iPhone 4S vs iPhone 5 – Improvements and Changes

There has always been a love hate relationship with Apple products, specifically the “iPhones”. iPhones had always been known to stand out in the crowd, and what makes them exciting to use is that all of the devices are “unique” unlike android, which can be found running on every other device. The exclusivity makes it sell like hot cakes and we witnessed that again as around 2 million i5’s were pre-ordered. But what makes us wonder is that if it’s worth swapping your iPhone 4s for iPhone 5? Let’s dig a little deeper by comparing the two phones side by side, shall we?

Dimensions

One of the most significant change made to tradition iPhone design are the dimensions, the popular 4s measured 115.2 x 58.6 x 9.3 mm in length, width and thickness respectively. The extended screen of iPhone 5 makes the new dimensions of, 123.8 x 58.6 x 7.6 mm; while the length has increased by 8.6 mm the thickness is reduced by 1.7 mm.

The iPhone 5 is not only thinner but lighter than 4s as well, while iPhone 5 weighs 112 grams, 4s weighs 140 grams, that’s good news – lighter and thinner.

Processor

The next big change made was to the processor, it was rather obvious that it would be pumped up. The previous A4 and A5 chips were tailored from ARM, the A6 is as-well, but it is Apples own recipe which delivers twice the performance when compared to A5 chip. Both are dual core – clocked at 1GHz processors. The A6 chip has its own on-board processor, but it also has a graphics processing unit, the PowerVR SGX 543MP3 which has 3 cores, while the 4s sported PowerVR SGX543MP2 graphical unit.

From the looks of it, the new chip takes less space as well, performance is the key here, and the benchmarks shows the efforts made by Apple to fully utilize two cores of their new chip.

Screen

iPhone’s screen had been the major selling point since the iPhone 4, when Apple introduced “retina” display; they named it so because of its extra pixel density. iPhone 4s shared the screen dimensions of “standard” iPhone display, measured at 3.5” with a resolution of 640 x 960 and pixel density of 330 pixels per inch, it carried on the legacy of iPhone 4. iPhone 5 swooped in with a 4” screen, having resolution of 640 x 1136 it lost a little bit of legendary pixel density which is now 326 pixel per inch.

The clarity and quality however was maintained, and iPhone 5’s screen looks exceptional, as shown In the vector’s above, the design change is evident.

Connectivity Ports

List of changes continues with the connectivity ports, the first big change you will notice is the dock connector, which has been changed from a 30 pin connector to just a 19 pin connector, still not an industry standard, but a big change. Another change you will notice is the location of 3.5mm jack which has been moved from top and now placed right next to microphone.

The docks to connect your old accessories to iPhone 5/ new iPod lineup have started selling and you can find one for as low as $10.

Camera

iPhones had always been good shooters, from previous camera dog fight, iphone 4s stood third even though it was a relatively old phone. Both iphone 4s and iphone 5 share 8 megapixel camera with resolution of 3264×2448 pixels with autofocus, LED, HDR, touch focus and face recognition. What sets the iphone 5 apart is the panorama feature, the front facing camera on iphone 5 is now HD and you will be allowed to “facetime” via 3G network.

The picture shows the two lenses, iphone 5 left and iPhone 4s right, however the changes aren’t that evident, as apple advertised, the camera lens of iPhone 5 is covered by sapphire crystal – which would give smudge free shots, and it also is scratch resistant. The lens used inside the iPhone 5 camera is manufactured by Sony.

Other Features

Several other noticeable changes has been made to iPhone 5 hardware, instead of having two microphones Apple has opted for three, along with that – to solve the “death grip” issue there is another antenna as well, which switches as required. Another improvement made is in the RAM department, it has been jumped from 512 MB to 1GB, that 1GB of RAM at 1066MHz cycle time/date rate.

When we look at it a little deeply, there is more to the iPhone 5 – it is twice more powerful than iPhone 4s/ The truth is that you don’t really need a Quad core processor or 2GB of RAM to run iOS smoothly, it is a well fragmented OS which ran perfectly on native iPhone 3gs. Another thing to look at in the iPhone 5 is the Operating system, yes, it runs iOS 6 and it is the first blessed device to get the final version. Summing it up, the changes are evident, and yes, we did say that there were a lot of changes, but were the changes a years worth of wait? That’s for you to decide