A couple of months ago we showed you this little spoof video of the iPhone 5 being leaked, that a lot of people actually thought was real. Idiots. But today Apple did actually unveil the iPhone 5 for the first time at some special presentation over in San Francisco. In the past Steve Jobs would have probably been the main guy performing at this presentation but as everyone knows, Steve Jobs is dead so it was left to some other guys from Apple to tell you all about it. Sick Chirpse decided to sit through the presentation so that you didn’t have to.
It was predictably a load of bullshit, which began with some guy called Tim Cook talking about how Apple was awesome and was opening a new store in Barcelona and its first store in Sweden this month and how iPads had a 68% share of the tablet market. ‘What has this got to do with the new iPhone?’ I found myself screaming at the presentation. It was like a more frustrating version of the Champions League draw or something because even though that takes fucking ages at least you get some clips of cool goals and some famous palyers saying dumb things, all I got with this one was some geek talking about iPads and some pictures of them. Boring.
Eventually another geek called Phil Schiller came on to talk about the new iPhone and its unique features. According to him apparently it’s ‘unlike anything that Apple or anyone else in their industry has made before.’ This is a pretty ridiculous claim considering it’s called the iPhone 5 which implies that there have been 4 other versions of it before this one. Surely they’re not going to stray too far from the original template are they? I waited with baited breath to discover if an addition as ridiculous as Siri was going to be included (check out Scotland Vs Siri if you don’t get how stupid Siri is yet) and then finally we got a picture of it, rising from the ground into all its glory:
Yep, looks pretty much like all previous iPhones except its made of only glass and aluminium (no idea what previous iPhones were made of so don’t know if this is that different) and is 20% lighter than the iPhone 4, only weighing 112g. Every iPhone gets smaller and lighter so this isn’t exactly that amazing an improvement, or that unsurprising, although this phone is slightly longer than the iPhone 4 which maybe is surprising? Not sure. Anyway, itt’s also now designed to ‘fit beautifully in the palm of your hand,’ which is all well and good but it makes you think what the hell they were trying to achieve with all the previous designs huh!?
This time too it’s set to have 5 icons vertically on the screen. WOW – that’s like one more icon per column than before. Awesome. I guess you would expect that from a phone with a bigger screen though huh, so my mind wasn’t that blow yet. Still just 4 shortcuts at the bottom of the screen though. I only have three there on mine so that doesn’t really bother me. It’s also got the same retina display as the iPhone 4s but now boasts a 4 inch display. I’m not really sure what that means but it doesn’t really sound like that much of an improvement. The display has 44% more colour saturation than the previous iPhone which could make watching stuff on there even better though I guess, I don’t really ever watch anything on my iPhone though. I’m probably not really using it to its full potential huh?
Predictably all the software on the phone has been updated too so you can now read more emails and put more events on your calendar. Boring. Apps have been updated too and they showed a CNN app or something and basically explained that you could get more information on your screen now. Wow, I wouldn’t expect that now that the screen and phone itself are longer. Stop killing time.
Here’s the important (?) stuff – it can switch antennas or something and is using LTE (whatever that is?) so basically you’ll be able to access 4G wherever you are in the world and your phone will run ULTRAFAST. His capitalisation, not mine, although I can appreciate why you might think it was mine. The new A6 processor is way faster and also way smaller, which again is obvious but is still pretty cool. It can load webpages 2X as fast as the 4S and also can provide killer graphics. They showed a demo of some game called Real Racing 3 and seriously, it looked completely sick even though it has a shitty name. I don’t really ever play games anymore but the graphics on this looked fucking killer:
I got kind of bored of the presentation around here because I’m not really that geeky (despite running a website) because it was just loads of technospeak that I didn’t really understand, so here’s a basic rundown: it’s thinner, lighter, slightly longer and ULTRAFAST. Everything about it is also BETTER than before. The battery life too is meant to be increased with 225 hours on standby (who the hell has an iPhone and leaves it on standby, people are always fucking playing with them when they’re supposed to be having a conversation with me) and gives you like 10 hours of LTE browsing and 10 hours of WiFi browsing. Wow. Wish I knew what LTE was now.
The camera is way better too, and they explained why in a bunch of technobabble that I didn’t understand. Here’s a picture from it though that apparently hasn’t been retouched and it does look fucking awesome. Sometimes actions speak louder than technobabble guys:
Face detection has also improved and apparently you can take pictures when you’re also recording a video which is kinda cool but also kinda useless. You can get FaceTime without connecting to WiFi now as well which again is kinda cool but also kinda useless because nobody actually uses FaceTime, do they?
They’ve also got their own Maps function now as opposed to using Google Maps. This is kinda good for Apple I guess but I do worry that their maps function won’t be as advanced as googles so when you do get the new iPhone everything else will be better but the one thing I actually use quite a lot – the maps function – won’t be as good and I’ll just end up bitching and moaning about it and having to FaceTime my buddy to find out how to get where I’m going instead.
Siri has also been improved and you can now ask her (it?) about sports and movies. Cool. She can also voice activate stuff apps and also post stuff onto Facebook through voice activation. That should be really useful for when you’re drunk Facebooking pictures of your ex girlfriend and slurring your words so open sounds a bit like poke or next sounds a bit like message and ‘hilarious consequences’ ensue. I can see the new season of Two and a Half Men now.
Aside from that it also comes in Black AND White which is pretty awesome right? It ships September 21st in North America and most European countries and in the States it’s retailing for $200 for 8GB, $300 for 16GB and $400 for 32GB which isn’t really that outrageous considering all these insane improvements – you know, being smaller and having slightly better features. Subsequently – in the States at least – iPhone 4′s will now be free on contract, but who really caes about that because nobody is gonna want to buy a piece of shit iPhone 4 now that the iPhone 5 is out, right? Here’s a final image from the presentation which shows you how much better (and thinner/longer/more expensive) the iPhone 5 is compared to previous models. Enjoy:
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