The Future of iPhones and Beyond: A Conversation with Peter and Ali Kazimi

In this latest episode of Mobile Nations, we're joined by tech experts Peter and Ali Kazimi to discuss the latest developments in the world of smartphones. The conversation starts with a discussion about the new iPhone 5S, which has been making waves in the tech community. According to Peter, "the value of that device overall is tremendous" and while he doesn't recommend it as a must-have for everyone, he believes it's still a great device that will keep him happy for the time being.

As we move on to talk about the future of iPhones, Ali shares his thoughts on what keeps him excited. For him, it's not just about the hardware, but also about iOS 7 and the sheer amount of app updates that are happening. He believes that these updates will be enough to keep him happy until next year, when a new iPhone is released. On the other hand, Peter is looking forward to seeing how developers push the boundaries of what the 5S can do in the coming year.

One of the topics discussed is ibeacons, which are low-energy Bluetooth devices that can be used for location-based services and other applications. According to Ali, ibeacons are not specific to the new iPhones, but rather a technology that Apple has supported since iOS 4.2, allowing existing devices to also use them. Peter notes that while NFC was not included in the new iPhone, he believes it's a mistaken assumption to pit Bluetooth LE against NFC, as both technologies have their own strengths and weaknesses.

One practical example of how ibeacons can be used is in Major League Baseball, where sensors have been installed in stadiums to enable fans to receive notifications on their devices when they're near the field. For instance, if you walk up to the front gates, your tickets will be automatically pulled up for scanning at the gate or other relevant information about the park will be displayed. This is just one example of how ibeacons can enhance someone's experience in a way that's not possible with NFC or GPS.

In terms of finding more information on ibeacons and their potential applications, Peter recommends checking out his writings on imore.com, as well as Twitter handles @imogel and @flagf-largh. Ali also invites readers to check out her work on mobileinsight.com and Renee Ritchie's social media channels.

As we wrap up our conversation with Peter and Ali, they thank the chat room for joining them and express their gratitude to all listeners who tune in to Mobile Nations every week. It's been an amazing community and we appreciate your support. Thank you, Peter, Ali, and Renee for sharing your expertise and insights with us today.

A Word from Our Experts

As always, we want to hear from our readers. Do you have any questions or topics you'd like to discuss? Join the conversation on social media using the hashtags #MobileNations and #iBeacon. We'll be answering some of your questions on our next episode, so don't miss out!

About Our Guests

Peter: [No bio provided]

Ali Kazimi: Ali is a tech expert and writer who has contributed to Mobile Nations. You can find her work on imore.com and follow her on Twitter at @imogel.

Renee Ritchie: Renee is another tech expert and writer who contributes to Mobile Nations. She invites readers to check out her social media channels for more information.

About Mobile Nations

Mobile Nations is a weekly podcast that brings you the latest news, reviews, and analysis on the world of mobile technology. From smartphones to wearables, we cover it all. Tune in every week for new episodes and subscribe to our show on your favorite platform.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enit's Thursday October 3rd for 2013. I'm Renee Ritchie and today we are going to review the brand new iPhone 5S and iPhone 5c live this is the imore show the exact editor of loop insight and the managing editor of imore joins us as usual internet Bobby Val Peter Cohen how are you Peter fine Renee how are you doing good you survived launch week I did indeed how'd you do uh okay it feels a a bit like butter spread too much over too much bread but you know we we do what we can Peter I imagine you've got some pretty thick calluses on your finger from all the uh typing you've been doing it's you know it's not the typing it's the trackpads for some reason after a while I don't know if there's chemicals on the trackpad or what it is my fingers just my fingertips feel numb um too much track padding someone who knows all about too much track padding is our how-to editor and a resident ninja in charge Ali kazmua how are you Ali nice iPhone 5c pink T-shirt alley I know this is a purple t-shirt you are all the color coordinated please I know Ally got one of these I'm gonna hold mine up this was a way funner and I'm using the Apple conjugation of the verb tufan uh iPhone then I have then I thought it would be I mean I used it all the time 24 7 for a weekend and then every alternate day for a week and I loved it I loved the way it looked and I loved the way iOS 7 looked on it what did you think Ellie I did I was really surprised because at first it's I have kind of mixed feelings about it or at least I did but then once I held it it's really it's not a cheap phone like I think I would honestly be okay with this phone if I didn't have a 5S or if I wanted to have a backup phone I I really kind of like it so I mean I was skeptical at first but it's really kind of Genius of Apple because instead of like keeping the five the five costs more to produce so putting these colored bags on the same internals gives people an option um I think it'll be really popular with people that aren't necessarily they don't need the latest and greatest technology they just want a fun phone that's better than what they have and at 99 I think they'll do well with that did you have a chance to hold it Peter because I I was anticipating the iPhone 3G and 3GS had pretty good plastic I've Loved HTC's plastic I've really loved Nokia's plastic I'm not a huge fan of Samsung's plastic and I'm always nervous when a new plastic phone came out but I think using this the antenna I think it's stainless steel still as a frame made it really solid indeed yeah you know I've been uh playing with them on and off for the past couple of weeks excuse me and I've been pretty impressed with uh the the overall build quality of the phone you know I wrote an editorial um before the iPhone 5c actually launched uh talking about uh the composition of the back of it and uh people made fun of me because my my takeaway was basically it's plastic but it's a better quality plastic you know it's better plastic because it's polycarbonate I completely stand by that I think it's a very high quality phone um I'm personally protesting the 5c until Apple releases a purple one you and Jim Dalrymple you both want your Samuel L Jackson lightsaber color that's exactly right you know I mean uh but I think Jim ended up with a green one after all that but uh he lost it in his beard you're right exactly um it's it's not quite Heineken green either um but uh it you know it's a very nice quality phone and I mean not everybody has to have the latest and greatest from Apple not everybody needs all of the features that the 5S has and for everyone else uh the 5c is a very nice option so um I think that's exactly right I know Dave Dave whiskers call it from unprofessional called them candy coated uh iPhones and that's in a way that's exactly right I kept hearing about the less expensive iPhone project at Apple for going on two years maybe more and I know the idea kept coming up and they just never went ahead with it they always kept last year's device reduced it by a hundred dollars and sold that um and it and then there's a lot of fretting about you know it's not cheap enough it's too high a price and it turns out Apple didn't care at all about a less expensive iPhone they wanted to make a more appealing iPhone and the colors did I mean my mother saw the commercials she watched the keynote with me I forced my mother to watch the keynote because I want her take on it that's true and she loved the iPhone 5c she's a history of art and architecture professor and for her it was Andy Warhol it was pop art it really was colorful and fun through and through and Ali I mean I think that was a smart choice because it lets Apple still keep the high end of the market but I'll slightly larger size of that high-end Market yeah I think that a lot of people I saw a lot of articles on one where some blogs were for some reason surprised that the 5c didn't sell well at launch I didn't expect it to it's not a phone that people were gonna line up at launch for it's the phone that's going to take the people that are you know don't want to spend 200 on a new phone they want to spend 99 and now they can get a brand new iPhone for that won their contracts up I think the where you'll see you know the 5S they sold a ton at launch and then I think they'll see you'll see the 5S can be a steady phone for them that will sell because it's a comparable offer you have all these Android phones that are available on contract for 99 well there's not an iPhone on contract for 99 that's brand new it's a year two year old model so I think that's what it's meant for it I think the biggest surprise for me was that they didn't release a red version that's a very popular color salmon pink I just know from like um just industry experience and you know data that I see red is a very popular customization color for iPhone it's the second most popular next to gold and they didn't release a black at all and black is almost always the most popular color when not available I think you made a good point along or a couple weeks ago that um when we thought there wouldn't be a black 5c that it's probably because of the fact that black is popular it's the best-selling model so it makes sense to push people that want black into the upper model so my question Peter you're my go-to retail guy it seems to me like these they're even an iPod Touch packaging and it seems to me their job is not to draw in like Ali said the big launch day crowd the big pre-order crowd but to sit on a shelf looking candy coated delicious day after day after day all through the holiday season and attract buyers visually absolutely right you know the presentation of the iPhone 5c is completely different from the 5S if you don't understand what Renee is talking about the 5c is presented very similarly to the iPod Touch in that it's in a plastic case um the Ali's got it right there and you can see it you can see the color uh of the case and of course you know the uh the screen overlay um uh that matches the the back color of the device whereas the five asses in Apple's sort of traditional uh black box or white box um enclosure so you don't actually see it until you open it you just see a photo on the front of it so you know it's it's I it's an interesting visual differentiation between the 5C and the 5S and it does tell you that I think Apple's trying to commodify the 5c a little bit even if the price isn't you know a rock bottom price they're still trying to commodify it a little bit um as a lifestyle device you know it's something that that appeals to people that's got a little bit of fun and Whimsy to it whereas the 5S is a more serious professional tool what do you think um Ali about the construct so the plastic Peter mentioned it before it's really high quality polyurethane sorry polycarbonate but it's also got a hard coating on it I know a lot of people like the soft touch the mattes the way the Nokia phones for example look what do you think about the actual choice of plastic for these devices and the colors that they put on them first thing I did you love the plastic I almost actually kind of like the feel of it better than I do this but I think this looks much better it's more high quality but as far as like in my hand if someone were to put a 5S on one hand and a 5C on the other hand and ask me which is easier or felt better to hold I almost want to say I'd say a 5c I was a huge fan of the 3Gs though and the way it curved and it just felt nice in your hands so and I think this brings a little bit of that back and that might be why I'm kind of partial to it that's interesting Peter what about the colors compared to for example I think the iPod Touch metallic colors look a little bit nicer and there they do