Apple’s favorite reviewers, who have had almost a week to play with the new iPhone 5, are offering generally positive reviews of the new smartphone, praising its thinner, lighter form factor, support for LTE networks and the new 4-inch Retina display.
One criticism: the new Lightning connector, which will force current iPhone users who want to keep using their accessories to buy an adapter plug. Says David Pogue of the New York Times, “Apple sells an adapter plug for $30 (or $40 with an eight-inch cable “tail”). If you have a few accessories, you could easily pay $150 in adapters for a $200 phone. That’s not just a slap in the face to loyal customers — it’s a jab in the eye.”
The iPhone 5 goes on sale Sept. 21 in the U.S. Apple said this week that customers pre-ordered more than 2 million units and that demand has already outstripped its supply.
Here are excerpts from the reviews:
Walt Mossberg, Wall Street Journal: ”The world’s most popular smartphone becomes significantly faster, thinner and lighter this week, while gaining a larger, 4-inch screen—all without giving up battery life, comfort in the hand and high-quality construction…
In increasing the iPhone’s screen size, Apple took a different approach than competitors. It kept the same side-to-side width, yet added height to grow the screen from its previous 3.5-inch size. For those who prefer the gargantuan screens on some other phones, like the 4.8-inch display on Samsung’s Galaxy S III, the iPhone 5′s screen likely won’t suffice. These competing big screens are typically both taller and wider.
However, I found the new iPhone screen much easier to hold and manipulate than its larger rivals and preferred it. In my view, Apple’s approach makes the phone far more comfortable to use, especially one-handed. It’s easier to carry in a pocket or purse and more natural-looking when held up to your face for a call…
While this new model isn’t a radical redesign, it offers a much bigger change than the current iPhone 4S did when it was launched last year. The minute you pick the iPhone 5 up you notice it’s much lighter—20% lighter, in fact. It’s so much lighter that you wonder if it’s a demonstration mock-up, not the real thing.
Yet unlike many competitors, this isn’t a plastic, insubstantial-feeling device. Although Apple claims it’s the world’s thinnest smartphone—18% thinner than the prior model—the iPhone 5 retains Apple’s trademark, solid-feeling, metal construction, with an aluminum back this time, instead of a glass back. Like many Apple products, it’s gorgeous.”
David Pogue, New York Times: ”At 0.3 inch, the phone is thinner than before, startlingly so — the thinnest in the world, Apple says. It’s also lighter, just under four ounces; it disappears completely in your pocket. This iPhone is so light, tall and flat, it’s well on its way to becoming a bookmark.
Should you get the new iPhone, when the best Windows Phone and Android phones offer similarly impressive speed, beauty and features? The iPhone 5 does nothing to change the pros and cons in that discussion. Windows Phones offer brilliant design, but lag badly in apps and accessories.
Android phones shine in choice: you can get a huge screen, for example, a memory-card slot or N.F.C. chips (near-field communication — you can exchange files with other N.F.C. phones, or buy things in certain stores, with a tap). But Android is, on the whole, buggier, more chaotic and more fragmented — you can’t always upgrade your phone’s software when there’s a new version.
IPhones don’t offer as much choice or customization. But they’re more polished and consistently designed, with a heavily regulated but better stocked app catalog. They offer Siri voice control and the best music/movie/TV store, and the phone’s size and weight have boiled away to almost nothing…
It’s just too bad about that connector change. Doesn’t Apple worry about losing customer loyalty and sales? Actually, Apple has a long history of killing off technologies, inconveniently and expensively, that the public had come to love — even those that Apple had originally developed and promoted. Somehow, life goes on, and Apple gets even bigger.
So if you wanted to conclude your term paper by projecting the new connector’s impact on the iPhone’s popularity, you’d be smart to write, “very little (sigh).” When you really think about it, we’ve all taken this class before.”
Ed Baig, USA Today: ”The iPhone 5 is a winner that should keep Apple at the front of the smartphone pack. But choosing iPhone 5 vs. a top-of-the line Android alternative isn’t a cut-and-dried decision, especially if you’re partial to a jumbo display, such as the one on the big, bold and beautiful Samsung Galaxy S III, an Android rival for which I’ve had high praise.
