After waiting in line to buy and spending seven days with the iPhone 5, living with it, owning it, I can say confidently that it's the best smartphone you can buy. The whiners, the babies, the cranky zealots who think it's boring, or disappointing, or not different enough? They don't understand. The iPhone has finally grown up. There's nothing boring about it.
Just to be clear, this isn't some corporate review unit we're talking aboutâ€"we waited outside at the hellacious crack of dawn in a hell-pit shopping mall alongside people who were willing to actually hit each other for a new phone. We battled line-cutters and a shifty AT&T retail manager. I wasn't due for a new contract, so I ponied up extra money for a semi-subsidized handset I was truthfully only buying because I shattered my last one.
I say this both because we got this phone like most people did, and because it was a gigantic pain in the ass. I had every reason to resent the iPhone 5. And yet...
What's the big deal?
Are you kidding me? We spend the better part of every single year speculating, exhaustively, over how the next iPhone will be different. The screen! The data! The body! What does this little circuit mean? Are these photos real?! Weâ€"you and I, all togetherâ€"have been caring about this thing since far before any Chinese laborer woke up at dawn to begin sifting through its parts. And it's not just us tech writers and readers who have a vested interest; the iPhone is mainstream to the tune of as many as six million handsets sold every single month. Over five million people have already bought this one.
As much as that's an indictment of our society, iPhone releases are small cultural events on their own. There's no point in trying to deny that. This phone will set the phone chatter until the next iPhone comes out, and that one until the next. And so on.
We care because we love caring, but we also care because we should: Apple only builds one phone a year, instead of the scattershot approach of the competition. There are tens of thousands of prom queensâ€"there's only one Miss America. And so the iPhone has been the standard-bearer of all Smartphonedom for half a decade: the entire industry looks to itâ€"sometimes a little too closely.
The iPhone hasn't been the only interesting or worthwhile phone for some time nowâ€"the Galaxy III and the Lumia 920 and the HTC One X all have a hint of gloryâ€"but there's no doubt it's the most venerable by a longshot. Apple's is the It Phone, and you or someone you know is going to buy one. And if you do, there's good news: It won't just be because you're in thrall to the hype machine.
Yes, it's pretty, and your friends will notice.
If the public is at all underwhelmed by the iPhone 5's arrival, it's expressed by the threadbare refrain, It doesn't look different enough, as if the New iPhone should have been hexagonal, a foot wide, or printed on the front of a graham cracker. At first blush it's an elongated iPhone 4S. But that first blush can go to hell. After just a day or two with the iPhone 5, actually using it instead of staring at pictures on the Internet, I could appreciate it for what it is: an aluminum jewel.
Every day I came to appreciate it more than the day before, the kind of gratification that takes time to percolate, rather than a quick pop. As soon as you palm the iPhone 5, it pleases youâ€"it's light (think a handful of pennies) and superthin (think a fraction of a CD case), just shy of feeling cheapâ€"a fantastic balance. Maybe Apple settled on this form deliberately, or maybe it just couldn't make it any skinnier and lighter. Either way, it's lovely to hold, and something I appreciated more each day, rather than a dimensional surprise that diminished. And holding a phone matters, because that's how you use a phone. Unlike other handsets with Hummer screens that mandate two-handed use and finger contortionist acts, I could operate the iPhone 5 comfortably, quickly, and constantly with one hand and open my apartment door, pet a dog, give a high five, or eat with the other. This is an enormous, quickly forgotten virtue among handsets. Appreciate it here. I was dreading a 4-inch iPhone as a blasphemy and a burden, but it turns out to be neither. My hand loves it, and yours will too, barring some anatomical aberration.
But practical is boring. Let's be superficial again. The iPhone 5 is the most beautiful iPhone, andâ€"despite some increasingly knockout competitionâ€"the most beautiful smartphone. It's just not the flashiest; again, time spent with the phone pays dividends. You'll appreciate its minuteness.
For those who careâ€"and it's more iPhone owners than might admit itâ€"rest assured that people will know that it's A New iPhone you're carrying. And there's nothing wrong with craving that geek street cred. You just dropped serious cash on a new thing, you want people to know it's different and better than last year's thing. And the iPhone 5 is plenty of both.
Its 7.6 mm thickness is gorgeousness in itself. WolframAlpha tells me this is the typical length of an ant. An ant! The matte black evokes the cold majesty of a stealth bomber, and like the display, I still find myself staring at it. Even after I dropped it on a hard locker room floor, revealing a dainty chipâ€"yes, it does chip and scratchâ€"it's inky and sublime. That coal bezel, faceted and gemlike, makes the old silver one of the 4, 4S, and much of the gigantic competition look straight tacky. The white iPhone 5 is fine, but you're missing out on some of the best industrial design of all time if you pick that over the understated blackâ€"you'll feel more George Jetson than Darth Vader.