have the red and they do have the Slate black indeed I like the metallic uh the the anodized um uh colors of the um iPod uh touch a little bit more than the plastic colors of the 5c um the one interesting thing about the 5c with the hard coating on it really necessary when you're dealing with polycarbonate polycarbonate is almost shatterproof um uh it's been used in optics for years and I remember when polycarb first started getting used in Optics um uh eyeglass places would have demonstration lenses that showed like a 10 penny nail driven through the center of a lens to show you how it was shatterproof the problem is that it's not very scratch resistant so Apple had to put a lacquer coating on the back of the 5c otherwise your iPhone 5c would look like crap in your pocket after about a week of rubbing look like the Millennium Falcon exactly carbon scoring and everything so um that that was a real necessary thing for Apple to do so you know it it makes it harder it changes the the feel of it a little bit but I think it's it's an absolutely necessary uh necessary change as far as the colors are concerned look you know Apple's going to change the colors every years every year just like they do with iPods you know we're going to get a little bit of variation yeah I think they did really well with the build quality but I am not a fan of the colors at all the blue green are the only decent ones the interesting thing to me about the colors is you know Apple's got um an ad that they've run a few times I haven't seen it too much actually in broadcast uh but it is available on the web called uh designed it together and one of the things that they emphasize in it is he's sort of using their visual language in this 30 second spot is that uh or a one minute spot is that the colors of the iPod touch or the I mean of the iPhone 5c are very complementary um to the the base palette in iOS 7. I thought that was a really interesting thing and I think that that might explain where Apple went at least with the initial design of the 5c yeah and I wonder if they change their colors every year where their iOS 7 gets subtly changed every year to match whatever the hot because they did that with the iPod with the iPods with whatever the hot palette is that year yeah I think there's other gradients they could have pulled iOS 7 is very colorful and like the pink Renee you and I had a conversation about that stuff okay can you hold it up can you hold up the home screen see it the brightness down foreign I mean there's a lot of colors in there that they could have used like pink is salmon it's not pink I think they could have went with a different shade that would have color matched because there's a lot of gradients I think the blue is okay yeah I do too I just the yellow and the pink and I just think they're really loud the yellow is not waterproof like iOS 7 it will not protect your phone from water so do not make that mistake the green one does make you horny though just like M M's it does not it makes you in Hulk induced rage um moving on a little bit it's got an improved FaceTime camera the back camera is the same eyesight camera from the iPhone 5 which was a great camera but they left it exactly the same the FaceTime camera got bigger 1.9 I think it went up from 1.7 to 1.9 Micron lens it's still 720p uh 1280 by um uh 720 pictures and video but it's got a back a backside illuminated sensor which means it's got all the circuitry out of the way so it can capture more light it's that Photon Obsession again but Ali to me I mean unless you're making a lot of FaceTime calls at night and we don't judge you know judgment free zone here or you're taking lot of selfies at night I didn't see a huge difference I know you put them through a lot of testing did you notice anything um I didn't really use too much of the front facing cameras I think you did that one um but with the rear camera I know that they say the five and the 5c are the same but I kind of found the 5c rear camera to be a little bit over saturated and I don't know if that's like the colored backs that are maybe playing a little bit into that um but they were different the front facing camera I haven't played with too much but I the few times that I've used FaceTime I really don't see a discernible difference from my five but then again we're not really it's it's during the day that I use you're not a low light facetimer or it's you know in a well-lit environment um in our living room like our condo is kind of laid out we don't have a ton of overhead lighting we have more like space lighting so it's kind of dim I call it a cave when I'm trying to get shots for eye more because I can never get anything that looks right but even the five handled fine for FaceTime calls and I don't really see a difference with the 5c and what about LTE Peter I mean I know Apple said that they included way more LTE bands than most bands on any phone that'll mostly affect people outside the US but since you're on T-Mobile you might as well be outside the US yeah indeed you know these these phones have been updated to um include even more LTE bands than before uh which which is great uh you know really depends on who your carrier is um I I'm not aware of any specific differences between the 5C and the 5s in terms of um uh in in terms of coverage at the same as far as I know same chip yeah it's the same chip so um there is a big difference though between the five and the 5c so if you're still on the fence about whether you want a 5c because you can get a better deal on the five I'd strongly consider the 5c because you're going to be able to get better coverage in more places uh depending on your carrier so uh let's just do a quick round the room Ali who would you recommend an iPhone 5c to and do you like it in general I do like an I recommend a 5c to anyone who doesn't want to spend a ton of money on a phone uh who doesn't my friends that don't read text sites that don't know that the iPhone 5S has a 64-bit processor in it I think most of those people are okay and maybe even people that are a little bit more clumsy because I honestly think that the 5c is probably going to be a little bit more resistant to breaks mainly because it looks like the screen is actually inlaid a little better um into the actual chassis than it is on like the 5S where are the five where it's it pops up so I think that's going to cause the glass to break so maybe clumsy friends number one because it might not break as easy and number two because it costs less computer same question I think that the uh five five C is a great choice for anybody who's got an iPhone uh four or older um that they want to upgrade from 4S to the 5c the big difference that you're going to get is LTE and you know all the improvements that were available in the five if you got a five it the 5c is is a lateral uh change you know you'll get some color Improvement but I want that color bad you got to want that color bad exactly so it's kind of a wash there but I'd say it's a safe bet for anybody with a 4S or earlier that are looking to upgrade or for that matter somebody who's new to the iPhone uh trying it out for the first time and uh you know don't necessarily want to have to spend um a lot more money to get the iPhone um it's a good entry level model now you know I agree with both of you I liked it a lot more than I thought it would because I've been using an iPhone 5 for so long I thought it would just be an iPhone 5 and as goofy and cheesy as it is it is just so much fun like you see the green but because the green comes out on the front too it's visually different and because it permeates the entire operating system you set the home screen color and then when you use Notification Center or control center those are all translucent so that color comes through comes through on the passcode lock I do miss not having Touch ID on it that's the only really big thing and the camera is not quite as good but for most people I think that's impossible to tell so I would recommend like my mom she would have a lot more fun with a 5c she doesn't need to spend the extra money she wouldn't appreciate the differences very much anyone who's new to the platform anyone who's younger or you know just who wants something not as serious as an iPhone 5s and I think Apple did a good job one thing I'm curious about Peter is if we could see apple introduce other colors out of cycle for example and I don't think this will happen but maybe in future years a red one around Christmas time a purple one around spring and use that as a way to juice the line as they go through the year so they're not as stuck to you know once a year Cycles or with organizations like product red yeah my assumption is that if they do a red one I mean because they do have the red case for the iPhone 5s and and uh that is a product right uh uh accessory so uh you know part of the proceeds of the sale of that go towards the uh AIDS charity that um you two lead singer Bono uh founded a number of years ago um I guess I guess that that's entirely possible um I'm just trying to think of of whether or not Apple I mean I always try to infer from what Apple has done in the past and I know that this is a dangerous game to to see what they would do in the future and I I can't really think of of of times where Apple has done that to the iPod line but maybe I'm wrong yeah I don't recall either I just wonder if they'll ever be able to kind of get out of that everyone's going to wait till September a thing didn't they just revise the 5th gen iPod Touch mid-cycle no it was the end of cycle it was instead of doing uipod touches this year they made a space gray model did put 128 gigabytes into the iPad 4 you know in the spring slotters that are introducing new ones so I'm just curious now that they've gone color maybe they can you know do more varieties of color I think they're in a different position with the 5c um I think it could give them they always you always see analysts and people talking about low sales numbers towards the end or mid-product cycle so I think they kind of have a unique opportunity with the 5c to say like you said red for Christmas or product red or something they can throw new phones in there that kind of give that another marketing push mid-cycle we shall see uh Switching gears iPhone 5S this is the new flagship model this is the gold uh version which to me you know as Brian kluke says is the only acceptable choice but I know you know Peter finds it not acceptable at all no I just for it I know brilliant I already the irony of it is incredible um so we did it we did a detailed review for the iPhone 5C and for the iPhone 5s those are both going to be in the show notes but uh the design the design is identical to last year's iPhone 5 except for the gold and the slate gray being replaced by the new space gray which I'm guessing is the politically correct way of saying gunmetal gray these days I like the visual difference last year Apple rebuilt the iPhone 5 to the atom almost incredible manufacturing and people might a lot of people said uh still around a rectangle boring so this year Apple's like fine screw you all you want is superficial change here you go two new colors and people went we did a whole podcast on it people went ballistic for the Gold version a lot of people really like the um space gray version Ali do you think that slate was replaced with space gray just because it's more resilient a finish yep I think a lot of it position black is the hardest color to produce it takes the longest um I don't know exact measurements but I think gold is over a half an hour I think and then I think to produce colors like gold or uh that's another one that's easy to produce those are like the lighter shades are a lot less like minutes so I think that it has to do with production time and the darker you get I don't know if Apple really at the mass scale that they is that really has the time and if they're not done correctly your coating is not as thick so this makes more sense and actually I really like the contrast of this better than the Slate I just think it looks better um you can tell there's a these phones it's almost like they're supposed to be a contrast between the back panels and the aluminum like the original iPhone Peter you like it too indeed I do indeed well you know I I um I like the Slate actually I like it a lot um I don't even know if you can see