iPhone 5S verdict: the surprises

"I will withhold judgment on the new iPhone until I have a chance to play customer, buy the product (my better half seems to like the 5C while I pine for a 5S), and use it for about two weeks – the time required to go beyond my first, and often wrong, impressions".

I wrote those words a little over a month ago. I've now played customer for the requisite two weeks – I got an iPhone 5S on 3 October – and I'm prepared to report.

But first, some context.

iPhone launches always generate controversy, there's always something to complain about: Antennagate for the iPhone 4, the Siri beta for the 4S, the deserved Maps embarrassment last year – with a clean, dignified Tim Cook apology.

(Whether these fracas translate into lost revenue is another matter).

As I sat in the audience during the introduction of the original iPhone, back in January, 2007, I thought the demo was too good, that Steve was (again) having his way with facts. I feared that when the product shipped a few months later, the undistorted reality would break the spell.

We know now that the iPhone that Steve presented on the stage was unfinished, that he trod a careful path through a demo minefield. But the JesusPhone that Apple shipped – unfinished in many ways (no native apps, no cut-and-paste) – was more than a success: It heralded the Smartphone 2.0 era.

This year, Tim Cook introduced the riskiest hardware/software combination since the original iPhone. The iPhone 5S wants to be more than just "new and improved", it attempts to jump off the slope with its combination of two discontinuities: a 64-bit processor and a new 64-bit iOS. Will it work, or will it embarrass itself in a noisome backfire?

First surprise: It works.

Let me explain. I have what attorneys call "personal knowledge" of sausage factories, I've been accountable for a couple and a fiduciary for several others. I have first-hand experience with the sights, the aromas, the tumult of the factory floor, so I can't help but wince when I approach a really new product, I worry in sympathy with its progenitors. The 5S isn't without its "aromas" (we'll get to those later), but the phone is sleek and attractive, the house apps are (mostly) solid, and the many new Application Programming Interfaces (API) promise novel applications. Contrary to some opinions, there are fewer warts than anyone could have expected.

Surprise #2: The UI: I had read the scathing critiques of the spartan excesses, and, indeed, I feel the drive for simplicity occasionally goes too far. The buttons on the built-in timer are too thin, too subdued. When I meditate in the dark, I can't distinguish start from cancel without my glasses. But I'm generally happy with the simpler look. Windows and views get out of the way quickly and gracefully, text is neatly rendered, the removal of skeuomorphic artifacts is a relief.

The next surprise is the fingerprint sensor – Touch ID. Having seen how attempts to incorporate fingerprint recognition into smartphones and laptops have gone nowhere, I had my doubts. Moreover, Apple had acquired AuthenTec, the company that created the fingerprint sensor, a mere 15 months ago. Who could believe that Apple would be able to produce a fingerprint-protected iPhone so quickly?

But it works. It's not perfect, I sometimes have to try again, or use another finger (I registered three on my right hand and two on my left), but it's clear that Apple has managed to push Touch ID into the category of "consumer-grade technology": It works often enough and delivers enough benefit to offset the (small) change in behaviour.

A personal favourite surprise is motion sensing.

When Apple's marketing supremo, Phil Schiller, described the M7 motion processor, I didn't think much of it, I was serving the last days of my two-month sentence wearing the JawBone UP bracelet mentioned in a previous Monday Note. (A friend suggested I affix it to his dog's collar to see what the data would look like.)

Furthermore, the whole "lifestyle monitoring" business didn't seem like virgin territory. The Google/Motorola Moto X smartphone introduced last August uses a co-processor that, among other things, monitors your activities, stays awake even when the main processor is asleep, and adjusts the phone accordingly. A similar co-processing arrangement is present in Moto X's predecessors, the Droid Maxx, Ultra and Mini.

But then I saw a Twitter exchange about motion sensing apps about a week after I had activated my iPhone 5S. One thumb touch later, the free Pedometer++ app asked for my permission to use motion data (granted) and immediately told me how many steps I'd taken over the past seven days.

I went to the chauffeured iPhone on my wife's desk and installed the app. I did the same on friends' devices. The conclusion was obvious: The M7 processor continuously generates and stores motion data independent of any application. A bit of googling shows that there are quite a few applications that use the motion data that's obligingly collected by the M7 processor; I downloaded a number of these apps and the step counts are consistent.

(Best in class is the ambitious MotionX 24/7. Philippe Kahn's company FullPower Technologies licenses MotionX hardware and software to many motion-sensing providers, including Jawbone and, perhaps, Apple. Wearable technologies aren't just for our wrists … we carry them in our pockets.)

My wife asked if her iPhone would count steps from within her handbag. Ever the obliging husband, I immediately attended to this legitimate query, grabbed her handbag, and stepped out of the house for an experimental stroll. A conservatively dressed couple walked by, gave me a strange look, and didn't respond to my evening greeting, but, indeed, the steps were counted.

A question arises: Does Apple silently log my movements? No, my iPhone records my locomotion, but the data stays within the device – unless, of course, I let a specific application export them. One must be aware of the permissions.

Other 5S improvements are welcome but not terribly surprising. The camera has been smartly enhanced in several dimensions; search finally works in mail; and, to please Senator John McCain, apps update themselves automatically.

All of this comes with factory-fresh bugs, of course, a whiff of the sausage-making apparatus. iPhoto crashed on launch the first three or four times I tried it, but has worked without complaint since then. A black Apple logo on a white background appeared and then quickly disappeared – too brief to be a full reboot, too sparse to be part of an app.

I've had to reboot the 5S to recover a dropped cellular connection, and have experienced hard-to-repeat, sporadic Wi-Fi trouble that seems to spontaneously cure itself. ("How did you fix it?" asks my wife when her tech chauffeur gets the sullen device to work again. "I don't know, I poke the patient everywhere until it responds.")

From my admittedly geeky perspective, I'm not repelled by these glitches, they didn't lose my data or prevent me from finishing a task. They're annoying, but they're to be expected given the major hardware and software changes. And I expect that the marketplace (as opposed to the kommentariat) will shrug them off and await the bug fixes that will take care of business.

So, yes, overall, the "discontinuous" 5S works.

[I'm also using a pre-release of Mavericks, the upcoming 10.9 version of OS X, on two Macs. There, I wonder if I'm not seeing the opposite of the iPhone 5S: less risk, more bugs. I hope things straighten out for the public release. I'll report if and when warranted.]

[I can't resist: the Washington Post's Wonkblog calls the iPhone's third colour … Dignified Gold. I wonder: Is it a compliment to Sir Jony's unerring taste? Or a clever, indirect ethnic slur?]

– JLG@mondaynote.com