iPhone 5 thoughts

I held off on posting about the iPhone 5 for a few days, just to let the initial reactions and waves of joy and hate flow over me, so I can clearly reflect on what's been announced, and the impacts it will have on the industry as a whole.

When the rumours first surfaced over June through to August, I had a strong feeling that this might have been a deliberate distraction from Apple, a sort of "look over there" approach so they could ultimatly wow the audience at the announcement with a completely different product. With this in mind, the launch (which due to me being in Australia mean't waking up and seeing the whole announcement splashed over most news sites) really took me by surprise...

"Really, the leaks were actually right. Oh..."

Given that I had recently moved to Android, more specifically, a Galaxy S3, my initial reaction was one of relief. My "spec sheet" was still longer (screen res, NFC etc). All is well with my call to switch. I knew this would still sell well, iPhone's always do, especially if nothing is especially broken. A lot of tech pundits saw this as "it's just the iPhone 4S with a few things better", but most consumers will see it as "an iPhone 4S, but better", and seeing as the 4S was still selling quite well, this is exactly what people want.

A lot of geekier people may look at the iPhone 5 and think "meh", but there is a much deeper difference to this phone that the current generation of Android based phones, and much, if not all of it, stems from the "Apple way of doing things", ie, everything under 1 roof.

An Android fan that thinks the iPhone 5 is a better phone

There are 2 main reasons why the iPhone 5 is a very good phone, and probably a better choice than an Android based phone for most people right now, and if Android based devices adopted these 2 things, the playing field would be much more level.

CPU
Apple typically announces features in a phone that even the least tech minded person can understand. "The CPU is twice as fast" is a fairly plain statement to make to your average consumer, but such a line immediately sends geeks into a tailspin. The initial reaction is either one of two things when a tech company makes a claim. You've either doubled the core speed (and killed the battery) or doubled the cores (which isn't really "twice as fast" and also kills the battery).
What Apple appears to have actually done, is made their own ARM based architecture cores, and optimised the crap out of the OS to take advantage of this. Because the CPU team and the OS team all have the same security badge, the OS guys can say to the CPU guys "Hey, we want to do this, but the current CPU can't handle it, can you put something in there to make this work." "Sure, can do" is usually the answer, pending design issues etc. Now obviously this process is far more complicated that that, but can you even begin to imaging Google talking to the ARM guys about Android based optimisations, let alone the 3 CPU manufacturers that actually make the CPU's in Android phones (Samsung, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments). If this actually happened, Android guys and girls the world over would swoon, and the Android ecosystem would ultimately benefit.

4G modem
This was the big one for me. After owning a HTC Velocity 4G (one of the first 4G phones in Australia) and having what could only be described as horrendous battery life, I gained a fairly clear understanding into how the 4G modem in a smartphone works. As 4G doesn't do voice (yet), and the 4G modem in an Android phone is separate to the 3G modem, both have to be on when you want to have your phone run at 4G speeds. So even when the phone is sitting idle, both modems are on. This is crazy, and any decent hardware engineer should have looked at this and gone "that's not the best way to do that". Aparently no-one at HTC, Samsung, Qualcomm etc saw this. Apple has now seized on this, by doing something that the other guys should have done in the first place. 1 modem. It's that simple. While the phone is sitting idle, I do need it to be able to accept a phone call, and messages etc, so the 3G modem needs to be on, and I accept that. Now the following is an assumtion, but this is what I expect the iPhone 5 to do in an LTE area. If it's asleep, the LTE connection will essentially be off, and any push based items (email, notifications etc) will come down the 3G pipe. Once you turn the screen on, the LTE connection will activate, and then data will flow over this connection. On this basis, the battery life will remain basically the same, which is what Apple has indicated. We won't know the real battery cost of LTE until the review units are out, but Apple has never underestimated their battery life numbers on announcements before, so I doubt they would start now. Plus, their customers wouldn't stand for it.

I'm still happy with the Galaxy S3, but I like the iPhone 5

While I won't be changing phones at the moment, I really like the iPhone 5. I would be happy to drop the customisations I can do with Android to get a phone that gets the core functionality so right. If the CPU and modem guys could get their shit together, and get these sort of hardware based features into an Android phone, the playing field would probably level out again, but until there is motivation (which is a corporate term for more money) for the modem guys, the CPU guys and the OS guys to get into the same room and nut this stuff out, I fear Android may be stuck....for now at least.