that that's black and then the space gray so that's like a true black and the gray yeah yeah no I I I I I certainly like it it's it's a nice um it's a nice effect I you know on on that particular phone I I excuse me on that particular phone I I don't particularly like the white around it I'm not a big fan of uh of of the white phones it you know it's interesting they photograph great we use them in our screenshots all the time for products um but actually using one I prefer to kind of get lost to the inky Blackness of uh of a black uh front phone so um it I I ha I have toyed with the idea though of having my uh uh my space gray uh iPhone uh 5S Uh custom anodized in some funky color purple yeah definitely all right so you've got the slight design difference and it seems to have worked it perked up a lot of people um the next difference well the one most observable differences is Touch ID right on the front there the idea of touch ID is instead of entering a passcode or instead of entering your iTunes pass uh password for App Store iBook store and iTunes store purchases you can just put your thumb or finger on it and it will match that to whatever mathematical formula of that previously registered fingerprint is on the A7 chipsets secure enclave and then it will release a token yes or no if it's yes it lets you in if it's or verifies your purchase and if it's no it doesn't it's very simple um and let's let's talk about the usability before we get into some of the controversy I know Ally's had problems but I've been using it non-stop for a week I have had unless I reboot my device or I deliberately cause it to fail five times I've never been asked for a passcode or an iTunes password but Ali you're apparently getting asked every five minutes um you don't buy enough apps I don't know I bought 12 of them one day it was fine um I think maybe that's why Renee because you're you know tweaking it enough that it doesn't reset because I've had the same problem that Ali's had yeah Richard's had that too yeah Richard's had it um message and it happens I get it every couple of hours I typically download or re-download apps quite frequently but probably two or three times a day for some reason I get a funky message in the App Store that comes up and tells me to re-verify touch ID purchases and to do that I have to enter my password um I also get it whenever I redeem a code or anything like that it doesn't I don't know if it lets you use fingerprints to redeem codes though no not yet nor Apple store purchases yeah same thing for you Peter yeah absolutely I'm seeing it um I've seen it several times now and of course if you reboot your phone uh you can't use Touch ID right away it wants you to input your passcode again Apple's doing the best I can to balance the convenience of touch ID with the security of a passcode um to make sure that uh you are who you say you you are I am sure that as time goes on um Apple's going to learn how people are using these things and figure out better ways to manage this stuff so I don't think any of us really have any reason to expect Apple to get the touch ID experience perfectly on the first try what's that Ali that's it Marissa that's the error message yep it says sign into iTunes Store confirm Apple ID password for my email to renew Touch ID purchases maybe it just thinks you're hella sketchy Maybe so I mean according to Apple's documents in my experience it will only ever ask you for your passcode or password if you failed five times if you have rebooted your phone or if you have not used it in 48 hours lies pack of lies great lies it sounds reasonable uh and you know to allay and he says some people don't think it's secure enough and that's a fair point like Peter mentioned there's always a battle between convenience and security and Apple's made with Touch ID security much more convenient it is probably stronger than a passcode because there's you know 10 000 passcode combinations where there's 50 000 fairly unique fingerprint combinations like there's a 150 000 chance someone will randomly have the same fingerprint but there's a one in ten thousand chance they can randomly enter your passcode it is much less secure than a strong you know pseudo-random password especially if it's 20 30 40 digits but entering that on Mobile sucks so badly nobody ever does it and apple had statistics at 50 of people don't even use a passcode but in order to use Touch ID you have to not only enable passcode but enable it immediately so when it works it's incredibly convenient but when it doesn't it's much more secure than people who ran around around you know uh passcode naked as a day that they were born so I think overall and I'm curious to hear what you guys think maybe Peter can start overall I think Touch ID is a huge win and I want it on everything I was making my computer monitor smudgy today trying to pass code on sorry trying to touch ID unlock one passwords icon you know I'm I'm in the same boat I've actually caught myself several times holding my thumb over the home button on my iPad to try to unlock it and uh you know having to catch myself and and so you know wait a minute that doesn't work so um I'm I'm definitely looking forward to um Apple rolling out Touch ID across the rest of the line and I think it's going to be um one of those things that we're going to see on everything within it within a year um you know like I said before I I think that that it's still a work in progress in terms of how actually Apple actually handles it and the one thing that Security Experts have said um that I completely agree with is that I think that Apple really needs to have two two-factor authentication at least an option um on it so for those of us who are very concerned about security not only having um the the the the the touch ID but also requiring you to enter uh the passcode um that might be one way uh to resolve some of the open issues that some people have with it quibbles aside Touch ID is a great Advance it makes things a lot more convenient and um it's just it's a terrific um uh Improvement in usability I don't necessarily think it's a terrific Improvement in security but it makes my secure device that much more easy to use and that makes me happy I reach for my iPad and try and unlock it and then have to enter in a passcode like an animal and I feel bad about myself Ally what about you exactly um I think it's great I don't necessarily look at it as an I didn't in the first place look at it as a way to make devices more secure but I think Apple's aim with iOS 7 in general in touch ID when it comes to security was to get more people to learn to use security they don't realize they have photos of their family they log into their bank accounts they have their emails on there people don't think about things like that and I think that having something is better than nothing um the odds of someone getting a hold of your phone and being able to get past Touch ID realistically aren't high so I think that it's gonna increase that and then paired with some of the other things like you can't restore a phone without turning find my iPhone off I think a lot of that I think it's going to curb theft I think that's a huge issue uh just you know being in the repair business up until recently I can't tell you how many times a week people would come in and say is there any way for me to get a phone back that I didn't have find my iPhone turned on no you know so I think it'll help with that tremendously and I think that's a huge advance um so in the chat room they're asking about setting it up I did have an awkward experiencing experience setting it up and your first time is never easy so if you have an awkward first time don't worry about it it does get easier I I found it odd that I put my finger down and then it would tell me to touch repeatedly I took it off too early it would then vibrate it would scare me I'd pull my finger away but after a while I calm down I relaxed I followed the directions better and then I forgot to do one of the angles on my finger so that edge of my thumb wouldn't unlock it so I deleted that fingerprint I did it again I made sure I followed the buzzing and the indications to go up and down as often as it said and then I made sure I did every edge of the finger so that it would get as big a picture as it could so I it did take a little bit of learning on my part but it was not unusable by any stretch of the imagination my girlfriend had issues she kept complaining that it kept telling her try again with the thumbprint and I told her I said just go in the settings delete the fingerprints and redo them and she hasn't had issues since so I think sometimes when you're setting it up if it's not working correctly I think some of that might be a little they're gonna have to work out some glitches with what it's accepting and what it's not so let's move on to the camera um the camera is improved from the previous iPhone 5. the sensor size thankfully is the same as 8 megapixel when you when companies tend to make bigger megapixel counts they do it by chopping the sensor smaller that reduces the amount of light each of the pixels can pick up and it generally does not improve photographs it lets you make bigger ones but not better ones so like HTC stuck to four megapix actually reduced to four megapixels Apple didn't go to that extreme but they stayed at eight I think that was a really good compromise they did increase the size of the sensor so the pixels now I believe are 1.5 microns sorry 1.6 up from 1.5 microns they collect some more photons which is a good thing still backside illuminated uh the aperture has increased to F uh 2.2 so it's not quite as good as F 2.0 but that was causing some distortions on phones that did that so F 2.2 might also be a good compromise Ali you did the biggest set of eyesight camera tests what did you think compared to the previous iPhone I don't think there was a huge issue between the 5S 5C and the five I think we're the most noticeable differences came in were color saturation for some reason the 5S does a lot better um it just didn't blow out colors the way both the five and five seeded that could be it's got a better image signal processor on the A7 chip yeah I think it's that just combined with the camera is a little bit better as far as the aperture and the overall settings um panels were a huge difference if you look at the photography guide or the comparison we did in almost every single panel I tried to capture it blew out the sky on both the 5C and the five and back to the processor and how the 5S is processing things it's it's just it blows it out of the water just the way that it Dynamic exposure across your panorama new photography people would be happy with any three of the phones Peter your your impression after using it for a while the 5S seems to work better in low light conditions I'm not completely sold on how well it works in bright light or direct light um you know our own tests show that you know at least subjectively sometimes we've preferred the images at the 5c or the five produce over the 5S under certain lighting conditions um having said that um the the the the the the the the processing advantages of the 5S are absolutely astonishing when you start using stuff like the slo-mo video mode um you know it just it's it's incredible to work with uh very sophisticated a great selling point of the phone and uh really delightful you know I've I've I've I now have a phone that has a better camera than my dedicated camera uh Canon camcorder uh from just a few years ago so uh I I have to say I'm very impressed with uh with what Apple's doing with that I mean you know devices like this are basically putting the camcorder business um out of business for for everybody except the the highest end prosumers and professionals I agree I'm incredibly impressed with what Apple's managed to do with a really really thin Zed index I mean cameras really want deep lenses you know that's why some camera phones actually put a big hunk of plastic on the back of the phone to give it more Z index they can put better Optics in there Apple really wants to keep the iPhone 5S thin and they're doing everything they can to work around it and a lot of that is the A7 chip in its image signal processor and Peter mentioned the slow-mo it's fantastic you take a video you can enter the ease in ease out points it's not as easy to transfer yet my