Either way, though, people will talk. I got commentsâ€""Nice!" "Can I hold it?" "Do you like it?" "Oh!"â€"without even having to be a conspicuous dick about it. The iPhone 5 is an understated beauty, and draws understated attention, but it's still worthy of the awe of every pretty Apple thing before it. I'm still finding new things about it that make me smileâ€"and yes I realize how corny that sounds. It's awful enough that I wouldn't write it if it weren't true.
Tasteful on the inside, too.
The iPhone 5 doesn't have NFC, wireless charging, or other early adopter fantasies that might've been on your wish list. That's fine; those things don't matter in the real world, not yet. Do you know how many times over the past week I wished my iPhone 5 had NFC? Zero times, because there are nearly zero opportunities to use it. I can't yearn for something I can't use. Wireless charging looks more practical on paper but also uglifies your desktop for nominal gain. If you're disappointed by the absence of these things, you're looking for a reason to be disappointedâ€"and you need to snap out of it.
The first iPhone didn't have 3G. It didn't have apps. You couldn't even text people pictures. But the conceit of a perfect touchscreen with Apple software poured into is every bit as compelling a reason to buy an iPhone in 2012 as it was in 2007. Apple is a gadget yacht club: beautiful, pristine, exhaustively perfectionist, planned down to details you probably won't notice, and entirely conservative. The iPhone 5 is the consummately conservative phone. It dares to do nothing new; it's determined, instead, to do what already exists in the most stellar manner possible. And it's always been that way.
Every day I found some improvement in the new phone, whether within or without: the machine gun speed of the camera's shutter when I was trying to snap a running puppy. Temple Run, my favorite 3D game, running a little more smoothly and booting up a hell of a lot more quickly. Being able to read the New York Times site in Safari by the water near my apartment in an LTE instantâ€"an area where I'd gotten poor (or no) service in the past. Distracting myself with old episodes of The Office and the vibrancy of Drive during a long train rideâ€"media that just wouldn't quite have been very much fun on a 3.5-inch screen. Ryan Gosling appreciates it. Being able to plug in the new Lightning plug when arriving at my desk and then back home without there being an "upside-down" to worry about.
And then there's the display. That 1136 x 640 screen is the best of any phone in the history of phones. Everything looks wonderfulâ€"it's still "Retina" at 326 ppiâ€"and the tallness allows you to get that extra bite of email, texting, or the web, without feeling like you've got a trout in your hand. There's no great mystery to it; it's the stuff you were doing on your last iPhone, only more so. Picking out a next song to play in the music app and realizing you can now see an entire album's track list is a treatâ€"a lengthy mixtape like Late Nights with Jeremih was more digestible than ever. My mobile photos look better than I've ever seen them, and there was, of course, more room than ever to pinch deep into the details of Instagrammed grass and drunk bar candids. It'll make you want to take more (so maybe reconsider that 16 GB model). Sometimes I just stare at the screenâ€"the George Condo oil painting wallpaper I settled on looks like it's actually on canvas. Shout out to George and Kanye.
It's entirely possible that Apple only made the display longer because that's what the kids buy these days, and not because they actually think it's better than the 3.5-inch models before. Part of growing up is compromise, though, realizing the demands of the world and bowing to them. If the iPhone 5 had to be larger, then very well, it had to be larger. Let's just be glad it's not any larger than it isâ€"Apple has balanced realism with restraint.
And besides, there's so much to like hiding underneath that screen. Remember: every single power of the 4S is powered up further, here. The camera takes better photos. LTE is LTE. My iPhone is finally a joy to use over AT&T in New York, which means yours will probably be in most other places. Your sites and apps will load faster, and your data cap will hit you soonerâ€"my phone's LTE downloads are faster than my residential cable connection.
Some previously buggy features finally work like they're supposed to. iMessage is instantaneous nowâ€"bringing it closer to the text perfection of BBMâ€"as is Spotify streaming and viewing any email attachment that might be thrown at you. The same peppiness goes for most apps, many of which are appreciably faster to load or pop up without any delay.
All this speed and shine doesn't feel like the future. It feels like the way a phone should have been all along. How boring!
Obviously not everything is perfect. I have gripes, and you will too. Apple Maps is, well, Apple Maps. It trips me up sometimes. The headphone jack switch from top to bottom seems arbitrary and feels clumsy. I often found myself trying to twist a headphone cord out of the way of my wrist, or accidentally triggering Siri mid-song while pulling the thing out of my pocket. It makes for an awkward pocket position.
Even with all of this internal augmentation, the battery remains the sameâ€"the ol' nightly recharge will be a mainstay, like it's always been with the iPhone. Sometimes you'll get a little less, sometimes you'll get a little more. With regular use, lots of Spotify streaming, and lots and lots of bathroom gaming, I almost always made it through an entire day. But in the age of Droid Razr Maxx and its beefily batteried kin, almost falls a little short.
The elongated 4-inch screen too, although perfectly ergonomic and delicious for widescreen videos, doesn't always make sense. In fact, sometimes it's a real drag: unoptimized or older apps are letterboxed. Letterboxing always sucks. Always.
