Spec Analysis: iPhone 5

It's not about the spec, it's all about the experience - that's the message we came away with from this week's iPhone 5 reveal. Vague on actual detail about the core innards of its new mobile, Apple's emphasis was on a phone that's obviously bigger but at the same time thinner and lighter, twice as fast as its year-old predecessor, and engineered to a level of precision measured down to the micron. This was Apple doing what it does best: creating a desirable product that excites the mainstream while at the same time generating a state approaching mania among its hardcore fans. How else can we explain the cries and whoops of delight that accompanied the reveal of a new docking connector and sync cable?Bearing in mind that the firm had little in the way of new information to impart that hadn't already been revealed weeks - if not months - previously by the rumour mill, Apple did remarkably well in its presentation. There's not actually much here we didn't know already. The biggest change to the form factor is the height of the new screen; iPhone's Retina display has been extended height-wise to accommodate a new widescreen display, with an 1136x640 resolution taking over from the previous 960x640 screen of the iPhone 4 and 4S. The intention here is to make it easy for users still to operate the phone in one hand, while at the same time making for easier web-browsing and the support of 16:9 media content. There is also talk of superior colour reproduction, and a closer adherence to the full sRGB colour gamut as we saw in the new iPad.The company's focus was to ensure that its customer base knew that the larger screen wouldn't make for an unwieldy phone, as is sometimes the case with the more outsize Android offerings, hence Apple.com's outsize factoids hammering home that the new phone is 18 per cent thinner, 20 per cent lighter and 12 per cent smaller in terms of volume compared to the 4S. Elsewhere, the focus was on delivering an even more refined user-experience: WiFi gets a speedier upgrade, the 4G LTE functionality added to the "new iPad" gets ported over, and the general business of navigating iOS certainly seems to be significantly improved. But in terms of the actual technological improvements within that precision-quality casing, Apple gave away less information than it ever has before - an intriguing move bearing in mind that the firm had it all to prove at this presentation after a less than stellar response to last year's 4S.A few weeks back, we wondered where the Cupertino giant would take the iPhone technology in this new revision. In previous years, the solution has been extremely straightforward: port across that year's iPad processor lock, stock and barrel and downclock it by 20 per cent in order to retain decent battery life. However, with this year's A5X, Apple's options were limited: simply in terms of die-size, the new iPad chip is enormous and its entire purpose in being is to service the mammoth 2048x1536 resolution of the tablet's new Retina display. Fabricated at 45nm, A5X is also somewhat power-hungry, in part explaining a battery pack that offers capacity significantly in excess of the MacBook Air's. Only a shrink down to 32nm - a process Apple had already carried out with the A5 in iPad 2 - in combination with the usual downclock could make A5X suitable for a mobile phone. Even then, would a 2x GPU boost alone be enough to sell a premium phone to an audience expecting a vastly revised product after the iterative 4S?

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