understanding is Mavericks will fix that on OS 10 but you have that 120 frame per second video on your camera you take burst mode it's taking a frame every second and then automatically picking the sharpest image and showing it to you instead of optical image stabilization is doing electronic image stabilization so it takes a photo it actually takes four photos and puts together the pieces of those photos that are in best focus and that kind of because one of the big challenges is in low light the aperture is open for so long that it's something moves whether it's your hand shaking or your subject just moving a little bit you get motion blur and this way it tries to compensate for that and I think especially if you do a lot of low light photography there's substantial advantage to the 5S camera and I think your photo test kind of showed that Ali yeah the only area I really couldn't produce um even in low light I couldn't get images to even include that showed a huge enough difference motion blur and low light I didn't really see too much of an improvement um maybe it was just me I don't know I didn't really see too much maybe I was being too harsh and using too dark of an environment to try to do that and I was expecting too much but I didn't see too much of an improvement when it came to motion blur on and during the day all three of them pretty much handled okay yeah so it's an improvement but it's not uh it's not night and day it's low light but it's not night and day instead because you're more apt to get a photo that's usable in Burst Mode then trusting the software to you know minimize motion blur the other interesting motion component that they have is the new M7 processor the A7 processor is now 64-bit and a lot of people are arguing about what that means and it absolutely means something because you know more is better I I don't care how you know pedantic you want to be more bits is more bits and developers will tell you it does help them in some instances but what is inarguable I think is that the M7 motion coprocessor is great in several respects first of all it takes the burden of monitoring the accelerometer the digital compass and the um gyroscope off of the main processor so the main processor which is much more battery hungry can go to sleep and just let the M7 record this stuff but it also means that apps don't have to do it anymore so if you had a fitness app that was monitoring your steps you used to have to leave it running and that would use up a lot of battery life now the app doesn't have to run at all and what's more is if you switch apps because the app doesn't contain the data the M7 does it'll just pull in all your previous week's worth of data and that's a huge advantage to getting you you know up to speed and going uh quicker so Peter I I'm I'm looking forward to for example I have a Nike fuel band ditching that and getting the fuel band ditching the Fitbit getting the Fitbit app and getting all sorts of apps that just let the chip do the work and give me better data collection that's certainly the hope you know I I and and uh it'll be interesting to see how this dovetails with an eye watch if if such a product ever comes to pass not that I want to uh go down the rabbit holes speculation too far with that but uh you know the the M7 ship um the sort of rewrites the rules on um all these um uh uh Telemetry objects that uh people have been sort of uh uh carrying around with them and it answers I mean it answers a real need for people who are in a fitness or people are just into a better understanding um their own their body's own rhythms and so on um the one downside I think of the M7 is uh well really there is no downside I mean you know it's it's a new specialized chip on the phone it's going to be really interesting over the course of the next few months um to see how developers actually use it you know already we've seen I think a couple of applications um that that have latched onto it but it's it's uh very much a work in progress because this is something that's just been sprung on developers um in the past uh a couple of weeks since the phone started shipping so um it's it's a a technology with a lot of Promise uh further down the road for us than today no I agree and it it does and correct me if I'm wrong Ali you you do have to give it permission to access motion the way you used to have to give an app permission to access location and also it's it's not a big privacy concern to me because the phone was recording this all the time anyway it's just doing it in a more energy efficient way yeah I would agree with that um it's I mean if you look I think it's in iOS 7 it's under settings privacy now for motion yep you can disable and enable apps to have access to that only if you want them to so if you don't want certain apps to have access to that and only allow others you can certainly do that yeah so it's not like someone in you know government agencies that are nameless will be just sitting there why oh Peter's iPhone hasn't moved in 20 minutes he fell asleep well said nice uh so overall um Peter looking at the iPhone 5S do you like it uh is it a good upgrade and who would you recommend it for the iPhone 5S is a definite solid upgrade um having said that I migrated from a five and it's a five that I got not too long ago so I can't really say that I think that the 5S is that much of a stunning difference to switch anybody with a 4S no question go for the 5S you know get it or if you want a top of the line um iPhone and touch ID is something that you're interested in using and all the other embellishments and accoutrements in the phone they're certainly a long list of reasons uh many of which we've talked about here uh why you should consider getting a 5S but understandably it's a big investment the 650 if you pay for it out of your own pocket it's you know two or three hundred dollars or or more um you know plus a two-year contract with your um with with your carrier if that's if that's the way that you want to go so it's a big commitment um if you've got a five it just may not be worth it right now to jump on it may be worth it just to kick back wait another year and see what Apple's got in store for us in 2014. Ally I am having way too much fun full motion video so for me the five to the 5S was worth it in entertainment Alone um yeah I I really like the camera improvements I use the camera and the video function and my iPhone probably more than anything else so for me I'm having a lot of fun with the new features like slow motion and burst mode um and I'm glad that I have those if you take the camera out of the equation unless you're and I don't I don't know if gamers are really saying they're seeing a difference I'm not a hardcore gamer so for me unless you can't cut the rope and Candy Crush that's the extent of my gaming abilities I don't think that it's too big of an improvement it's interesting Peter I mean it does support opengl es 3.0 on the new uh Series 6 Rogue graphics processor do you think we'll see better use of that soon would a gamer be well advised to upgrade well gamers are always um should be should always be inclined to go with whatever The Cutting Edge is whatever the bleeding edge is at that uh um at that particular moment so I would definitely think the gamers would probably be more interested in the 5S than the 5c and indeed or or the five and indeed they're already reaping the rewards of that uh Infinity Blade 3 for example from chair entertainment has been upgraded now I think two or three times uh since its initial release with optimizations specifically intended to improve qualitatively how the game looks and how it plays in the 5S so yeah this is a pretty big advance for gamers too you know I'm inclined to agree with that you know if I had a five I would sell my five get enough money to you know justify my 5S upgrade that's how my internal rationalization process but apple called it their most forward-thinking iPhone ever and I think that's a very clever way to frame it because there's a lot of Technologies in here that we're just glimpsing the potential of from Touch ID only right now doing unlock and doing you know select iTunes Store purchase authentication but there's a lot of applications you can see tying into that eventually the M7 co-processor right now is only doing sort of what Nike fuel band or Fitbit would do previously but there's a lot of potential for something that knows when you're walking when you're driving when you're awake when you're asleep and does it without a lot of battery drain and I would love to have a Siri co-processor that lets me do onboard Siri the way the Moto X does onboard Google Plus but I like that Apple's getting into coprocessors the camera is a significant Improvement if you're doing low light if you want that 120 frame per second video um and it has a lot of promise to really make it simple a lot of other cameras are better but they're not as simple or they're much more than an average person might need the finishes you know I I really at the end of the day could care less about the finishes but I think it's a nod towards the superficiality of consumers these days who equate a new look to a new device far more than they equate new internals to a new device so I think overall Apple did a lot of very smart things and they used the 5S almost like they used snow leopard on the Mac sort of set the stage for where they go next and I had the opportunity I was in Miami at the mobile Nations editors Meetup for the past four days so I got to use the Lumia 1020 I got to use the Galaxy Note 3 I got to use the GS4 the HTC One pretty much any phone you could think of and sure iPhone does not have as good a keyboard as the physical keyboard on the BlackBerry Q10 does not have as good a camera as the giant camera on the Nokia 10 20. but it comes in second to all of those things and when you're not a specialist and you still come in second I think the value of that device overall is tremendous so I would perhaps not surprisingly for many really hardly recommend um a 5S I don't know if you guys have any final thoughts you want to share on it Peter um no actually I I'm I I think I've said what I need to say about the uh uh about both phones really yeah so are we looking forward to an iPhone five six that's right iPhone 6 even more than you were a few weeks ago or is this enough to keep you happy for the rest of the year it's certainly enough to keep me happy for right now um I'm always looking forward to the next big thing from Apple and Shirley Apple will have an iPhone 6 out sometime in 2014. um and that'll be something to look forward to but for right now uh you know developers are just starting to scratch the surface of what the 5S can do so it'll be really interesting over the next uh the next year um to see how far they can push the hardware yeah Ally I think it's not really the hardware that will keep me happy I think it's iOS 7. um and just the sheer amount of app updates and how much apps are changing um I think that's what will keep me happy until next year so in the chat room they're asking you about ibeacons and ibeacons are not specific to the new iPhones uh Apple's supported Bluetooth 4.0 low energy since iOS since the iPhone 4S so a lot of existing devices can do it most recently now with the new Apple TV software you can go and uh touch you don't have to be with within touch range within 10 feet you can do a trusted Bluetooth device setup and I'm looking forward to more of those things ibeacons will let you put a low energy Bluetooth device in national parks in shopping malls in your house and do all sorts of things that people lamented Apple didn't include NFC and I think you looked into this a bit Peter right that they didn't include NFC to enable yeah you know it's funny people who think that um I I also think that it's it's a mistaken assumption to pit Bluetooth LE against NFC both of them are complementary Technologies NFC is great if all you want to do is uh pay for something at uh you know a kiosk someplace that's how it's being used right now because uh the distance between NFC devices has to be fewer less than about a half a foot uh in order for it to work the advantage the Bluetooth only brings to the table is being able to set up zones in buildings uh that that that will work with other Bluetooth LE equipped devices so um we've seen a practical example of this already