleague's phone. I still do not understand why won't Apple allow people to transfer photos via bluetooth? It is something that I have taken using my own device and I am transferring it out to my own laptop as well. In the Android system, just turn on bluetooth or plug in a USB cable and you can transfer the photos out. However for the iPhone you need to send it via email and the stupid thing is you can only attach one photo per email or use iTunes. Come on Apple, you are the richest company in the world. You tout you devices to be the easiest to use among all the competitors. Why the heck is it so hard to transfer something that I own out of my own device?

I was told later that I could just plug in the cable and it would appear like a disk drive on my laptop. However I do not have the lightning connector and I will go and try it out with Amy's phone tonight.

I hope you all enjoyed reading this as much as I have playing with the new iPhone5. Hope you gets your soon.