My experience with the iPhone 5

After the iPhone 5 was announced, I discussed the reasons that I thought that lawyers would love it.  I received my iPhone 5 on Friday and I’ve using it extensively over the weekend.  Here are some additional thoughts that I have after using this outstanding device.

Size and weight.  Every review of the iPhone 5 notes that it is thinner and lighter, but boy is it noticeable.  I usually wear a shirt with a front pocket and I’ve been keeping devices there since I first got a Palm III in 1998.  Over these last 14 years, the devices that I have kept in that pocket have, for the most part, gotten thinner and lighter every year, but I can’t remember a change as noticeable as this one before.  It’s not even that my iPhone 4S was that heavy, it’s just that the iPhone 5 is first device I’ve used that crosses the threshold over to being barely noticeable in my pocket.  Additionally, the weight feels great in the hand, not at all heavy but with a premium feel.  I’ve heard some people wonder why Apple is always working so hard to make devices thinner and lighter, but after a weekend with the iPhone 5, I now understand why this is worth pursuing.

Longer screen.  As you know, the width of the iPhone 5 remains unchanged from earlier models, but the screen is longer.  In daily use, this is an amazing improvement.  The iPhone 5 feels just as good in your hand, but you can now see more.  When I look at a list of emails, a list of tweets, a list in the Settings app, or any other list on the iPhone 5, I really notice that I can see so much more.  It’s like being seated in coach on an airplane and then being notified that you have been upgraded and you can move up to First Class.  Suddenly you have that extra space to stretch out, you don’t feel cramped by the seat in front of you, and you find that you can be even more productive.  It’s really nice.

Plus, the extra length means that you have an extra row on each of your Home Screens.  If you are like me, then your first Home Screen is prime real estate — the Boardwalk and Park Place of apps.  Whenever a really good app comes along that I want to add to my first home screen, I have to make a difficult decision of what gets bumped back.  Two apps enter the ring; only one survives.  It can be a bloody process.  But now suddenly I have four more spots on my first home screen.  After using an iPhone all of these years, this is a major change, and I’m still deciding how to distribute the riches.

4G LTE speed.  I figured that fast 4G LTE service would make a difference, and that’s why I wrote about it before we even knew for sure that it would be a feature in the iPhone 5.  But now that I’ve spent a weekend with it … WOW.  I have the AT&T version of the iPhone 5, and here in New Orleans, LTE is unbelievably fast.  As a point of comparison, at my home I have the most expensive cable modem service that Cox sells in this market.  On my computer (using a wired connection), I usually see download speeds in the 20 Mbps to 35 Mbps range, which I consider quite fast.  The speed of WiFi in my house depends upon where I am located.  If am very close to my WiFi router (an Airport Extreme Base Station), I can get speeds of 25 Mbps to 30 Mbps on an iPhone 5 or an iPhone 4S, and as I move to other spots in my house the speed drops to around 10 Mbps.

But if I turn off WiFi on the iPhone 5 and rely on AT&T LTE, the speeds are higher.  I have been running speed tests all weekend using the free Speedtest.net Mobile Speed Test app () and the FCC Mobile Broadband Test app ().  I usually see speeds in the 20-35 Mbps range, but very often, at least 25% of the time, I am seeing speeds in the 40-50 Mbps range.  Yesterday afternoon, I attended the Saints football game at the Superdome, and while the game itself was a painful experience, the LTE speeds were impressive.  That was a confined area with 70,000 other people in one spot, and presumably at least some of them were using AT&T LTE, but I still got consistent results in the 30-40 Mbps range.  And late Saturday night, and again last night, I saw speeds over 50 Mbps:

 

I have never before seen download speeds this fast on any device.  The speeds are fast enough to make me wish I could use LTE all the time and just ignore WiFi.  Of course, if I did so, I’m sure that I would exceed my AT&T monthly data cap. 

These are just numbers.  What does 4G LTE on the iPhone 5 mean in real life?  It means that webpages load incredibly quickly.  Large attachments download with virtually no delay.  When network speed is critical for an app (for example, LogMeIn), these apps work brilliantly over LTE.  When I need to access a large PDF file in my Dropbox, it just pops up after a few seconds.  It’s a big deal, and it means that the iPhone always has a fast connection without needing to worry about whether I am using WiFi or not. 

LTE might be slower in your city than it is here in the Crescent City.  (If you have an iPhone 5 and you have run speed tests in your city, feel free to comment on this post and share your speeds; I’d love to see them.).  And perhaps over time as more people use LTE services we will all see speed decline.  But for now, I’m finding that unlike every prior iPhone, I actually get faster network speeds if I turn off WiFi — which seems completely backwards to me.