a Major League Baseball has refitted um uh the field with the New York Mets play uh with sensors so as you walk to the front gates for example uh the um the the major league baseball app will automatically pull up your ticket um your tickets for you so you can get your tickets scanned at the gate or if you're in a certain part of the the park it'll show you some historical information about the park it'll tell you where the closest restroom is we're the closest uh uh beer stand is what have you um so it's very clever technology that can really qualitatively improve somebody's experience um where when they go someplace in a way that you can't do with NFC in a way that you can't do with the with Precision using something like GPS so it's an important piece of the puzzle that I think we're going to see more and more information come out about as companies find interesting ways to use ibeacon in the future awesome I can't wait I want it all now give me the future today damn it I know Ally where can people find out more about you and all your wonderful writings oh let's see um obviously on imore.com uh and on Twitter at imogel what else do I use um Google Plus I think it's just under Ali kazmo ha nice and I think that's about it Peter at Twitter at flag f-l-a-r-g-h um at imore and also on the loop at loopinsight.com nice and you can find me at Renee Ritchie on all the social things you can find me at imore and for all of our shows you can go to mobilenations.com uh thank you chat room for joining us you are an amazing Community as always and thank you everybody who is listening to the show in audio or watching it on a video in iTunes or on YouTube or anywhere else that we put it you guys are all amazing and we appreciate you taking the time to join us have a great day everybody thanks Peter thanks Ali thank you Renee thank youit's Thursday October 3rd for 2013. I'm Renee Ritchie and today we are going to review the brand new iPhone 5S and iPhone 5c live this is the imore show the exact editor of loop insight and the managing editor of imore joins us as usual internet Bobby Val Peter Cohen how are you Peter fine Renee how are you doing good you survived launch week I did indeed how'd you do uh okay it feels a a bit like butter spread too much over too much bread but you know we we do what we can Peter I imagine you've got some pretty thick calluses on your finger from all the uh typing you've been doing it's you know it's not the typing it's the trackpads for some reason after a while I don't know if there's chemicals on the trackpad or what it is my fingers just my fingertips feel numb um too much track padding someone who knows all about too much track padding is our how-to editor and a resident ninja in charge Ali kazmua how are you Ali nice iPhone 5c pink T-shirt alley I know this is a purple t-shirt you are all the color coordinated please I know Ally got one of these I'm gonna hold mine up this was a way funner and I'm using the Apple conjugation of the verb tufan uh iPhone then I have then I thought it would be I mean I used it all the time 24 7 for a weekend and then every alternate day for a week and I loved it I loved the way it looked and I loved the way iOS 7 looked on it what did you think Ellie I did I was really surprised because at first it's I have kind of mixed feelings about it or at least I did but then once I held it it's really it's not a cheap phone like I think I would honestly be okay with this phone if I didn't have a 5S or if I wanted to have a backup phone I I really kind of like it so I mean I was skeptical at first but it's really kind of Genius of Apple because instead of like keeping the five the five costs more to produce so putting these colored bags on the same internals gives people an option um I think it'll be really popular with people that aren't necessarily they don't need the latest and greatest technology they just want a fun phone that's better than what they have and at 99 I think they'll do well with that did you have a chance to hold it Peter because I I was anticipating the iPhone 3G and 3GS had pretty good plastic I've Loved HTC's plastic I've really loved Nokia's plastic I'm not a huge fan of Samsung's plastic and I'm always nervous when a new plastic phone came out but I think using this the antenna I think it's stainless steel still as a frame made it really solid indeed yeah you know I've been uh playing with them on and off for the past couple of weeks excuse me and I've been pretty impressed with uh the the overall build quality of the phone you know I wrote an editorial um before the iPhone 5c actually launched uh talking about uh the composition of the back of it and uh people made fun of me because my my takeaway was basically it's plastic but it's a better quality plastic you know it's better plastic because it's polycarbonate I completely stand by that I think it's a very high quality phone um I'm personally protesting the 5c until Apple releases a purple one you and Jim Dalrymple you both want your Samuel L Jackson lightsaber color that's exactly right you know I mean uh but I think Jim ended up with a green one after all that but uh he lost it in his beard you're right exactly um it's it's not quite Heineken green either um but uh it you know it's a very nice quality phone and I mean not everybody has to have the latest and greatest from Apple not everybody needs all of the features that the 5S has and for everyone else uh the 5c is a very nice option so um I think that's exactly right I know Dave Dave whiskers call it from unprofessional called them candy coated uh iPhones and that's in a way that's exactly right I kept hearing about the less expensive iPhone project at Apple for going on two years maybe more and I know the idea kept coming up and they just never went ahead with it they always kept last year's device reduced it by a hundred dollars and sold that um and it and then there's a lot of fretting about you know it's not cheap enough it's too high a price and it turns out Apple didn't care at all about a less expensive iPhone they wanted to make a more appealing iPhone and the colors did I mean my mother saw the commercials she watched the keynote with me I forced my mother to watch the keynote because I want her take on it that's true and she loved the iPhone 5c she's a history of art and architecture professor and for her it was Andy Warhol it was pop art it really was colorful and fun through and through and Ali I mean I think that was a smart choice because it lets Apple still keep the high end of the market but I'll slightly larger size of that high-end Market yeah I think that a lot of people I saw a lot of articles on one where some blogs were for some reason surprised that the 5c didn't sell well at launch I didn't expect it to it's not a phone that people were gonna line up at launch for it's the phone that's going to take the people that are you know don't want to spend 200 on a new phone they want to spend 99 and now they can get a brand new iPhone for that won their contracts up I think the where you'll see you know the 5S they sold a ton at launch and then I think they'll see you'll see the 5S can be a steady phone for them that will sell because it's a comparable offer you have all these Android phones that are available on contract for 99 well there's not an iPhone on contract for 99 that's brand new it's a year two year old model so I think that's what it's meant for it I think the biggest surprise for me was that they didn't release a red version that's a very popular color salmon pink I just know from like um just industry experience and you know data that I see red is a very popular customization color for iPhone it's the second most popular next to gold and they didn't release a black at all and black is almost always the most popular color when not available I think you made a good point along or a couple weeks ago that um when we thought there wouldn't be a black 5c that it's probably because of the fact that black is popular it's the best-selling model so it makes sense to push people that want black into the upper model so my question Peter you're my go-to retail guy it seems to me like these they're even an iPod Touch packaging and it seems to me their job is not to draw in like Ali said the big launch day crowd the big pre-order crowd but to sit on a shelf looking candy coated delicious day after day after day all through the holiday season and attract buyers visually absolutely right you know the presentation of the iPhone 5c is completely different from the 5S if you don't understand what Renee is talking about the 5c is presented very similarly to the iPod Touch in that it's in a plastic case um the Ali's got it right there and you can see it you can see the color uh of the case and of course you know the uh the screen overlay um uh that matches the the back color of the device whereas the five asses in Apple's sort of traditional uh black box or white box um enclosure so you don't actually see it until you open it you just see a photo on the front of it so you know it's it's I it's an interesting visual differentiation between the 5C and the 5S and it does tell you that I think Apple's trying to commodify the 5c a little bit even if the price isn't you know a rock bottom price they're still trying to commodify it a little bit um as a lifestyle device you know it's something that that appeals to people that's got a little bit of fun and Whimsy to it whereas the 5S is a more serious professional tool what do you think um Ali about the construct so the plastic Peter mentioned it before it's really high quality polyurethane sorry polycarbonate but it's also got a hard coating on it I know a lot of people like the soft touch the mattes the way the Nokia phones for example look what do you think about the actual choice of plastic for these devices and the colors that they put on them first thing I did you love the plastic I almost actually kind of like the feel of it better than I do this but I think this looks much better it's more high quality but as far as like in my hand if someone were to put a 5S on one hand and a 5C on the other hand and ask me which is easier or felt better to hold I almost want to say I'd say a 5c I was a huge fan of the 3Gs though and the way it curved and it just felt nice in your hands so and I think this brings a little bit of that back and that might be why I'm kind of partial to it that's interesting Peter what about the colors compared to for example I think the iPod Touch metallic colors look a little bit nicer and there they do have the red and they do have the Slate black indeed I like the metallic uh the the anodized um uh colors of the um iPod uh touch a little bit more than the plastic colors of the 5c um the one interesting thing about the 5c with the hard coating on it really necessary when you're dealing with polycarbonate polycarbonate is almost shatterproof um uh it's been used in optics for years and I remember when polycarb first started getting used in Optics um uh eyeglass places would have demonstration lenses that showed like a 10 penny nail driven through the center of a lens to show you how it was shatterproof the problem is that it's not very scratch resistant so Apple had to put a lacquer coating on the back of the 5c otherwise your iPhone 5c would look like crap in your pocket after about a week of rubbing look like the Millennium Falcon exactly carbon scoring and everything so um that that was a real necessary thing for Apple to do so you know it it makes it harder it changes the the feel of it a little bit but I think it's it's an absolutely necessary uh necessary change as far as the colors are concerned look you know Apple's going to change the colors every years every year just like they do with iPods you know we're going to get a little bit of variation yeah I think they did really well with the build quality but I am not a fan of the colors at all the blue green are the only decent ones the interesting thing to me about the colors is you know Apple's got um an ad that they've run a few times I haven't seen it too much actually in broadcast uh but it is available on the web called uh designed it together and one of the things that they emphasize in it is he's sort of using their visual language in this 30 second spot is that uh or a one minute spot is that the colors of the iPod touch or the I mean of the iPhone 5c are very