2 iPhones, 3 lessons

The new iPhone models may not have set the market on fire. But the charm is in details, says David Pogue.

We can draw three lessons from the arrival of Apple’s two new iPhone models, the 5C and 5S.

Lesson 1: Apple may have set its own bar for innovation too high.

Year after year, Steve Jobs used to blow our minds with products we didn’t know we wanted. Now, two years after his death, we still expect every new iPhone to clean our gutters, cook our popcorn and levitate. So when the hardware revisions are minor each year, we’re disappointed.

And sure enough, after Apple showed off its two new iPhone models recently, its stock dropped. Analysts shrugged that they contain nothing “transformative.” The blogger-haters had a field day.

The budget model, the new iPhone 5C, comes in five colors ($100 or Rs 6,223 for the 16-gigabyte model with a two-year contract, $550 or Rs 34,226 without). It’s essentially identical to last year’s iPhone 5, except that its back and sides are a single piece of plastic instead of metal and glass.

Actually, “plastic” isn’t quite fair. The 5C’s case is polycarbonate, lacquered like a glossy piano. Better yet, its back edges are curved for the first time since the iPhones of 2008. You can tell by touch which way it’s facing in your pocket.

It’s a terrific phone. The price is right. It will sell like hot cakes; the new iPhones go on sale Friday. But just sheathing last year’s phone in shiny plastic isn’t a stunning advance.
Lesson 2: The smartphone is mature.

The App Store filled a huge hole. Siri voice command answered a desperate need. And high-resolution Retina displays helped compensate for the tiny screen.

But today, every phone has that stuff; the big holes have been plugged. Maybe the age of annual mega-leaps is over.

The new 5S ($200 or Rs 12,446 with contract, $650 or Rs 40,449 without) looks exactly like last year’s thin and gorgeous iPhone 5. You can now get it with its brushed aluminium body in dark gray (with black glass accents), silver (white accents) or a surprisingly classy-looking gold (white accents).

Apple says the 5S’ chip is twice as fast as before. Nobody was exactly complaining about the iPhone’s speed before, but, sure, it’s plenty quick. Since it’s a 64-bit chip, Apple says the graphics in 3-D video games look especially smooth and detailed.

There’s also a second chip devoted to tracking motion data from the phone’s compass, gyroscope and tilt sensor. Apple says this coprocessor should save battery life when you use fitness tracking apps, because it can monitor your data all day long; the main chip, which requires six times as much power, can remain asleep.

Those are both fairly invisible changes, though.

The new camera will mean more to you. Its sensor is 15 percent bigger, and the individual light-detecting pixels are bigger. Take photos side-by-side with the iPhone 5S’ predecessor, and the difference is immediately obvious; lowlight pictures are far better on the new phone. Clearer, brighter, better color.

The 5S also has two LED flashes - one pure white, one amber - that fire simultaneously. When mixed in the right balance, their light can match the colour tone of your subject (moonlight, streetlights, fluorescents, whatever). Apple says this idea is a first in both phones and cameras.

It really works. Flash photos look much, much better. No longer will your loved ones’ skin look either nuclear white or “Avatar” blue.

The 5S’ camera also offers a burst mode (10 frames a second), 3X zooming during video capture, Instagram-style photo filters and truly wowing slow-motion video. (Weirdly, filtered photos and slo-mo videos don’t survive the transfer to your computer, although you can send them by email or text message.) Sample photos and videos accompany this column online.

The most heavily promoted feature is the 5S’ fingerprint sensor, which, ingeniously, is built into the Home button. You push the Home button to wake the phone, leave your finger there another half second, and boom: You’ve unlocked a phone that nobody else can unlock, without the hassle of inputting the password. (And yes, a password is a hassle; half of smartphone users never bother setting one up.)

The best part is that it actually works - every single time, in my tests. It’s nothing like the balky, infuriating fingerprint-reader efforts of earlier cellphones. It’s genuinely awesome; the haters can go jump off a pier.

The 5S can also scan your fingerprint when you’re buying books, music, apps and videos from Apple, saving you the password entry (although this, too, is buggy; Apple says a fix is due). You can teach your iPhone 5S to recognise up to five fingerprints - all yours, yours and your spouse’s, or whatever.

Apple says your fingerprint is stored only on your phone, encrypted and never transmitted or stored online. And using the fingerprint reader is optional; you can always use a regular password instead.

Lesson 3: If we’re reaching a point of diminishing returns in hardware breakthroughs, the software breakthroughs are only just getting underway.

The new iPhones come with iOS 7, a redesigned operating system. You can also install it on recent iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch models.

This software looks nothing like the old iOS. It’s all white and clean, almost barren. Its Home screen and dialogue boxes use thin fonts and a colour palette of bright, light hues.

Above all, it completely abandons Apple’s formerly favourite design principle, skeuomorphism, in which on-screen things depict real-world materials (lined yellow paper for Notes, leather binding for Calendar, wooden shelves for iBooks).

You might love this design, and you might loathe it. You also might get used to it. But in any case, iOS 7 is more efficient to navigate, because nothing on the screen is eye candy; everything is a button, so you spend less time hunting for things.

Furthermore, Apple did an insane amount of work on features. Some are big-ticket items like Siri, which responds faster, has a more realistic voice and understands new kinds of commands (including “Make the screen brighter” and “Turn on Bluetooth”).

A supremely useful Control Center offers one-touch buttons to change important settings (thanks for the idea, Android!). AirDrop shoots pictures, maps, Web sites and other items to nearby iOS 7 gadgets, quickly and wirelessly.

Now, Apple’s competition in the Android world is fierce and gaining; the competitors include phones that are equally beautiful (from HTC), phones that take spoken commands without your having to press a button (from Motorola) and phones in every conceivable screen size (Samsung).

But that doesn’t mean that the iPhones have been overtaken. The iPhone’s ecosystem is a deal-sweetening perk - the best apps; the best-stocked online stores for music and movies; smooth synchronizing of your calendars, addresses and even photos among Apple phones, tablets and Macs; and enough cases and accessories to reach from the landfill to the moon.

If you wanted to summarize all three of this week’s lessons into a single final thesis, here it is: Apple still believes in superb design and tremendous polish. The iPhone is no longer the only smartphone that will keep you delighted for the length of your two-year contract - but it’s still among the few that will.