The iPhone 5, which you couldn't possibly have missed coverage of since it's been discussed and nauseam by geeks and non-techies alike, is actually Apple's sixth-generation smartphone, despite being handed the "5" moniker. In 2007, Apple introduced the original iPhone, then the iPhone 3G arrived, and a while later, Apple introduced the 3GS - a much faster, slicker experience than both of its predecessors. The iPhone 4 brought a radical new design and Retina display to a table now crowded by ravenous iFans, and the iPhone 4S cuts a more vivid picture, having been introduced only eleven months ago.
The smartphone market is among the largest and fastest growing markets in the world of consumer electronics. It is currently dominated by the iPhone and Android smartphones, with BlackBerry and Windows Phone at a distant 3rd and 4th position. Now that Apple has released the iPhone 5, arguably the biggest smartphone of the year with 5 million units sold in the opening weekend, it’s time to take a look at the smartphone market and, more importantly, involved consumers.
The first weekend of iPhone 5 sales is now over and judging by the queues that were being experienced at various Apple Stores in available countries, it was expected that Apple would be seeing some extremely positive sales numbers after the first three days of availability. In a press statement coming out of California today, Apple Inc. have announced that they managed to ship five million iPhone 5 units following the release on Friday September 21st.
The iPhone 5 has been officially available through Apple and the carriers for two days now and although it has been heralded as a success, there are still a few issues that have some users expressing a little concern. One of the biggest talking points has been the removal of Google Maps in favor of Apple's own vector based mapping system, which in itself wouldn't be too much of an issue but Apple have gotten things drastically wrong in some users opinion.
Those of you who have installed iOS 6 or purchased a device like the iPhone 5 will notice that it no longer has the YouTube application bundled as part of the OS. Google have released a fairly decent app onto the App Store, but at the moment it doesn't come with a native iPad version meaning that users needs to run it as an iPhone app on the iPad. It is also yet to be updated for the new iPhone 5.
Yesterday, it was confirmed through multiple benchmarks that, with its custom ARMv7 dual-core chip dynamically clocked between 750MHz to 1.2GHz, Apple’s iPhone 5 is indeed the fastest smartphone available in the market today. It bests every other high-end Android smartphone (Galaxy S III, One X, Galaxy Nexus, you name it!); doesn’t matter if they come with four cores or are clocked at higher frequencies.
Apple made a song and dance of the new iPhone 5's camera improvements, and although the resolution remained at 8-megapixels (translating to "unchanged" among the overwhelming majority), Apple not only improved its build quality by incorporating a Sapphire lens, but also claim it performs much better in low lighting conditions.
Despite the shockingly-bad Maps app upsetting a vast number of iOS 6 users, the Cupertino company's latest and greatest mobile firmware has been downloaded and installed in record numbers. Fuelled by the frenzied consumer rush for the new iPhone 5, the new operating system has been adopted at a rate 122 percent faster than iOS 5, which released last October.
Apple really brought forth some significant changes with the iPhone 5, and one of the most obvious is the new, larger display. Having stuck faithfully by its 3.5-inch configuration since day one, the Cupertino-based company finally felt it time to offer users of its iconic smartphone a little bit more real estate to play around with. However, breaking from the mold of many rivaling vendors, the fruit company opted to maintain the same width of the display, instead adding a sizeable block of pixels along the top.
It has, by and large, been a pretty good past week or two for Apple, and with stocks rising thanks to high sales forecasts of the iPhone 5, Tim Cook and his team have plenty to feel positive about. Having said that, iOS 6 hasn't released to such critical acclaim, and although it offers quite a few minor improvements in many key areas, one of the most anticipated changes - the new Maps app - looks to have been a marked fail.