complementary um to the the base palette in iOS 7. I thought that was a really interesting thing and I think that that might explain where Apple went at least with the initial design of the 5c yeah and I wonder if they change their colors every year where their iOS 7 gets subtly changed every year to match whatever the hot because they did that with the iPod with the iPods with whatever the hot palette is that year yeah I think there's other gradients they could have pulled iOS 7 is very colorful and like the pink Renee you and I had a conversation about that stuff okay can you hold it up can you hold up the home screen see it the brightness down foreign I mean there's a lot of colors in there that they could have used like pink is salmon it's not pink I think they could have went with a different shade that would have color matched because there's a lot of gradients I think the blue is okay yeah I do too I just the yellow and the pink and I just think they're really loud the yellow is not waterproof like iOS 7 it will not protect your phone from water so do not make that mistake the green one does make you horny though just like M M's it does not it makes you in Hulk induced rage um moving on a little bit it's got an improved FaceTime camera the back camera is the same eyesight camera from the iPhone 5 which was a great camera but they left it exactly the same the FaceTime camera got bigger 1.9 I think it went up from 1.7 to 1.9 Micron lens it's still 720p uh 1280 by um uh 720 pictures and video but it's got a back a backside illuminated sensor which means it's got all the circuitry out of the way so it can capture more light it's that Photon Obsession again but Ali to me I mean unless you're making a lot of FaceTime calls at night and we don't judge you know judgment free zone here or you're taking lot of selfies at night I didn't see a huge difference I know you put them through a lot of testing did you notice anything um I didn't really use too much of the front facing cameras I think you did that one um but with the rear camera I know that they say the five and the 5c are the same but I kind of found the 5c rear camera to be a little bit over saturated and I don't know if that's like the colored backs that are maybe playing a little bit into that um but they were different the front facing camera I haven't played with too much but I the few times that I've used FaceTime I really don't see a discernible difference from my five but then again we're not really it's it's during the day that I use you're not a low light facetimer or it's you know in a well-lit environment um in our living room like our condo is kind of laid out we don't have a ton of overhead lighting we have more like space lighting so it's kind of dim I call it a cave when I'm trying to get shots for eye more because I can never get anything that looks right but even the five handled fine for FaceTime calls and I don't really see a difference with the 5c and what about LTE Peter I mean I know Apple said that they included way more LTE bands than most bands on any phone that'll mostly affect people outside the US but since you're on T-Mobile you might as well be outside the US yeah indeed you know these these phones have been updated to um include even more LTE bands than before uh which which is great uh you know really depends on who your carrier is um I I'm not aware of any specific differences between the 5C and the 5s in terms of um uh in in terms of coverage at the same as far as I know same chip yeah it's the same chip so um there is a big difference though between the five and the 5c so if you're still on the fence about whether you want a 5c because you can get a better deal on the five I'd strongly consider the 5c because you're going to be able to get better coverage in more places uh depending on your carrier so uh let's just do a quick round the room Ali who would you recommend an iPhone 5c to and do you like it in general I do like an I recommend a 5c to anyone who doesn't want to spend a ton of money on a phone uh who doesn't my friends that don't read text sites that don't know that the iPhone 5S has a 64-bit processor in it I think most of those people are okay and maybe even people that are a little bit more clumsy because I honestly think that the 5c is probably going to be a little bit more resistant to breaks mainly because it looks like the screen is actually inlaid a little better um into the actual chassis than it is on like the 5S where are the five where it's it pops up so I think that's going to cause the glass to break so maybe clumsy friends number one because it might not break as easy and number two because it costs less computer same question I think that the uh five five C is a great choice for anybody who's got an iPhone uh four or older um that they want to upgrade from 4S to the 5c the big difference that you're going to get is LTE and you know all the improvements that were available in the five if you got a five it the 5c is is a lateral uh change you know you'll get some color Improvement but I want that color bad you got to want that color bad exactly so it's kind of a wash there but I'd say it's a safe bet for anybody with a 4S or earlier that are looking to upgrade or for that matter somebody who's new to the iPhone uh trying it out for the first time and uh you know don't necessarily want to have to spend um a lot more money to get the iPhone um it's a good entry level model now you know I agree with both of you I liked it a lot more than I thought it would because I've been using an iPhone 5 for so long I thought it would just be an iPhone 5 and as goofy and cheesy as it is it is just so much fun like you see the green but because the green comes out on the front too it's visually different and because it permeates the entire operating system you set the home screen color and then when you use Notification Center or control center those are all translucent so that color comes through comes through on the passcode lock I do miss not having Touch ID on it that's the only really big thing and the camera is not quite as good but for most people I think that's impossible to tell so I would recommend like my mom she would have a lot more fun with a 5c she doesn't need to spend the extra money she wouldn't appreciate the differences very much anyone who's new to the platform anyone who's younger or you know just who wants something not as serious as an iPhone 5s and I think Apple did a good job one thing I'm curious about Peter is if we could see apple introduce other colors out of cycle for example and I don't think this will happen but maybe in future years a red one around Christmas time a purple one around spring and use that as a way to juice the line as they go through the year so they're not as stuck to you know once a year Cycles or with organizations like product red yeah my assumption is that if they do a red one I mean because they do have the red case for the iPhone 5s and and uh that is a product right uh uh accessory so uh you know part of the proceeds of the sale of that go towards the uh AIDS charity that um you two lead singer Bono uh founded a number of years ago um I guess I guess that that's entirely possible um I'm just trying to think of of whether or not Apple I mean I always try to infer from what Apple has done in the past and I know that this is a dangerous game to to see what they would do in the future and I I can't really think of of of times where Apple has done that to the iPod line but maybe I'm wrong yeah I don't recall either I just wonder if they'll ever be able to kind of get out of that everyone's going to wait till September a thing didn't they just revise the 5th gen iPod Touch mid-cycle no it was the end of cycle it was instead of doing uipod touches this year they made a space gray model did put 128 gigabytes into the iPad 4 you know in the spring slotters that are introducing new ones so I'm just curious now that they've gone color maybe they can you know do more varieties of color I think they're in a different position with the 5c um I think it could give them they always you always see analysts and people talking about low sales numbers towards the end or mid-product cycle so I think they kind of have a unique opportunity with the 5c to say like you said red for Christmas or product red or something they can throw new phones in there that kind of give that another marketing push mid-cycle we shall see uh Switching gears iPhone 5S this is the new flagship model this is the gold uh version which to me you know as Brian kluke says is the only acceptable choice but I know you know Peter finds it not acceptable at all no I just for it I know brilliant I already the irony of it is incredible um so we did it we did a detailed review for the iPhone 5C and for the iPhone 5s those are both going to be in the show notes but uh the design the design is identical to last year's iPhone 5 except for the gold and the slate gray being replaced by the new space gray which I'm guessing is the politically correct way of saying gunmetal gray these days I like the visual difference last year Apple rebuilt the iPhone 5 to the atom almost incredible manufacturing and people might a lot of people said uh still around a rectangle boring so this year Apple's like fine screw you all you want is superficial change here you go two new colors and people went we did a whole podcast on it people went ballistic for the Gold version a lot of people really like the um space gray version Ali do you think that slate was replaced with space gray just because it's more resilient a finish yep I think a lot of it position black is the hardest color to produce it takes the longest um I don't know exact measurements but I think gold is over a half an hour I think and then I think to produce colors like gold or uh that's another one that's easy to produce those are like the lighter shades are a lot less like minutes so I think that it has to do with production time and the darker you get I don't know if Apple really at the mass scale that they is that really has the time and if they're not done correctly your coating is not as thick so this makes more sense and actually I really like the contrast of this better than the Slate I just think it looks better um you can tell there's a these phones it's almost like they're supposed to be a contrast between the back panels and the aluminum like the original iPhone Peter you like it too indeed I do indeed well you know I I um I like the Slate actually I like it a lot um I don't even know if you can see that that's black and then the space gray so that's like a true black and the gray yeah yeah no I I I I I certainly like it it's it's a nice um it's a nice effect I you know on on that particular phone I I excuse me on that particular phone I I don't particularly like the white around it I'm not a big fan of uh of of the white phones it you know it's interesting they photograph great we use them in our screenshots all the time for products um but actually using one I prefer to kind of get lost to the inky Blackness of uh of a black uh front phone so um it I I ha I have toyed with the idea though of having my uh uh my space gray uh iPhone uh 5S Uh custom anodized in some funky color purple yeah definitely all right so you've got the slight design difference and it seems to have worked it perked up a lot of people um the next difference well the one most observable differences is Touch ID right on the front there the idea of touch ID is instead of entering a passcode or instead of entering your iTunes pass uh password for App Store iBook store and iTunes store purchases you can just put your thumb or finger on it and it will match that to whatever mathematical formula of that previously registered fingerprint is on the A7 chipsets secure enclave and then it will release a token yes or no if it's yes it lets you in if it's or verifies your purchase and if it's no it doesn't it's very simple um and let's let's talk about the usability before we get into some of the controversy I know Ally's had problems but I've been using it non-stop for a week I have had unless I reboot my device or I deliberately cause it to fail five times I've never been asked for a passcode or an iTunes password but Ali you're apparently getting asked every five minutes um you don't buy enough apps I don't know I bought 12 of them one day it was fine um I think