There is one major change on the outside: the home button now sports a ring around it, marking the area for the Touch ID fingerprint sensor. Input your prints a few times on set up and it’ll remember them, logging you and only you in. Thankfully, it works flawlessly and quickly: if you lock your phone with a passcode, it’s a useful option to have for convenience’s sake rather than security (after all, it still defaults to a pin when you restart the phone) and it’ll save you minutes every day when you’re unlocking to check email or browse the web. And if you don’t lock your phone? It won’t change a thing.
Whether you’re security conscious or not though, you’ll benefit from the other improvements in the iPhone 5s. Between iOS 7 (which looks and feel fresh, though isn’t without its flaws) and the new A7 processor, it absolutely blazes along, booting up quicker and making lag a thing of the past: games look glorious and they’re only going to get better. Impressively, battery life seems to have been slightly improved despite the faster silicon. With push notifications on and email pumping away at most you can get a day’s use out of it.
The camera, too, is better than ever. The eight megapixel sensor grabs impressive shots in low light, and exemplary ones in daylight. Better still, the live filters in iOS 7 let you give your snaps an Instagram-ish finish before you've even hit the shutter button - you can see how they all look in real-time while you frame your shot. It’s no Nokia Lumia 1020 camera, but with its mesmerising slo-mo video filming mode, the iPhone 5s comes very close.
If you've got an iPhone 5, the 5s will throw few surprises your way. Very few. Too few: it’s identically sized, for one thing, so the screen remains as cramped as ever. While plenty of people prefer displays you can reach across with one finger or thumb, it would be nice for Apple to get with the program and offer a larger variant to take on the new breed of Android phablets. If you were hoping for refreshed hardware that feels new, forget about it: the iOS 7 update for your iPhone 5 gives you an almost identical experience.
That’s about the only issue with the product itself, mind: the iPhone remains a masterful example of mobile engineering. It’s just a pity the iPhone 5s costs so much (£549 for the SIM-free 16GB version, stretching up to an eye-watering £709 for the 64GB).
While the iPhone 5c is so close in price to the 5s that you might as well just stretch the extra fiver a month, the fact remains that both are exorbitantly expensive, especially if you want 4G thrown in. If all you need is a web browser and the ability to play a few games and stream music, there are much cheaper options out there, especially if you’re prepared to venture into Android territory, or even Windows Phone. If you don’t lock your phone today, you don’t need to pay for Touch ID tomorrow.
Oh, also, the gold version is even more horrible in reality than the press images would have you believe: it’s a blingtastic atrocity that looks like a discarded prop from a 2001 rap music video. Avoid at all cost.
The Apple iPhone 5s is the phone people expected, if nothing else. It’s more powerful than ever, with a better battery life, all inside the same slick design. If you’re toting an iPhone 4 at the end of its contract and a truly fantastic camera matters to you above all else, it’s a no-brainer, but if you’re tired of glass and gun metal grey and want a new experience however, the colourful 5c might be the better option.
If you’ve got an iPhone 5 or even a 4S however, it’s not clear the new goodies inside the iPhone 5s outweigh the high price. Certainly, Touch ID on its own is not a killer feature, just a useful extra, and the software is almost identical otherwise, thanks to Apple’s post-sale support. Just don’t buy the gold 5s, whatever you do.
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