JOHN DAVIDSON
Apple announces its new iPhone 5, with a longer screen, a smaller connector, a new operating system and a faster processor. Tell us something we didn’t know.
The mobile phone rumour mill must be stockpiling thunder.Nokia had its thunder well and truly stolen by accurate rumours ahead of its announcements last week, and now Apple. Almost everything new and exciting about the iPhone 5, we knew already, making it feel just that little bit less new and less exciting.
Somewhere, wherever the rumour mill lives, the dogs must be looking to the skies in terror.
We knew about the new, smaller connector on the iPhone 5, a connector that’s going to be a pain for anyone who already has any sort of a dock for their existing iPhone: you’ll either need an adapter, or a brand new dock. Not to mention, your iPhone cable will no longer double as your iPad cable.
What we didn’t know was that the new connector was going to be called Lightning, appropriately enough, since that was just about the only thunder that wasn’t stolen by the leaks and rumours ahead of the launch.
We knew that there would be LTE, but it’s nice to know (and the ACCC will be pleased to hear) that the LTE will work here in Australia, too, on both the Telstra and the Optus networks. That of course could mark the end of halcyon days for LTE: once the myriad iPhone 5 users jump onto the networks, the networks will start to get every bit as congested as the old HSPA networks, and almost as slow. (LTE is technically faster than HSPA, but it’s not that much faster - not as much as you might now believe if you’re already on LTE and enjoying break-neck download speeds. Much of the current performance arises from the lack of congestion on LTE.)
We knew that the screen would be longer, measuring 4 inches rather than the 3.5 inches on all previous iPhones. We even knew what the resolution would be, down to the pixel: 640 x 1136 pixels. That’s an impressive bit of rumour milling. Really, phone companies should just give up making big, expensive announcements, and just leave it to the fans.
We even knew that the phone wouldn’t have a Near Field Communications chip. Apple tends not to add technology just for technology’s own sake, but rather adds it when it can help create new functionality in its devices. In the absence of a proper NFC-based payments system (which doubtless Apple will one day come up with), an NFC chip just wouldn’t have added all that much to the iPhone 5, so for now its omission was predictable, predicted and sensible. From a future-proofing standpoint, though, it’s a bit disappointing: when Apple does come up with an NFC payments system, no amount of software updating is going to retrofit it onto the iPhone 5. You’ll need a new phone, which obviously was the plan in the first place.
And speaking of software updates, we of course knew that the iPhone 5 would have a lot of fancy new applications, chief amongst them being the mapping, Passbook and FaceTime over 3G, though that information came from Apple itself, when it previewed its new operating system in June, rather than the rumour industry.
All of those things add up to what looks like a very nice phone indeed. Apple has certainly done enough to catch up with its competitors (which is to say, with the Samsung Galaxy S III and the HTC One X), even despite the fact the iPhone 5 still has a smaller screen than those phones, and lacks NFC. The appeal of Apple products is, as much as anything, the whole ecosystem of software and addons that surround the products themselves, and on that score Apple still wins.
Though, for how long is another question. The introduction of that smaller connector, Lightning, means customers will have to upgrade many of their addons (it’s hard to imagine many docks being all that stable, or all that pretty, with a whopping great adapter sitting between the phone and the dock), and that upgrade cycle could open the window, just a crack, for other phone makers to squeeze in. If you have to buy a new speaker dock, why not get a new Nokia Lumia with its wireless recharging speaker dock instead, for instance?
And Samsung, more than Apple’s other competitors, has the opportunity to create an ecosystem that’s quite unique, and every bit as powerful as Apple’s. After all, you’re more likely to have a Samsung TV and a Samsung refrigerator than you are an Apple TV and an iFridge, There are things that Samsung can do, like allowing you to watch your TV on your phone when you’re in the loo, that could give Apple a run for its money.
And Samsung has another advantage, too: people are less excited by Samsung than they are by Apple, meaning there are fewer rumours, meaning that, when Samsung does announce a new product, it seems just that little bit newer, just that little bit more exciting because we haven’t heard it all already.
