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Meet the iPhone 5S

At tonight’s long-awaited press conference in Cupertino, California, after Apple CEO Tim Cook introduced iOS 7, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller unveiled the company’s hotly-anticipated flagship phone, the iPhone 5S. Here’s what we learned by following the liveblogs that came from the journos lucky enough to be invited to the event.

Schiller focused on three key areas that are completely new to the iPhone 5S: its processor, improvements made to the iSight camera, and its brand-new fingerprint scanner that had been speculated on for months prior to the announcement. Nothing was said about its screen, which implies the 5S uses the same Retina display of its predecessor.

The biggest surprise  was the announcement that the iPhone 5S would use a new 64-bit “desktop class” processor – the first ever used in a smartphone – called the A7 system-on-a-chip, which has a native 64-bit kernel and runs both 32-bit and 64-bit applications. Apple said it’s “twice as fast” as the iPhone 5’s CPU, 40x faster than the original iPhone’s processor 56x faster than the original iPhone’s graphics chip. The 5S runs OpenGL|ES, just like the new Nexus 7, and according to Epic Games’ Donald Mustard, its graphics capabilities are 5 times faster than that of the iPhone 5. Infinity Blade III was demonstrated on-stage to show off the phone’s graphics quality, complete with a detailed and fluid dragon that blew fire at the screen with nary a hitch.

That’s not all on the processing side, though. The iPhone 5S also has a new coprocessor that works in tandem with the A7, called the M7. It was referred to as a motion coprocessor, which continuously measures motion data from the accelerometer, the GPS and the phone’s compass, and it has been optimised to be contextually aware and can tell apps if you’re stationary, walking, driving or whatever. That makes it extremely useful to application developers like Nike, which is releasing a new app that makes extensive use of the new coprocessor called Nike+ Move.

The phone’s iSight camera has been given a significant upgrade with a bunch of new features. It now uses a new 5-element Apple-designed lens with an F2.2 aperture and a sensor that has an active area that’s 15% larger than that of the iPhone 5S’s camera. Surprisingly, it’s not going to pack in more pixels – instead, Apple is increasing the size of each pixel to 1.5 microns, going on the theory that bigger pixels mean better pictures. iOS7 has been optimised to make full use of the camera’s new hardware, and the camera app sets white balance, exposure and creates a “dynamic local tone map”, “autofocus matrix metering” with 15 zones automatically to help you take the best picture possible. In addition, every time a picture is taken, the camera actually takes multiple pictures, and picks the best one.

And then there’s the new “True Tone Flash” that has two LEDs, one cool and white, the other warm and amber. These can be combined by the camera app to get the right colour balance when photographing people with lots of exposed flesh.

The phone has image stabilisation functionality as well, but not in the traditional optical-or-digital sense. Instead, it works by taking multiple photos, and then combining them to come by the right light levels and the camera app then chooses the sharpest one.

The 5S’s camera has a burst mode that captures 10 frames per second, and a new slow-mo mode that shoots at a very impressive rate of 120 frames per second. Lastly, video capture on the 5S can be done at 720p quality, at 120fps.

The most revolutionary feature of the new iPhone 5S is undoubtedly its fingerprint scanner that has been built into the phone’s redesigned (and sapphire) Home button. The new ring around the Home button is merely a sensor that activates the “Touch ID” sensor that then scans your fingerprint in order to unlock the phone and authenticate yourself to apps, like iTunes, when making purchases.

Simply touching the Home button unlocks the screen, and according to the demo video Apple ran, fingerprints can be scanned from multiple angles successfully. All fingerprint data is encrypted, and stored in a “secure enclave” , and that data is never made available to other apps, uploaded to Apple’s servers or backed up to iCloud.

The newest iPhone will be available in slate, gold, silver and “new space grey”, great news to anyone tired of the black-or-white approach Apple has taken with the iPhone since ’09. The new colours all look pretty swanky, too.

On the storage side, Apple has stuck to its 16GB/32GB/64GB model, ending speculation that a 128GB iPhone could be imminent. The starting price (in the US, of course, so that means it’s heavily subsidised by their mobile carriers) is $199 for the 16GB, $299 for the 32GB and $399 for the 64GB model. Pre-orders for the phones will open on September 13, and the phones will go in sale on September 20 in the US.

All new iPhones will ship with iOS7, Apple’s newest and most advanced operating system. It will be rolled out to all iPhones later than 4, iPad 2 and later, iPad minis and iPod touch 5th-gen on September 18, and of course all new iPhone 5S and 5Cs will ship with it installed.

The phone will be available worldwide in December “in over 100 countries, and on over 270 carriers”, although there was no specific mention of South Africa. It will be available at launch in China for the first time, though, so maybe in a few years time it’ll be our turn to sit on the launch country list for the first time. Fingers crossed!

And there you have it, that’s the iPhone 5S in a nutshell. Are you excited, or is this just another overhyped Apple phone? Let us know in the comments.

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