The iPhone 5s Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 17, 2013 9:01 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Apple
- Mobile
- iPhone
- iPhone 5S
Display
The iPhone 5s, like the iPhone 5c, retains the same 4-inch Retina Display that was first introduced with the iPhone 5. The 4-inch 16:9 LCD display features a 1136 x 640 resolution, putting it at the low end for most flagship smartphones these days. It was clear from the get-go that a larger display wouldn’t be in the cards for the iPhone 5s. Apple has stuck to its two generation design cadence since the iPhone 3G/3GS days and it had no indication of breaking that trend now, especially with concerns of the mobile upgrade cycle slowing. Recouping investment costs on platform and industrial design are a very important part of making the business work.
Apple is quick to point out that iOS 7 does attempt to make better use of display real estate, but I can’t shake the feeling of being too cramped on the 5s. I’m not advocating that Apple go the route of some of the insanely large displays, but after using the Moto X for the past month I believe there’s a good optimization point somewhere around 4.6 - 4.7”. I firmly believe that Apple will embrace a larger display and branch the iPhone once more, but that time is just not now.
The 5s’ display remains excellent and well calibrated from the factory. In an unusual turn of events, my iPhone 5c sample came with an even better calibrated display than my 5s sample. It's a tradeoff - the 5c panel I had could go way brighter than the 5s panel, but its black levels were also higher. The contrast ratio ended up being very similar between the devices as a result. I've covered the panel lottery in relation to the MacBook Air, but it's good to remember that the same sort of multi-source components exist in mobile as well.
Color accuracy is still excellent just out of the box. Only my iPhone 5c sample did better than the 5s in our color accuracy tests. Grayscale accuracy wasn't as good on my 5s sample however.
Saturations:
GMB Color Checker:
Cellular
When early PCB shots of the 5s leaked, I remember Brian counting solder pads on the board to figure out if Apple moved to a new Qualcomm baseband solution. Unfortunately his count came out as being the same as the existing MDM9x15 based designs, which ended up what launched. It’s unclear whether or not MDM9x25 was ready in time in order to be integrated into the iPhone 5s design, or if there was some other reason that Apple chose against implementing it here. Regardless of the why, the result is effectively the same cellular capabilities as the iPhone 5.
Apple tells us that the wireless stack in the 5c and 5s is all new, but the lack of LTE-Advanced features like carrier aggregation and Category 4 150Mbps downlink make it likely that we’re looking at a MDM9x15 derivative at best. LTE-A support isn’t an issue at launch, however as Brian mentioned on our mobile show it’s going to quickly become a much needed feature for making efficient use of spectrum and delivering data in the most power efficient way.
The first part is relatively easy to understand. Carrier aggregation gives mobile network operators the ability of combining spectrum across non-contiguous frequency bands to service an area. The resulting increase in spectrum can be used to improve performance and/or support more customers on LTE in areas with limited present day LTE spectrum.
The second part, improving power efficiency, has to do with the same principles of race to sleep that we’ve talked about for years. The faster your network connection, the quicker your modem can transact data and fall back into a lower power sleep state.
The 5s’ omission of LTE-A likely doesn’t have immediate implications, but those who hold onto their devices for a long time will have to deal with the fact that they’re buying at the tail end of a transition to a new group of technologies.
In practice I didn’t notice substantial speed differences between the iPhone 5s, 5c and the original iPhone 5. My testing period was a bit too brief to adequately characterize the device but I didn’t have any complaints. The 5s retains the same antenna configuration as the iPhone 5, complete with receive diversity. As Brian discovered after the launch, the Verizon iPhone 5s doesn’t introduce another transmit chain - so simultaneous voice and LTE still aren’t possible on that device.
