First iPhone 5 Found In The Wilderness

IPHONE 5 SURPRISINGLY SIMILAR, SLIGHTLY SLIMMER

Here it is, folks! The first iPhone 5 that I have spotted in the wild! This one belongs to one of my cohorts, fellow blogger Tim Largent.

When I first saw it, I didn't know I was looking at an iPhone 5. He had it sitting on his desk, downloading his apps from iCloud. When I saw his iPhone 4 sitting on the other side of his desk, I was confused, thinking the iPhone 4 was an iPod or something.

I asked him what the heck he was doing, and he told me he was loading his new phone. That's when it dawned on me (I'm not that bright) that the device I was looking at was in fact his iPhone 5.

Picking it up, it was noticeably thin. He had it in a cheaper rubber case, but even with the case on the device, you could tell that it had a couple of millimeters shaved off. Otherwise, it looked exactly like the iPhone 4, only stretched out a bit.

If someone had plopped that phone in front of me on a table and asked me to identify it, I would have guessed it was an iPhone 4. But after you pick it up and try to access the top left corner of the screen, and can't reach it with your thumb, you reaize it has increased in height.

The new data connector is quite a bit of a switch, about 1/4th the size of the older standard connector. But it's not the magnetic type that you see on the Macbook Air. This has a few iPhone fans a little disappointed, but the new connector is an improvement at least.

The display looks about the same, but with the added pixel height. The new aspect ratio of 16:9 is set up for optimal movie viewing. It looks like the standard iPhone display with an extra row of icons added. That might help for jamming more favorites onto the home screen.

So the bottom line is, for me, that the iPhone 5 is shockingly similar to the iPhone 4/4S form factor. It is a great-looking phone with the newly designed thinness and slightly taller display, but it's more of the same. Apple did not take chances on shaking up the entire design.

The iPhone 5 is not something that would draw me back from Android devices, but I do see this out-selling all previous iPhone models. I think Apple is smartly sticking to what they know works best, and we may not see a radical shift in design for quite some time.

Do you have an iPhone 5, or are you considering getting an upgrade? If so, what carrier is your choice host? Let me know in the comments section below!

Carlton Flowers
iPhone Watcher