First, design. A single company, known for its obsession over details,
produces both the hardware and the software. The result is a single,
coherently designed whole.
Second, superior components. As the world’s largest tech company, Apple
can call the shots with its part suppliers. It can often incorporate new
technologies — scratch-resistant Gorilla glass, say, or the supersharp
Retina screen — before its rivals can.
Third, compatibility. The iPhone’s ubiquity has led to a universe of
accessories that fit it. Walk into a hotel room, and there’s probably an
iPhone connector built into the alarm clock.
If you had to write a term paper for this course, you might open with
this argument: that in creating the new iPhone 5 ($200 with contract),
Apple strengthened its first two advantages — but handed its rivals the
third one on a silver platter.
Let’s start with design. The new phone, in all black or white, is
beautiful. Especially the black one, whose gleaming, black-on-black,
glass-and-aluminum body carries the design cues of a Stealth bomber. The
rumors ran rampant that the iPhone 5 would have a larger screen. Would
it be huge, like many
Android
phones? Those giant screens are thudding slabs in your pocket, but
they’re fantastic for maps, books, Web sites, photos and movies.
As it turns out, the new iPhone’s updated footprint (handprint?) is
nothing like the Imax size of its rivals. It’s the same 2.3 inches wide,
but its screen has grown taller by half an inch — 176 very tiny pixels.
It’s a nice but not life-changing change. You gain an extra row of icons
on the Home screen, more messages in e-mail lists, wider keyboard keys
in landscape mode and a more expansive view of all the other built-in
apps. (Non-Apple apps can be written to exploit the bigger screen. Until
then, they sit in the center of the larger screen, flanked by
unnoticeable slim black bars.)
At 0.3 inch, the phone is thinner than before, startlingly so — the
thinnest in the world, Apple says. It’s also lighter, just under four
ounces; it disappears completely in your pocket. This iPhone is so
light, tall and flat, it’s well on its way to becoming a bookmark.
Second advantage: components. There’s no breakthrough feature this time,
no Retina screen or Siri. (Thought recognition will have to wait for
the iPhone 13.)
Even so, nearly every feature has been upgraded, with a focus on what counts: screen, sound, camera, speed.
The iPhone 5 is now a 4G LTE phone, meaning that in certain lucky
cities, you get wicked-fast Internet connections. (Verizon has by far
the most LTE cities, with AT&T a distant second and Sprint at the
rear. Here’s a
cool coverage comparison map:
j.mp/V5wEwN.)
The phone itself runs faster, too. Its new processor runs twice as fast,
says Apple. Few people complained about the old phone’s speed, but this
one certainly zips.
The screen now has better color reproduction. The front-facing camera
captures high-definition video now (720p). The battery offers the same
talk time as before (eight hours), but adds
two more hours
of Web browsing (eight hours), even on LTE networks. In practical
terms, you encounter fewer days when the battery dies by dinnertime — a
frequent occurrence with 4G phones.
The camera is among the best ever put into a phone. Its lowlight shots
blow away the same efforts from an iPhone 4S. Its shot-to-shot times
have been improved by 40 percent. And you can take stills even while
recording video (1080p hi-def, of course).
So far, so good. But now, the third point, about universal compatibility.
These days, that decade-old iPhone/iPad/iPod charging connector is
everywhere: cars, clocks, speakers, docks, even medical devices. But the
new iPhone won’t fit any of them.
Apple calls its replacement the Lightning connector. It’s much sturdier
than the old jack, and much smaller — 0.31 inch wide instead of 0.83.
And there’s no right side up — you can insert it either way. It clicks
satisfyingly into place, yet you can remove it easily. It’s the very
model of a modern major connector.
Well, great. But it doesn’t fit any existing accessories, docks or chargers. Apple sells
an adapter plug for $30 (or $40 with an
eight-inch cable
“tail”). If you have a few accessories, you could easily pay $150 in
adapters for a $200 phone. That’s not just a slap in the face to loyal
customers — it’s a jab in the eye.
Even with the adapter, not all accessories work with the Lightning, and
not all the features of the old connector are available; for example,
you can’t send the iPhone’s
video out to a TV cable.
Apple says that a change was inevitable — that old connector, after 10
years, desperately needed an update. Still, Apple has just given away
one of its greatest competitive advantages.
The phone comes with new software, iOS 6, bristling with large and small
improvements — and it’s a free download that also runs on the iPhone
3GS, iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S.
The
chief attractions
of iOS 6 are a completely new GPS/maps app (Apple ditched Google Maps
and wrote its own app); new talents for Siri, the voice-activated
assistant (she now answers questions about current movies, sports and
restaurants); and one-tap canned responses to incoming calls (like “I’m
driving — call you later”).
There’s a new panorama mode for the camera, too, that comes in handy
more often than you might expect. As you swing the phone around you, it
stitches many shots together into a seamless, ultra-wide-angle,
28-megapixel photo. Unlike other apps and phones with panorama modes,
this one is fully automated and offers a preview of the panorama that
materializes as you’re taking it. (For my
complete review of iOS 6, see
nytimes.com/pogue.)
Should you get the new iPhone, when the best Windows Phone and Android
phones offer similarly impressive speed, beauty and features?
The iPhone 5 does nothing to change the pros and cons in that
discussion. Windows Phones offer brilliant design, but lag badly in apps
and accessories.
Android phones shine in choice: you can get a huge screen, for example, a
memory-card slot or N.F.C. chips (near-field communication — you can
exchange files with other N.F.C. phones, or buy things in certain
stores, with a tap). But Android is, on the whole, buggier, more chaotic
and more fragmented — you can’t always upgrade your phone’s software
when there’s a new version.
IPhones don’t offer as much choice or customization. But they’re more
polished and consistently designed, with a heavily regulated but better
stocked app catalog. They offer Siri voice control and the best
music/movie/TV store, and the phone’s size and weight have boiled away
to almost nothing.
If you have an iPhone 4S, getting an iPhone 5 would mean breaking your
two-year carrier contract and paying a painful penalty; maybe not worth
it for the 5’s collection of nips and tucks. But if you’ve had the
discipline to sit out a couple of iPhone generations — wow, are you in
for a treat.
It’s just too bad about that connector change. Doesn’t Apple worry about losing customer loyalty and sales?
Actually, Apple has a long history of killing off technologies,
inconveniently and expensively, that the public had come to love — even
those that Apple had originally developed and promoted. Somehow, life
goes on, and Apple gets even bigger.
So if you wanted to conclude your term paper by projecting the new
connector’s impact on the iPhone’s popularity, you’d be smart to write,
“very little (sigh).” When you really think about it, we’ve all taken
this class before.
WASHINGTON: The top US commander in Afghanistan, General John Allen said he was "mad as hell" about attacks by Afghan soldiers on Western troops, but expected them to continue even after the United States and NATO end combat operations in 2014. 
KARACHI:
Pakistan Tahrik-e-Insaf (PTI), which was near the peak of its
popularity graph, has gone down, while ML-N has taken over the top
position.
COLOMBO:
Pakistan defeated South Africa by two wickets in a group two Super
Eights match of the World Twenty20 in Colombo on Friday.
