One of the biggest updates to the iPhone 5 is the screen size, which has been cleverly executed. Vertical height of the screen has been increased while maintaining the same screen width. This is meant to ensure backward compatibility with all existing iPhone apps.providing app designers / developers additional vertical space to work with. All existing iPhone apps will need to be updated to take advantage of this additional screen real estate. This change also transitions the iPhone 5 to a 16:9 screen device which will further the iPhone's multi-media playback / consumption capabilities. With the taller screen, users with smaller hands may find it challenging to use the device with one hand, especially as it pertains to tapping a button on the top left hand corner of the screen.
The iPhone 5 ships with an A6 processor, touted to be twice as fast as it's predecessor. This should make all existing built in apps as well as third party apps more snappy to use. Additionally, this coupled with the launch of iOS 6 should make for a much improved user experience. An important consideration for apps that are being developed and tested on the iPhone 5 is that they be implemented in a way that is meant to ensure that they are performant on older, slower devices like the iPhone 4 and 4S.
The 4G (LTE) feature of the iPhone 5 may be one of the most under-rated capabilities of the new device. Web based experiences will function more efficiently in a 4G based environment with the potential to further reduce the differences between web and native experiences. An entire class of functionality that previously pushed the processing limitations of the device can now be implemented through integration with the cloud through a high speed connection. Apps can now leverage the compute capabilities of the cloud as an extension of the device without having network latency as a limiting factor.
The 8 megapixel camera in the iPhone 5 is another addition. Photography is already one of the most common uses on a smartphone and the upgraded camera along with the Panorama (auto-stitching of photos) and enhanced Photo Stream (selective photo sharing) features are set to further displace traditional point and shoot cameras. Apps that do any sort of image processing (OCR, Image Recognition) can benefit from the increased resolution of the camera.
Individually, any one of the features above could be enough of a reason to upgrade. Collectively, though, they will likely breed a new round of innovation, possible only now because of the increased processing and high speed networking capabilities of the iPhone 5.
As other tech companies release new smartphones or update mobile operating systems, we’ll keep you updated on what this means for your mobile strategy.