So now that I’ve held, played with and experienced the new iPhone 5 from Apple, here are my initial thoughts. You’ve likely heard that the device is light, that can’t be stated enough. Having used an iPhone 4S as my personal device for a year, when I picked up the iPhone 5, I immediately had the reaction I typically get from opening a new Android device, in that I wanted to search the box for the battery. To think that the battery is already in this device is absolutely insane, it feels as light as a dummy phone found in many cellular retail stores. Upon booting the device up, I noticed how much faster the process actually was, it took about 30 seconds. I didn’t think the iPhone’s display—seeing how it was the same resolution—could be any better, but was I wrong. The images on the screen seem brighter, colors are more vibrant and because of the new “in-cell” display, images appear almost as if they are on the surface of the glass. When it comes to speed, it’s blazing. Screen transitions can be done with the lightest tough and show no signs of hiccups or lag, but even the iPhone 4S did that, but with the A6, it just feels snappier. I haven’t used maps yet, I’ll give it a shot when I leave for lunch, but everything else so far is nice. Because I grabbed a black version, I can’t speak for those who purchased the white model, that being said, when applications that haven’t been scaled up to take advantage of the new larger display are on screen, the black letterboxes above and below are so dark they blend right in with the black front glass, making the experience flawless.
What can I say that hasn’t already been said about the design, it’s something you have to hold in your hand to understand. To think that this device is thinner and lighter than the Galaxy S III and yet, is made of glass and metal and not plastic, is hard to comprehend. The phone feels amazing, while I know some of you prefer larger displays, I prefer comfort and the iPhone 5 just feels right in my hand.
Perhaps the one of best feature that people haven’t discussed—I’ll go more in depth in my official review—is how great restoring your device is with iCloud. Before I sold my iPhone 4S, I did a back up via iCloud. When I saw the small size of the backup, I was worried that all it did was save my settings and maybe my contacts. Boy, was I wrong. Upon the setup of the iPhone 5, I chose to restore from my iCloud backup and after about 5 minutes, the device rebooted and came up with my old wallpaper and all the apps that I had previously, where on my screen, on every panel, only they were downloading, meaning it didn’t save the actual apps to my iCloud, thus saving space. It instead stored the list and location of the apps I had and immediately started to download them. On top of that, it saved my text messages, call list, contacts, system settings and even my camera roll and photo stream were all there. I didn’t have to do anything, other than update apps that have new updates for iOS 6 or the new iPhone 5. The process was simple and painless.
Overall, I’m very impressed with the iPhone 5, it feels great, it looks great and was a breeze to set up. Now I’ll take the next two days testing it out, running speed tests and more. So check back for my official review.