Camera.  I’ve noticed two big differences in the Camera app.  First, because the iPhone 5 is so much faster than previous iPhones, you can take pictures much more quickly.  I stated in my prior post that “the iPhone is now 40% faster when taking photographs, making it easier
to take a large number of pictures in a row — just like a fashion
photographer.”  I’ve definitely noticed this.

Second, if you are in an area with low light, the camera works much better.  Sure, low light pictures can be grainy, but on prior iPhones a low light picture can just look black.  Now, I actually get a usable picture.  For example, here are two photographs.  I took the first photograph with my iPhone 4S in a room with the light dimmed.  For the second picture, I put my iPhone 5 in the extra same spot and didn’t change the lights at all.  The difference is astonishing. 

Each of the above pictures is reduced to 500 pixels wide.  If you click on each one, you can see a version that is 1000 pixels wide. I reduced the size from the normal 3,264 pixel width in the interest of your bandwidth, but I did not otherwise manipulate the images in any way.  And note that when I did try to manipulate both pictures in Photoshop, I was able to make the iPhone 4S picture look better but still not as good as the original iPhone 5 picture, whereas I could use Photoshop to get the iPhone 5 picture even better than what you see above.

If you are outside during the day, none of this will matter.  But how often have you tried to take a picture with the iPhone in the evening or inside only to discover that there simply isn’t enough light to create a usable picture?  With the iPhone 5, you have a much better chance of getting a picture that captures the memory.

iPhone speed.  I’ve already mentioned how the faster chip in the iPhone 5 lets you take pictures faster.  Everything else on the iPhone 5 is faster as well.  I expect to see speed with each new iPhone so I can’t say that this change was unexpected, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t appreciated.

Battery.  The iPhone 5 battery lasts all day long, even when I am using it a lot, which has been the case this weekend.  The same was true for my iPhone 4S, but with the increased speed and larger screen to power, it is nice to see that the battery life is still very good.  This is especially important right now because the iPhone 5 has the new Lightning connector, and I currently only have the cord that came with the iPhone 5 to charge it.  With my iPhone 4S, I have charging cords and docks in multiple locations in my house and also in my car.  I ordered some adapters so that I can still use those cables to charge the iPhone 5, but they are still on backorder from Apple.com so for now I’m going to need to rely on that battery holding up on its own.

So in summary, the iPhone 5 is incredible.  I never used the original iPhone that came out in 2007, but I’ve used every one since then:  the iPhone 3G, the 3GS, the iPhone 4, the iPhone 4S, and now the iPhone 5.  The iPhone 5 upgrade seems more significant to me than any prior upgrade.  Before this weekend, I would have said that the iPhone 4 was the biggest upgrade.  The iPhone 4 added the amazing retina screen, a great new thinner design, a better camera, and was faster.  But the iPhone 5 seems like an even more significant change.  The longer screen is fantastic just like the retina display was fantastic at the time.  The overall speed increase (faster chip, fast 4G LTE) is much more noticeable than every prior speed increase I’ve experienced — although I’m told that the iPhone 3G was a major network speed increase over the original iPhone which could only use the slow Edge network.  And as I noted above, the iPhone 5 is not just lighter but is noticeably lighter, enough to really make a difference.  The other changes such as the amazing design, the improved camera, etc. are just icing on the cake.

I purchased an iPhone 4S last year so I am not yet eligible to pay the subsidized price to upgrade to an iPhone 5.  (For what it’s worth, I opted for the black 64GB model.)  If you want the latest and greatest but you are also not yet eligible, perhaps you can take advantage of the approach that I used.  Unlike me, my wife was eligible for an upgrade.  (She uses an iPhone 4 — although I’ll soon move her over to my 4S.)  AT&T had no problem with me ordering an iPhone 5 using her phone number, and then once I had the device in my hand, before I activated it, I called AT&T.  On the phone they were able to transfer the device to my phone number, and a few minutes later my iPhone 4S stopped getting an AT&T signal and the iPhone 5 started working.  It was very easy; the only annoying part was having to wait on hold with AT&T for 20 minutes before I was connected to a representative.  By the way, AT&T calls this a “cross upgrade,” so you know what to ask for when you talk to the AT&T representative to do this.

The iPhone 5 is the best iPhone yet.  Of course that is true; every new iPhone is always the best iPhone yet.  This year, however, the improvements are more substantial than in prior years.  Using an iPhone 5 this weekend has been really delightful, and no matter what model iPhone you are using now, you are going to be very happy whenever you make the upgrade.