And when apps are optimized, sometimes you're getting absolutely nothing in return for that bigger screen you paid for: every time I've used Instagram, perhaps the worst infractor, I'm bummed. Instead of using the extra space to make the app better, its devs just filled in the space with blank grey pixels. Great. Thanks for that. Instagram certainly isn't the only offender: plenty of my favorite games are letterboxed, and will probably be forever, given a lack of recent updates. Wasteful app moments like this might make you wince or roll your eyesâ€"or maybe they'll force developers to be more creative with vertical space. We can hope!
Are Maps a Dealbreaker?
And then there's Maps. We need to have this talk. Apple Maps is nowhere near as good as Google Maps. This is potentially a huge deal, as instant, near-perfect directions for the entire world have come to be one of the most vital and taken-for-granted parts of owning any smartphone. It's a thing that genuinely makes our lives better. If a phone's maps are trash, the whole thing might be scuttled.
I urge you to do some online homework and see if Apple Maps is completely screwed up in your localeâ€"if so, wait to buy an iPhone 5.
Odds are, it's fine.
There are problems aplenty, sure. Search results are off, sometimes. This needs to be fixed. The absence of integrated public transit directions is infuriating and unforgivable. This needs to be fixed. Some geo-queries drop multiple pins for the same place, which is irritating and confusing (Pro tip: the one with the integrated Yelp info is usually the correct one). This needs to be fixed. Some spots are just flat out wrong, which almost screwed me for crosstown meetings on a couple of occasions. This needs to be fixed.
But all of these were exceptions. Flareups. Errors. None of which prevented the iPhone 5 from being livable and usable every day I've carried it.
Ideally, yes, Apple would've stuck with Google Maps. This is a backslide, a noticeably inferior user experience. There was no reason for this switch-up beyond a corporate middle school slap fight between two rich companies. But please relax: in the US, at least, Apple's Maps are nowhere close to as bad as you've heard. They will likely get the job doneâ€"and if you hadn't heard so many deafening complaints from the Internet echo-chamber whine-orgy, you might not have ever known you were using a deficient product to begin with.
Apple Maps is flawed, not broken, and the hysteria surrounding its release is overblown. I've been using iOS 6 and Apple Maps every single day for months on an iPhone 4S and now 5, walking and driving through New York, Washington, coastal Massachusetts, and rural Maryland. I never got lost. Isn't that what matters? I found the clam shack I was looking for on Apple Maps. Turn by turn works spectacularly. Is it Google Maps good? No. But for now, most times, it's good enough.
Yes, 3D terrain feature is goofily warped. Often completely broken. It's funny to laugh about on Tumblr and mock for its stupidity, but beyond meme fodder, who cares? Really, were you ever going to use it for anything more than an eye candy dazzle-show? It's a demo, not a feature. I never triggered it, unless by accident, or just to show off a "cool 3D thing" my new phone can do, which is stupid. Unless you're a CIA analyst planning a Predator drone strike, you've never needed satellite view for anything beyond the novelty of "hey there's my house." You still don't need it.
This is what matters.
Not this.
The iPhone grew up. So should you.
The only thing that could stop you from being excited by the iPhone 5, and recognizing it as the best phone of our time, is this past year's expectations, or deep-seated habit. Let 'em go. If you're an Android or Windows Phone diehard, this probably won't win you overâ€"it's more of the same. But the same has never been so good, so refined, so useful. Now that the wowza factor of a touchscreen smartphone has worn off after half a decade, refined isn't enough to stir everyone up into a frenzy of orgiastic expectation fulfillment. But if you were expecting a groundbreaking phone, or a startling phone, or some sort of phone quantum leap, you were kidding yourself. Wireless charging folly, NFC futurismâ€"those are immature demands for immature technologies.
The iPhone 5 is a mature phone. It's also a brilliant phone. Apple identified, one by one, every way in which an already spectacular phone could be improved. And then it made those things better. It didn't set out to startle and amaze by face value. It won't dazzle you with a breathtaking new design. Your breath will remain with you. But the very feat of making progress toward perfection with a device that was already the best phone out there is a giant feat in itself. Body, processor, colors on screen, data downloads, a much-improved camera with some clever new tricks. There's no shame in incremental progress, in toddler steps, when those steps are along a golden road covered in candy canes. Sure, Apple Maps might make it hard to find this road, but the point remains: the iPhone 5 can be phenomenal without being a phenomenon unto itself. It can be the best gadget you've ever owned without being the harbinger of a tech revolution.
The iPhone 5 is the best smartphone ever made. If that on its own isn't enough to excite you, then it's your lossâ€"have fun waiting for a 5G 6-inch prism.
iPhone 5 Test Notes:
Camera
Network & Wi-Fi speed
The screen
Optimized app comparison
First impressions, call quality, and more
How to set up your new iPhone
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