maybe that's why Renee because you're you know tweaking it enough that it doesn't reset because I've had the same problem that Ali's had yeah Richard's had that too yeah Richard's had it um message and it happens I get it every couple of hours I typically download or re-download apps quite frequently but probably two or three times a day for some reason I get a funky message in the App Store that comes up and tells me to re-verify touch ID purchases and to do that I have to enter my password um I also get it whenever I redeem a code or anything like that it doesn't I don't know if it lets you use fingerprints to redeem codes though no not yet nor Apple store purchases yeah same thing for you Peter yeah absolutely I'm seeing it um I've seen it several times now and of course if you reboot your phone uh you can't use Touch ID right away it wants you to input your passcode again Apple's doing the best I can to balance the convenience of touch ID with the security of a passcode um to make sure that uh you are who you say you you are I am sure that as time goes on um Apple's going to learn how people are using these things and figure out better ways to manage this stuff so I don't think any of us really have any reason to expect Apple to get the touch ID experience perfectly on the first try what's that Ali that's it Marissa that's the error message yep it says sign into iTunes Store confirm Apple ID password for my email to renew Touch ID purchases maybe it just thinks you're hella sketchy Maybe so I mean according to Apple's documents in my experience it will only ever ask you for your passcode or password if you failed five times if you have rebooted your phone or if you have not used it in 48 hours lies pack of lies great lies it sounds reasonable uh and you know to allay and he says some people don't think it's secure enough and that's a fair point like Peter mentioned there's always a battle between convenience and security and Apple's made with Touch ID security much more convenient it is probably stronger than a passcode because there's you know 10 000 passcode combinations where there's 50 000 fairly unique fingerprint combinations like there's a 150 000 chance someone will randomly have the same fingerprint but there's a one in ten thousand chance they can randomly enter your passcode it is much less secure than a strong you know pseudo-random password especially if it's 20 30 40 digits but entering that on Mobile sucks so badly nobody ever does it and apple had statistics at 50 of people don't even use a passcode but in order to use Touch ID you have to not only enable passcode but enable it immediately so when it works it's incredibly convenient but when it doesn't it's much more secure than people who ran around around you know uh passcode naked as a day that they were born so I think overall and I'm curious to hear what you guys think maybe Peter can start overall I think Touch ID is a huge win and I want it on everything I was making my computer monitor smudgy today trying to pass code on sorry trying to touch ID unlock one passwords icon you know I'm I'm in the same boat I've actually caught myself several times holding my thumb over the home button on my iPad to try to unlock it and uh you know having to catch myself and and so you know wait a minute that doesn't work so um I'm I'm definitely looking forward to um Apple rolling out Touch ID across the rest of the line and I think it's going to be um one of those things that we're going to see on everything within it within a year um you know like I said before I I think that that it's still a work in progress in terms of how actually Apple actually handles it and the one thing that Security Experts have said um that I completely agree with is that I think that Apple really needs to have two two-factor authentication at least an option um on it so for those of us who are very concerned about security not only having um the the the the the touch ID but also requiring you to enter uh the passcode um that might be one way uh to resolve some of the open issues that some people have with it quibbles aside Touch ID is a great Advance it makes things a lot more convenient and um it's just it's a terrific um uh Improvement in usability I don't necessarily think it's a terrific Improvement in security but it makes my secure device that much more easy to use and that makes me happy I reach for my iPad and try and unlock it and then have to enter in a passcode like an animal and I feel bad about myself Ally what about you exactly um I think it's great I don't necessarily look at it as an I didn't in the first place look at it as a way to make devices more secure but I think Apple's aim with iOS 7 in general in touch ID when it comes to security was to get more people to learn to use security they don't realize they have photos of their family they log into their bank accounts they have their emails on there people don't think about things like that and I think that having something is better than nothing um the odds of someone getting a hold of your phone and being able to get past Touch ID realistically aren't high so I think that it's gonna increase that and then paired with some of the other things like you can't restore a phone without turning find my iPhone off I think a lot of that I think it's going to curb theft I think that's a huge issue uh just you know being in the repair business up until recently I can't tell you how many times a week people would come in and say is there any way for me to get a phone back that I didn't have find my iPhone turned on no you know so I think it'll help with that tremendously and I think that's a huge advance um so in the chat room they're asking about setting it up I did have an awkward experiencing experience setting it up and your first time is never easy so if you have an awkward first time don't worry about it it does get easier I I found it odd that I put my finger down and then it would tell me to touch repeatedly I took it off too early it would then vibrate it would scare me I'd pull my finger away but after a while I calm down I relaxed I followed the directions better and then I forgot to do one of the angles on my finger so that edge of my thumb wouldn't unlock it so I deleted that fingerprint I did it again I made sure I followed the buzzing and the indications to go up and down as often as it said and then I made sure I did every edge of the finger so that it would get as big a picture as it could so I it did take a little bit of learning on my part but it was not unusable by any stretch of the imagination my girlfriend had issues she kept complaining that it kept telling her try again with the thumbprint and I told her I said just go in the settings delete the fingerprints and redo them and she hasn't had issues since so I think sometimes when you're setting it up if it's not working correctly I think some of that might be a little they're gonna have to work out some glitches with what it's accepting and what it's not so let's move on to the camera um the camera is improved from the previous iPhone 5. the sensor size thankfully is the same as 8 megapixel when you when companies tend to make bigger megapixel counts they do it by chopping the sensor smaller that reduces the amount of light each of the pixels can pick up and it generally does not improve photographs it lets you make bigger ones but not better ones so like HTC stuck to four megapix actually reduced to four megapixels Apple didn't go to that extreme but they stayed at eight I think that was a really good compromise they did increase the size of the sensor so the pixels now I believe are 1.5 microns sorry 1.6 up from 1.5 microns they collect some more photons which is a good thing still backside illuminated uh the aperture has increased to F uh 2.2 so it's not quite as good as F 2.0 but that was causing some distortions on phones that did that so F 2.2 might also be a good compromise Ali you did the biggest set of eyesight camera tests what did you think compared to the previous iPhone I don't think there was a huge issue between the 5S 5C and the five I think we're the most noticeable differences came in were color saturation for some reason the 5S does a lot better um it just didn't blow out colors the way both the five and five seeded that could be it's got a better image signal processor on the A7 chip yeah I think it's that just combined with the camera is a little bit better as far as the aperture and the overall settings um panels were a huge difference if you look at the photography guide or the comparison we did in almost every single panel I tried to capture it blew out the sky on both the 5C and the five and back to the processor and how the 5S is processing things it's it's just it blows it out of the water just the way that it Dynamic exposure across your panorama new photography people would be happy with any three of the phones Peter your your impression after using it for a while the 5S seems to work better in low light conditions I'm not completely sold on how well it works in bright light or direct light um you know our own tests show that you know at least subjectively sometimes we've preferred the images at the 5c or the five produce over the 5S under certain lighting conditions um having said that um the the the the the the the the processing advantages of the 5S are absolutely astonishing when you start using stuff like the slo-mo video mode um you know it just it's it's incredible to work with uh very sophisticated a great selling point of the phone and uh really delightful you know I've I've I've I now have a phone that has a better camera than my dedicated camera uh Canon camcorder uh from just a few years ago so uh I I have to say I'm very impressed with uh with what Apple's doing with that I mean you know devices like this are basically putting the camcorder business um out of business for for everybody except the the highest end prosumers and professionals I agree I'm incredibly impressed with what Apple's managed to do with a really really thin Zed index I mean cameras really want deep lenses you know that's why some camera phones actually put a big hunk of plastic on the back of the phone to give it more Z index they can put better Optics in there Apple really wants to keep the iPhone 5S thin and they're doing everything they can to work around it and a lot of that is the A7 chip in its image signal processor and Peter mentioned the slow-mo it's fantastic you take a video you can enter the ease in ease out points it's not as easy to transfer yet my understanding is Mavericks will fix that on OS 10 but you have that 120 frame per second video on your camera you take burst mode it's taking a frame every second and then automatically picking the sharpest image and showing it to you instead of optical image stabilization is doing electronic image stabilization so it takes a photo it actually takes four photos and puts together the pieces of those photos that are in best focus and that kind of because one of the big challenges is in low light the aperture is open for so long that it's something moves whether it's your hand shaking or your subject just moving a little bit you get motion blur and this way it tries to compensate for that and I think especially if you do a lot of low light photography there's substantial advantage to the 5S camera and I think your photo test kind of showed that Ali yeah the only area I really couldn't produce um even in low light I couldn't get images to even include that showed a huge enough difference motion blur and low light I didn't really see too much of an improvement um maybe it was just me I don't know I didn't really see too much maybe I was being too harsh and using too dark of an environment to try to do that and I was expecting too much but I didn't see too much of an improvement when it came to motion blur on and during the day all three of them pretty much handled okay yeah so it's an improvement but it's not uh it's not night and day it's low light but it's not night and day instead because you're more apt to get a photo that's usable in Burst Mode then trusting the software to you know minimize motion blur the other interesting motion component that they have is the new M7 processor the A7 processor is now 64-bit and a lot of people are arguing about what that means and it absolutely means something because you know more is better