The move to 4 inches feels right for the iPhone, though it looks like a dwarf side-by-side with the 4.8-inch display on the Samsung Galaxy S III, arguably the best of the Android breed. I was able to display more than four extra paragraphs reading the same newspaper article on the Samsung as opposed to the iPhone 5. On the other hand, the iPhone screen appears sharper and brighter, and the phone is easier to carry.
Samsung is countering with its own ad campaign: “The Next Big Thing Is Already Here.” But Samsung’s Big Thing is taller, wider and more than 0.7-ounces heavier than iPhone 5, though only a whisker thicker…
People have always had lofty expectations for the iPhone 5, especially as the competition stiffens. In delivering a fast, attractive, LTE-capable and larger-screen handset, Apple has met those expectations with a gem.”
Harry McCracken, Time. ”The iPhone 5 features some upgrades which, though not groundbreaking in the least, are welcome, like its slightly-larger screen and zippy 4G LTE broadband. It sports an improved version of what was already the single best camera in phonedom. It makes Siri smarter. In short, it’s the most polished version yet of what was already easily the most polished phone on the market…
The new earbuds which come with the iPhone are called EarPods and look a bit like two tiny hairdryers; Apple says that the unusual shape is designed for maximum comfort and sound quality with the highest percentage of human ears. Unlike the old-style earbuds, they don’t make my ears feel like I’ve stuffed a couple of bumblebees into them. And for bundled headphones, they sound good…
It’s also worth remembering that you can buy an Apple mobile device with the expectation that future software updates will make it better over time. Apple will deliver iOS 6 as a free download on Wednesday, giving owners of all recent iPhones, iPod Touches and iPads an upgrade that’s nearly as much fun as a new phone. Android users, by contrast, often have to wait — and wait and wait — for upgrades, if they ever arrive at all.
The bottom line, in case it isn’t clear already: The iPhone 5 is one terrific smartphone. Ignore the naysayers — even without any awesome technological breakthroughs, it’s a sizable improvement on the iPhone 4S. For many upgraders, LTE alone will be worth the price of admission.”
Jon Gruber, Daring Fireball. “The iPhone 5 is really nice. It feels great, looks great, has the best display I’ve seen at any size, runs noticeably faster, networks noticeably faster, is way thinner and lighter than any of its predecessors, takes better photos, and, in my six days of testing, gets totally decent iPhone-4S-level battery life.
But you don’t even have to turn it on to see how nice it is. Just hold it. You really have to. Apple boasted during last week’s event that they now measure the precision of the iPhone 5 assembly in microns. A micron is one-millionth of a meter…
And so thus the meta story surrounding the iPhone 5 is the same as that of the iPhone 4S a year ago: a gaping chasm between consumers so excited to buy it that they stay up until (or wake up in) the middle of the night to pre-order it, and on the other side, a collective yawn from the gadget and tech press. That story a year ago was lost amid the tributes to Steve Jobs, who died the day after the 4S was unveiled.2 If anything, that chasm is growing. The collective yawn from the tech press was louder this year; the enthusiasm from consumers is stronger.
Niceness is my explanation. The bored-by-the-iPhone tech press/industry experts surely value niceness, but they do not hold it in the same top-tier regard that Apple does. They are not equipped to devote an amount of attention to niceness commensurate with the amount of effort Apple puts into it. Apple can speak of micron-level precision and the computer-aided selection of the best-fitting of 725 identical-to-the-naked-eye components, but there is no benchmark, no tech spec, to measure nice. But you can feel it.
And that is what resonates with millions of people around the world.”
Rich Jaroslovsky, Bloomberg. “One of Apple’s under-appreciated abilities is its sense of timing. It often isn’t first with new technologies, waiting until it can bring something special and Apple-like to the table. With the iPhone 5, the most obvious something-special is how fast it is and how long it runs at those speeds.
The new model is the first iPhone to run on the new 4G LTE networks being rolled out by carriers. These networks aren’t everywhere: Of the three major U.S. carriers offering the iPhone, Verizon Wireless has by far the broadest coverage, with AT&T trailing andSprint just getting started.
But if they’re in your area, you’ll find the iPhone 5 roaringly fast — far zippier than any previous iPhone at downloading Web pages, uploading photos, installing apps and doing pretty much anything that requires an Internet connection. My AT&T test unit routinely registered download speeds 5 to 20 times faster than a 4S running over the slower network that AT&T confusingly labels “4G.”
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