Gadgetory

well hey this is Josh from the verge and we're taking a look at the iPhone 5 Apple's latest entry into the smartphone market and perhaps the best iPhone ever the design of the phone may look familiar to you it uses essentially the same body shape and components as the previous iPhone 4s but the build of the phone is completely new in fact I spoke to Phil Schiller at the launch event for the phone and he told me that while the design is an iteration of the previous version its kind of built from the ground up with new processes and new materials and you know new funky style and the phone does look different when you get up close and personal with it it's got these edges these mirrored edges that are really beautiful looking it's thinner it's a little bit taller because it's got a bigger screen and and it is using some new materials there's glass on it but you've also got this new aluminum back which feels a lot better in the hand and that presumably is harder to break than a piece of glass the phone is also lighter than the previous version it's actually a lot lighter the first time I picked it up I almost dropped it because I was expecting more heft it feels smaller it's thinner but it overall feels smaller even though it's a little bit taller the width is exactly the same as the iPhone 4s and the iPhone 4 so typing on it won't seem weird or awkward for most people Apple has moved the location of the headphone jack to the bottom of the phone and it sits next to the new lightning dock connector which replaces the 30 pin port that was on every previous version of the iPhone the main reason for this is that it takes up less space it's a much much smaller jack in fact it's about the size of a micro USB port but I'm sure that it will rile a lot of owners of accessories Apple does make an adaptor that you can stick in here that will take it from lightning to 30-pin though it does lose some functionality such as iPod control inside the box Apple has bundled their new earbuds they call ear pods which they say they spent three years working on generally they do sound a little bit better than the old versions they're very base heavy even if they're not completely pushed deep into your ear for me they didn't sit in my ear very well they basically kind of fell out when I put them in I have a pair of RHA earbuds that I paid about 35 bucks for that I think do a slightly better job in terms of sound reproduction but as far as a bundled pair of earbuds the ear pods do a pretty decent job on the front of the phone is that new 4-inch display which is 11 36 by 640 it's a Retina display and has the same pixel density as the previous version next to the older phone it definitely looks a lot better and even compared to terrific screens like the HTC One X display it stands out as possibly the best-looking display on the market right now it's actually a little perplexing as to why they made the screen larger because there's nothing in iOS 6 that really seems to be taking advantage of it and in fact as I mentioned in my review there are some obvious areas where I feel they could have utilized the screen for instance with making the notifications a little less obtrusive which Apple hasn't done Apple has tweaked all of its first party apps to utilize the extra space on the screen and if you're running an older app it will display the app in its original size with black bars on the top and bottom or sides of it which isn't really that distracting and certainly on the black version of the phone you barely notice but already developers are working on new versions of their applications for instance the CNN app which takes full advantage of this space inside Apple says the phone has been completely revamped as well there's a new a6 chip LTE on Verizon Sprint and AT&T here in the US and in lots of other places around the world larger battery which apple claims gets better battery life the camera has been improved a bit as well it's an 8 megapixel camera which is what the 4s had but Apple claims the optics have been improved and based on the shots I've taken with it I have to agree with them the front-facing camera is now a 1.2 megapixel HD camera that's 720p not 1080 and you can do HD FaceTime calls with it as well along with the iPhone 5 Apple has introduced the latest version of its operating system iOS 6 they've added some sharing options which is really helpful they've added Twitter and now Facebook into the Notification Center they've added options to share via Twitter and Facebook in a bunch of different apps Safari for instance which is very helpful there are some more sizable additions to iOS 6 the biggest one is probably Maps Apple has changed the Maps application to utilize its own services rather than Google Maps and it's caused something of an uproar the new maps are excellent for turn-by-turn directions and the turn-by-turn worked really well when I was driving around but for getting around a big city and for getting detailed information on points of interest restaurants or shops it is severely lacking right now one of the more troubling aspects of the new version of maps at least for me is that it doesn't provide any transit directions integrated with the maps itself it requests that you go find an app that it can plug into and then even when you get those transit directions you're taken from maps to that application to get the directions they're not integrated into the Maps application itself Apple did add a pretty cool new feature called flyover which is a real-time 3d rendering of major cities it doesn't always perfectly represent what it's rendering in fact there are some parts of New York that look basically destroyed by it but it is impressive when it's working and it's working most of the time the unfortunate thing about flyover is that it has really limited use I mean you're not looking at an awesome display a flyover when you're navigating you're trying to figure out where you're supposed to go and for day-to-day use I would rather have Street View on my device than a really cool render of the tops of buildings apples also made some pretty big improvements to Siri even though the app isn't out of beta it does seem to be giving better answers and getting those answers faster than previously I will say that while using iOS 6 I was constantly reminded of just how dated the software feels it's not that it's bad in fact it's a really excellent mobile operating system but it just seems to be more difficult to do the things that I find myself doing all the time for instance checking Twitter constantly or sharing things with people on different services or taking actions on notifications which Apple doesn't really give you an opportunity to do or changing settings on apps which is often confusing and convoluted for instance opening a private browsing tab in Safari by my count it takes about 6 different steps to do that the iPhone 5 is that question the best iphone ever made and for the mass-market it's the best smartphone on the market in my opinion but there is a segment of the market myself included that would like to see smartphones and smartphone OS is really evolved and really try to innovate and at this point I don't feel like Apple's really doing that with the iPhone