I tried the S3 in a shop and I found it to be quite laggy and the apps pre-loaded by Samsung to be inconsistent in appearance and quality. I tried my friends HTC Android (I believe it's a Desire HD) and I wasn't really that impressed by the apps available either.
So with all that in my mind I decided it was best to stick with what I know works for me. I'm a geek and the iPhone does not offer me any kind of geeky customization features. But it does offer a massive array of applications to the tune of over 700,000. And it also has support from seemingly every company imaginable. My Pay TV service, my bank, my ISP, my Mobile and Landline providers, my energy supplier.. you name it they have Apps on the iOS Store.
And of course I've also spent probably £150+ on Apps on the app store which would just go straight down the drain. And those are Apps that I'd either have to buy again or just don't exist on Android.
So I pre-ordered a 64GB iPhone 5 for myself and it came yesterday at about 4:30pm - Launch day.
I've taken some pictures here comparing it to my old 32GB iPhone 4S I would also compare it to my much older 3GS but I sold that a few weeks ago.
I'm not going to do a full blown review of the phone as there are plenty of sites for that but I will say a few things here in this mini-review. First of all this feels both larger than my iPhone 4S to my eyes and yet smaller than my iPhone 4S in my hand. It's a very strange feeling it has a bigger screen and yet a smaller physical footprint. Indeed volumetrically it is smaller than the iPhone 4S but they shoehorned in this beautiful 4" display. The screen makes this phone and it looks spectacular. It is even more colour accurate than the 4S which was largely considered the best display on a smart phone as it used IPS technology instead of AMOLED.
The physical build quality is astounding the mix of the anodised black aluminium and the glass is really striking and it looks sculpted to the same level as fine hand crafted jewelry and yet we know this is mass produced in some polluting factory in China.
Speed wise it feels faster than the 4S. Applications open noticeably quicker, browsing web pages is faster not just because of the faster 3G and LTE but because of the CPU's ability to render the pages much faster. The graphics in the phone have also seen a great boost and in-fact are now 3.5x faster than the iPhone 4S. Indeed this is the fastest ARM SoC on the market beating every other phone and tablet available including the Galaxy S3, Nexus 7 and even the iPad 3 in both CPU and GPU performance. Incredible engineering on Apples part.
The GPU performance increase is very noticeable when scrolling lists or swiping left to right between applications. Android has only just caught up to the iPhone 4's interface responsiveness with Jelly Bean and Apple has already reiterated on that level of performance twice now, first with the iPhone 4S and now with the iPhone 5. This is by far the most responsive to the touch iPhone I've ever handled.
And lastly perhaps the most important thing of all is call quality. Apple has stepped up here as well by placing three separate microphones on the device, two dedicated to listening to your environment so that it can do dynamic noise cancelling not just for the person hearing you but for you listening to the other person too. But they didn't stop there because they have also included High Definition Voice Calls which is a feature some Android phones have had for a while. I tried this yesterday with a call to my friend who also received an iPhone 5 (you must be on a HD Call enabled carrier such as Three or Orange in the UK) it is like studio quality sound nothing like the annoying tinny-staticy phone calls you're used to.
So in closing, I love my iPhone 5 it is a really excellent step up over the iPhone 4S. It doesn't bring any big innovation to the game but it reiterates on an already comfortable formula. iOS 6 was definitely a let down and in my opinion it does not meet the bar set by the iPhone 5's hardware. I feel that iOS 7 coming next year will step things up. Apple did put 1GB of RAM in the iPhone 5, up from 512MB in the iPhone 4S and with that extra memory they can certainly do a lot with the operating system.
