Apple's iPhone 5s launched: Fingerprint sensor and other key features

Apple on Tuesday announced two new iPhones, the iPhone 5s and the iPhone 5C. The iPhone 5s is the premium smartphone from Apple.

Apple has kept the screen size the same; 4-inches with Retina Display quality. The phone comes in three colours - gold, silver or space gray. And thankfully, the gold iPhone 5s looks exactly like the ones in the various leaked pictures, which means it is a more tasteful ‘champagne’ gold rather than a device that screams ‘bling’.

The iPhone 5s also comes with a 64-bit A7 chip which Apple says makes it the only smartphone in the world with a 64-bit system. Apple has also upgraded its inbuilt iPhone apps to support 64-bit. However as this post on Zdnet points out, Apple’s 64-bit system will make a difference only when the app ecosystem catches up, that is when developers make apps supporting 64-bit.

The 64-bit architecture can handle more bytes than the 32-bit system, which means that the device will be able to handle data much faster. In doing this, Apple has followed the line from the PC system where 64-bit is common now. This was also the first time that Apple was touting its hardware for the phone, in a market saturated with quad-core smartphones. Rival Samsung has now moved on to octa-core smartphones with the launch of the Galaxy S4 and the Galaxy Note 3.

Like the Nexus 7, the iPhone 5s supports OpenGL ES 3.0 for graphics. This allows better reflections and lens flares. It also offers better photo-realism for gaming. Users can see details such as skin texture, shadows, etc in games.

iPhone 5s still has an 8-eight megapixel rear camera and it seems that Apple like HTC is not going to take part in the megapixel wars. The front camera is now 1.2 megapixels.

Apple’s iPhone 5s has a f/2.2 aperture and a new, larger sensor which Apple says is 15 percent bigger than the previous iPhone 5 version. A bigger sensor means that the quality of the picture improves in low light.

The camera also has a dual-LED flash which Apple is calling the True Tone Flash. The dual-tone flash is in two colours white and amber and ensures that users get better lighting when they are clicking photos.

According to Apple this feature makes the photos appear more natural. The camera has a new burst mode with 10 frames per second. It also has a Slo-Mo mode which lets users shoot 20 frames per second. It also has a 28-megapixel panorama. Apple has also added Instagram-like filters in inside the Camera suite.

Apple iPhone 5S also has a new part M7 which is a motion co-processor. Essentially this will constantly measure data from the accelerometer, compass, and gyroscope and help with health apps. Apple has also released a new Core Motion API which developers can use in their apps. This is will identify user movements. Apple says the M7 will save battery life for pedometer or other fitness apps that use the accelerometer all day as the A7 chip won’t be called into do such tasks.

The iPhone 5s also comes with Touch ID aka the Fingerprint sensor which is built into the home button. Apple has used laser cut sapphire crystal, together with the capacitive touch sensor in the Home button to analyse fingerprints.

Apple says that all fingerprints are encrypted and stored in the Secure Enclave inside the A7 chip on the iPhone 5s and never on Apple’s servers or iCloud. You can use the fingerprint scanner to buy apps from App Store, music and movies from iTunes, etc.

The iPhone 5s has 10 hours of battery life on 3G. It’s retailing for $199 for 16 gigabytes of memory, $299 for 32 gigabytes and $399 for 64 gigabytes, all with a two-year contract in the US.

The phone is likely to come to India by December. It goes on sale in the US, Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Puerto Rico, Singapore and the UK on 20 September. Apple has also discontinued the iPhone 5. The unlocked version of the iPhone 5S is $649, so expect the phone to be priced pretty high when it comes to India.

This is the first time that Apple is launching the iPhone in China in an initial release phase.