iPhone 5S and 5C - First Thoughts

By Aron Adler - September, 12th 2013

The blogosphere is already awash with hundreds, if not thousands of reviews on the latest generation of iPhones, the 5S and 5C. In contrast to this great rush to be the first to give My Very Valid Opinion On Apple currently sweeping the Internet though, we like to do things in a slightly more dignified manner here at GreatPreneurs. Thus, here follows our calmly considered and unrushed opinion on Apple’s latest (dual) offering.

Since we have already had an excellent article discussing the new iOS7 operating system, I will limit this discussion to the actual hardware of the new iPhones themselves.

Now, as for the iPhone 5C, it is pretty clear that this is a smartphone aimed at the budget end of the market. I note that when I say ‘budget’ this is still relative, as the lower end iPhone is only £80 cheaper than the 5S in both its 16GB and 32GB guises - not a huge amount when the 5S isn’t particularly cheap to begin with, clocking in at £549 and £629 respectively, plus a whopping £709 for the 64GB version. What I found particularly interesting is that during the course of my research for this article, when looking at how the original iPhone 5 compares with its successors, it simply was nowhere to be seen on the Apple website. Not only that, but its own predecessor, the iPhone 4S was in fact there. Although this gave me a few moments of confusion, I soon realised what it meant: the two new iPhone models are not both meant to supersede the 5 - only the iPhone 5S is meant to do that, whilst the iPhone 5C is intended merely as an update to the 5, to give it a quick multi-coloured, budget-friendly polish before sending it right back into the store.

Back to the 5S though, I am in two minds as to the fingerprint scanner. The first reason is because contrary to what people think, it does not actually add another layer of security at all. As visible in the below promotional photo, one will always be able to enter the password instead of using one’s fingerprint. Now it’s true that for people who would never have bothered to lock their phone were it not for the new ‘Touch ID’ feature this does represent an increase in security - but only because they never bothered to secure their phones otherwise. For people however who had availed themselves of the standard password locking feature, Touch ID will if anything only provide an additional route into the phone, in addition to the original unchanged password feature. Thus an increase in security it is not, regardless of the practicality of a fingerprint scanner. I must say though, having had several less than pleasurable experiences with fingerprint scanners in the past that I am very curious to see whether the 5S’s will indeed work as smoothly as claimed.

Which brings me to the next point: Siri. Regular - and sometimes humorous - updates notwithstanding, it still simply does not work properly. I can say this as I have had an iPhone 4S myself for close to two years. My initial hopes of using Siri as the tireless, dry-witted personal assistant that it was meant to be swiftly evaporated as it misunderstood even my most basic and most clearly enunciated commands. This resulted in me using the feature less and less, to the point where I now use it solely for two functions: to tell it to play a song and to turn all alarms off at once (doing it manually means flicking every alarm to the ‘off’ position individually). Seeing as when Steve Jobs was alive nothing passed the doors until it passed every conceivable test, the release of Siri to me represented a clear boundary between the days of Steve Jobs and the post-Jobs days era. It thus remains to be seen whether the fingerprint scanner will signify another step away from the days of relentless perfectionism, or a further decline into mediocrity.