Tuesday morning, Apple caught up to its own rumor mill. It took the wraps off the two new iPhones that everyone had already predicted: the iPhone 5C and the iPhone 5S, which will be available on Sept. 20.
The 5C is the budget model. It’s basically last year’s iPhone 5 but with a plastic body (lacquered for extra shininess!), available in five colors. It will be $100 with a two-year contract.
The more exciting new phone is the iPhone 5S. It looks almost identical to the iPhone 5, except that it’s available in black, white or a classy-looking coppery gold. It’s priced the same as last year’s model, too: $200, $300 and $400 for the models with 16, 32 and 64 gigabytes of storage.
Inside, though, there’s a new processor, which Apple says is twice as fast as before. It’s also the cellphone world’s first 64-bit processor, according to the company, which is an especially attractive feature for game makers; it can “load in” new scenes five times faster than the previous chip.
There’s also a coprocessor — a smaller, assistant chip — dedicated to monitoring and processing data from the phone’s motion and location circuits. It can continuously monitor your activity and location (for fitness and journaling apps, for example) at a battery cost of only one-sixth what the main processor would require.
There’s also a more refined camera. Apple says that it has an f/2.2 lens, meaning much better in low light, and that its pixels are bigger than before, meaning even better in low light (and color and dynamic range are better). The sensor itself is 15 percent bigger, which is a great help.
The flash is worth writing home about. It’s actually two LED flashes — white and amber.
When you take a flash photo, there’s an initial flash; that’s the camera measuring the color temperature of the scene. Then there’s an immediate second flash, the real flash. The two LED’s fire in combination, balanced to match the light in the room to keep colors pure. In combination, they can flash in 1,000 different color-temperature tones. The idea is to eliminate the ugly white bleached-out look of most flash photos. Apple says this is the first such color-adapting flash on any camera — not just on a phone.
You also get 10 frames-per-second burst mode and 120 frames-per-second slow-motion video. The samples look great.
Finally, the iPhone 5S has a fingerprint reader, ingeniously built right into the Home button. You don’t have to push the button — just touch it — to wake the phone and unlock it. It works at any angle.
You can teach it to recognize up to five fingers, yours or a loved one’s; teaching it involves opening the Settings app and tapping the Home button about a dozen times, as the phone builds a more and more complete picture of your whorls, loops and arches.
You can use it instead of a password to make purchases from Apple’s online stores, too — books, music, TV shows and so on. At the moment, other apps can’t use it — for logins into Web sites, Twitter and so on. Apple says it may add that feature down the road, but for now, it’s for unlocking the phone and making Apple purchases only.
Apple says that the images of your fingerprints are encrypted and stored on the phone’s chip, and that they’re never transmitted or stored online, by Apple or anyone else.
As I tweeted the news, many of my Twitter followers (I’m @pogue) were quick to scoff.
“Your fingerprint is not stored online? You are a funny man, Mr. Pogue,” wrote one.
“Ha ha! Soon as your finger touches it, you are scanned and in the system. NSA has your prints!” wrote another.
Look, I get that people are suspicious and cynical after all the revelations about the National Security Agency and its back doors into our phones and e-mail.
But using the fingerprint reader is optional; if you prefer a password, you can still use one. Indeed, you must also set up a password; the “enter password” box appears automatically after three failed efforts to use your fingerprint.
The point is that, according to Apple, only 50 percent of us bother to put a password on our phones, and that’s not good. Here’s a security protocol that’s far faster and more convenient than a password, but even more secure.
Furthermore, if you’re convinced that Apple is lying and the world is out to get you, why aren’t you equally worried about using a login password? How do you know Apple’s not transmitting that to the N.S.A., too?
If that’s your worry, I submit that you have much greater worries. You must also worry that Verizon is listening in to your phone calls, Visa is laughing its head off at your purchases, and Garmin is tracking your road trips on a map somewhere.
Besides — surely you don’t believe the N.S.A. needs to hack into our phones to get our fingerprints. Surely it already has them.
Several of my Twitter correspondents argue that their worry is muggers. “It’s a lot easier to force a finger to a button than extract a password from a brain.”
I don’t get that, either. If a mugger has a gun to your head, I don’t think you’d hesitate to provide your password.
Besides, Apple’s new Activation Lock feature lets you “brick” the phone by remote control, making it worthless after a theft. So this whole mugger scenario is a bit ridiculous.
The iPhone 5S isn’t the first cellphone with a fingerprint reader; the Motorola Atrix had one on the sleep switch a couple of years ago, but it didn’t work well at all, and was abandoned.
I got a few minutes with the 5S at Apple’s event introducing the phone. I trained it to recognize my finger, then used it to unlock the phone a couple of times. It worked perfectly, which is a welcome advance. And the placement on the Home button is ingenious.
The fingerprint reader, improved camera sensor and dual-tone flash are far more important than the sort of treading-water moves Apple has spent most of its efforts in making since Steve Jobs’s death: “the iPad, only smaller” or “the iPod Touch, with sharper screen.” These are surprising, cutting-edge and truly useful enhancements; I can’t wait to spend some time with the new phones to see how well they live up to the promise.