I I don't care how you know pedantic you want to be more bits is more bits and developers will tell you it does help them in some instances but what is inarguable I think is that the M7 motion coprocessor is great in several respects first of all it takes the burden of monitoring the accelerometer the digital compass and the um gyroscope off of the main processor so the main processor which is much more battery hungry can go to sleep and just let the M7 record this stuff but it also means that apps don't have to do it anymore so if you had a fitness app that was monitoring your steps you used to have to leave it running and that would use up a lot of battery life now the app doesn't have to run at all and what's more is if you switch apps because the app doesn't contain the data the M7 does it'll just pull in all your previous week's worth of data and that's a huge advantage to getting you you know up to speed and going uh quicker so Peter I I'm I'm looking forward to for example I have a Nike fuel band ditching that and getting the fuel band ditching the Fitbit getting the Fitbit app and getting all sorts of apps that just let the chip do the work and give me better data collection that's certainly the hope you know I I and and uh it'll be interesting to see how this dovetails with an eye watch if if such a product ever comes to pass not that I want to uh go down the rabbit holes speculation too far with that but uh you know the the M7 ship um the sort of rewrites the rules on um all these um uh uh Telemetry objects that uh people have been sort of uh uh carrying around with them and it answers I mean it answers a real need for people who are in a fitness or people are just into a better understanding um their own their body's own rhythms and so on um the one downside I think of the M7 is uh well really there is no downside I mean you know it's it's a new specialized chip on the phone it's going to be really interesting over the course of the next few months um to see how developers actually use it you know already we've seen I think a couple of applications um that that have latched onto it but it's it's uh very much a work in progress because this is something that's just been sprung on developers um in the past uh a couple of weeks since the phone started shipping so um it's it's a a technology with a lot of Promise uh further down the road for us than today no I agree and it it does and correct me if I'm wrong Ali you you do have to give it permission to access motion the way you used to have to give an app permission to access location and also it's it's not a big privacy concern to me because the phone was recording this all the time anyway it's just doing it in a more energy efficient way yeah I would agree with that um it's I mean if you look I think it's in iOS 7 it's under settings privacy now for motion yep you can disable and enable apps to have access to that only if you want them to so if you don't want certain apps to have access to that and only allow others you can certainly do that yeah so it's not like someone in you know government agencies that are nameless will be just sitting there why oh Peter's iPhone hasn't moved in 20 minutes he fell asleep well said nice uh so overall um Peter looking at the iPhone 5S do you like it uh is it a good upgrade and who would you recommend it for the iPhone 5S is a definite solid upgrade um having said that I migrated from a five and it's a five that I got not too long ago so I can't really say that I think that the 5S is that much of a stunning difference to switch anybody with a 4S no question go for the 5S you know get it or if you want a top of the line um iPhone and touch ID is something that you're interested in using and all the other embellishments and accoutrements in the phone they're certainly a long list of reasons uh many of which we've talked about here uh why you should consider getting a 5S but understandably it's a big investment the 650 if you pay for it out of your own pocket it's you know two or three hundred dollars or or more um you know plus a two-year contract with your um with with your carrier if that's if that's the way that you want to go so it's a big commitment um if you've got a five it just may not be worth it right now to jump on it may be worth it just to kick back wait another year and see what Apple's got in store for us in 2014. Ally I am having way too much fun full motion video so for me the five to the 5S was worth it in entertainment Alone um yeah I I really like the camera improvements I use the camera and the video function and my iPhone probably more than anything else so for me I'm having a lot of fun with the new features like slow motion and burst mode um and I'm glad that I have those if you take the camera out of the equation unless you're and I don't I don't know if gamers are really saying they're seeing a difference I'm not a hardcore gamer so for me unless you can't cut the rope and Candy Crush that's the extent of my gaming abilities I don't think that it's too big of an improvement it's interesting Peter I mean it does support opengl es 3.0 on the new uh Series 6 Rogue graphics processor do you think we'll see better use of that soon would a gamer be well advised to upgrade well gamers are always um should be should always be inclined to go with whatever The Cutting Edge is whatever the bleeding edge is at that uh um at that particular moment so I would definitely think the gamers would probably be more interested in the 5S than the 5c and indeed or or the five and indeed they're already reaping the rewards of that uh Infinity Blade 3 for example from chair entertainment has been upgraded now I think two or three times uh since its initial release with optimizations specifically intended to improve qualitatively how the game looks and how it plays in the 5S so yeah this is a pretty big advance for gamers too you know I'm inclined to agree with that you know if I had a five I would sell my five get enough money to you know justify my 5S upgrade that's how my internal rationalization process but apple called it their most forward-thinking iPhone ever and I think that's a very clever way to frame it because there's a lot of Technologies in here that we're just glimpsing the potential of from Touch ID only right now doing unlock and doing you know select iTunes Store purchase authentication but there's a lot of applications you can see tying into that eventually the M7 co-processor right now is only doing sort of what Nike fuel band or Fitbit would do previously but there's a lot of potential for something that knows when you're walking when you're driving when you're awake when you're asleep and does it without a lot of battery drain and I would love to have a Siri co-processor that lets me do onboard Siri the way the Moto X does onboard Google Plus but I like that Apple's getting into coprocessors the camera is a significant Improvement if you're doing low light if you want that 120 frame per second video um and it has a lot of promise to really make it simple a lot of other cameras are better but they're not as simple or they're much more than an average person might need the finishes you know I I really at the end of the day could care less about the finishes but I think it's a nod towards the superficiality of consumers these days who equate a new look to a new device far more than they equate new internals to a new device so I think overall Apple did a lot of very smart things and they used the 5S almost like they used snow leopard on the Mac sort of set the stage for where they go next and I had the opportunity I was in Miami at the mobile Nations editors Meetup for the past four days so I got to use the Lumia 1020 I got to use the Galaxy Note 3 I got to use the GS4 the HTC One pretty much any phone you could think of and sure iPhone does not have as good a keyboard as the physical keyboard on the BlackBerry Q10 does not have as good a camera as the giant camera on the Nokia 10 20. but it comes in second to all of those things and when you're not a specialist and you still come in second I think the value of that device overall is tremendous so I would perhaps not surprisingly for many really hardly recommend um a 5S I don't know if you guys have any final thoughts you want to share on it Peter um no actually I I'm I I think I've said what I need to say about the uh uh about both phones really yeah so are we looking forward to an iPhone five six that's right iPhone 6 even more than you were a few weeks ago or is this enough to keep you happy for the rest of the year it's certainly enough to keep me happy for right now um I'm always looking forward to the next big thing from Apple and Shirley Apple will have an iPhone 6 out sometime in 2014. um and that'll be something to look forward to but for right now uh you know developers are just starting to scratch the surface of what the 5S can do so it'll be really interesting over the next uh the next year um to see how far they can push the hardware yeah Ally I think it's not really the hardware that will keep me happy I think it's iOS 7. um and just the sheer amount of app updates and how much apps are changing um I think that's what will keep me happy until next year so in the chat room they're asking you about ibeacons and ibeacons are not specific to the new iPhones uh Apple's supported Bluetooth 4.0 low energy since iOS since the iPhone 4S so a lot of existing devices can do it most recently now with the new Apple TV software you can go and uh touch you don't have to be with within touch range within 10 feet you can do a trusted Bluetooth device setup and I'm looking forward to more of those things ibeacons will let you put a low energy Bluetooth device in national parks in shopping malls in your house and do all sorts of things that people lamented Apple didn't include NFC and I think you looked into this a bit Peter right that they didn't include NFC to enable yeah you know it's funny people who think that um I I also think that it's it's a mistaken assumption to pit Bluetooth LE against NFC both of them are complementary Technologies NFC is great if all you want to do is uh pay for something at uh you know a kiosk someplace that's how it's being used right now because uh the distance between NFC devices has to be fewer less than about a half a foot uh in order for it to work the advantage the Bluetooth only brings to the table is being able to set up zones in buildings uh that that that will work with other Bluetooth LE equipped devices so um we've seen a practical example of this already a Major League Baseball has refitted um uh the field with the New York Mets play uh with sensors so as you walk to the front gates for example uh the um the the major league baseball app will automatically pull up your ticket um your tickets for you so you can get your tickets scanned at the gate or if you're in a certain part of the the park it'll show you some historical information about the park it'll tell you where the closest restroom is we're the closest uh uh beer stand is what have you um so it's very clever technology that can really qualitatively improve somebody's experience um where when they go someplace in a way that you can't do with NFC in a way that you can't do with the with Precision using something like GPS so it's an important piece of the puzzle that I think we're going to see more and more information come out about as companies find interesting ways to use ibeacon in the future awesome I can't wait I want it all now give me the future today damn it I know Ally where can people find out more about you and all your wonderful writings oh let's see um obviously on imore.com uh and on Twitter at imogel what else do I use um Google Plus I think it's just under Ali kazmo ha nice and I think that's about it Peter at Twitter at flag f-l-a-r-g-h um at imore and also on the loop at loopinsight.com nice and you can find me at Renee Ritchie on all the social things you can find me at imore and for all of our shows you can go to mobilenations.com uh thank you chat room for joining us you are an amazing Community as always and thank you everybody who is listening to the show in audio or watching it on a video in iTunes or on YouTube or anywhere else that we put it you guys are all amazing and we appreciate you taking the time to join us have a great day everybody thanks Peter thanks Ali thank you Renee thank you\n"