iPhone 5 Thoughts

Many months late, I'd like to provide some of my thoughts on the iPhone 5.  Sure there are plenty of reviews out there, but what do you really need to know!  I'll make it short and sweet.  Here we go.

The number one benefit of the iPhone 5 is LTE.  Until you've experienced LTE speeds you can't begin to appreciate them.  The experience is most similar going from EDGE to 3G, but in the case of LTE your speeds are even faster.  In a recent trip to San Diego I had speeds up 30 Megs per second down.  Now I can't say that I've had that in all locations, but the capabilities of LTE are awesome and of course that only comes with an iPhone 5 vs other iPhones.  Specific to AT&T there were many areas where my 4G signal was weak or non existent.  I've found that since going on LTE, many of those slow and weak spots with 4G actually work with LTE.  I had heard rumors that AT&T wasn't investing in their 3G/4G infrastructure and I'm here to say that I believe that to be true.

The larger screen size may not seem like much, but it's amazing what a little bit more space means.  As applications have started to take advantage of the extra real estate, they've become even richer.  Sure movies look better, but what's even more important is that you can put four more extra icons on a screen!  The Camera program also benefits from having a larger on screen button that makes it much easier to find and press.  The old one was OK, but the iPhone 5 button is bigger and in this case, bigger is better!

The next item to mention is the phone's speed.  It's a speedster.  The best example of testing the phone's capabilities is with the Camera.  With prior iPhone's, taking photos one after another was ho hum - nothing special.  With the iPhone 5 you can take picture after picture after picture without missing a heartbeat.  When I take pictures of my family, and I have younger kids who like to look in various directions, I take multiple pictures, one after another and usually end up with a great shot.  Not having a delay is great.  Overall, the general speed and performance is better.

Well that's my list.  My intent here was to focus on the hardware and not the operating system.  I was also not trying to compare the iPhone to other non iPhone phones.  Are there better phones out there?  Maybe, and you can debate that with any comments, but as far as the iPhone 5 goes, it's a great upgrade and a great first time purchase.