Apple is proud of its support for up to 13 LTE bands on some SKUs. Despite the increase in support for LTE bands there are a lot of iPhone 5s SKUs that will be shipped worldwide:
| Apple iPhone 5S and 5C Banding | |||||||
| iPhone Model | GSM / EDGE Bands | WCDMA Bands | FDD-LTE Bands | TDD-LTE Bands | CDMA 1x / EVDO Rev A/B Bands | ||
|
5S- A1533 (GSM) |
850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz | 850, 900, 1700/2100, 1900, 2100 MHz | 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 13, 17, 19, 20, 25 | N/A | N/A | ||
|
5S- A1533 (CDMA) |
800, 1700/2100, 1900, 2100 MHz | ||||||
|
5S- A1453 |
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 13, 17, 18, 19, 20, 25, 26 | ||||||
|
5S- A1457 5C- A1507 |
850, 900, 1900, 2100 MHz | 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 20 | N/A | ||||
|
5S- A1530 5C- A1529 |
1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 20 | 38, 39, 40 | |||||
| Apple iPhone 5S/5C FCC IDs and Models | |||
| FCC ID | Model | ||
| BCG-E2642A | A1453 (5S) A1533 (5S) | ||
| BCG-E2644A | A1456 (5C) A1532 (5C) | ||
| BCG-E2643A | A1530 (5S) | ||
| BCG-E2643B | A1457 (5S) | ||
| BCG-E2694A | A1529 (5C) | ||
| BCG-E2694B | A1507 (5C) | ||
WiFi
WiFi connectivity also remains unchanged on the iPhone 5s. Dual band (2.4/5GHz) 802.11n (up to 150Mbps) is the best you’ll get out of the 5s. We expected Apple to move to 802.11ac like some of the other flagship devices we’ve seen in the Android camp, but it looks like you’ll have to wait another year for that.
I don’t believe you’re missing out on a lack of 802.11ac support today, but over the life of the iPhone 5s I do expect greater deployment of 802.11ac networks (which can bring either performance or power benefits to a mobile platform).
WiFi performance seems pretty comparable to the iPhone 5. The HTC One and Moto X pull ahead here as they both have 802.11ac support.
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Dug - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
"maybe you should hire a developer to write native cross platform benchmark tools"WHY? It is not going to make any difference. Developers aren't writing native cross platform programs. If they can take advantage of anything that's in the system, then show it off.
That would be like telling car manufacturers to redesign a hybrid to gas only to compare with all the other gas only cars.
ddriver - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
"Developers aren't writing native cross platform programs"Maybe it is about time you crawl from under the rock you are living under... Any even remotely concerned with performance and efficiency application pretty much mandates it is a native application. It would be incredibly stupid to not do it, considering the "closest" to native language Java is like 2-3 times slower and users 10-20 times as much memory.
Dug - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
Exactly my point! "native cross platform" Each cross-platform solution can only support a subset of the functionality included in each native platform.It doesn't get you anywhere to produce a native cross platform benchmark tool.
Again you have to mitigate to names and snide comments because you are wrong.
ddriver - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
What you talk about is I/O, events and stuff like that. When it comes to pure number crunching the same code can execute perfectly well for every platform it is complied against. Actually, some modern frameworks go even further than that and provide ample abstractions. For example, the same GUI application can run on Windows, Linux, MacOS, iOS and Android, apart from a few other minor platforms.Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
Ultimately the benchmarking problem is being fixed, just not on the time scale that we want it to. I figured we'd be better off by now, and in many ways we are (WebXPRT, Browsermark are both steps in the right direction, we have more native tools under Android now) but part of the problem is there was a long period of uncertainty around what OSes would prevail. Now that question is finally being answered and we're seeing some real investment in benchmarks. Trust me, I tried to do a lot behind the scenes over the past 4 years (some of which Brian and I did recently) but this stuff takes time. I remember going through this in the early days of the PC industry too though, I know how it all ends - it'll just take a little time to get there.Actually I think 128-bit registers might've been optional on v7.
The only reason encryption results are in that table is because that's how Geekbench groups them. There's no nefarious purpose there (note that it's how we've always reported the Geekbench results, as they are reported in the test themselves).
In my experience with the 5s I haven't noticed any performance regressions compared to the 5/5c. I'm not saying they don't exist and I'll continue to hunt, it's just that they aren't there now. I believe I established the reasoning for why you'd want to do this early, and again we're talking about at most 12 months before they should start the move to 64-bit anyways. Apple tends to like its ISA transitions to be as quick and painless as possible, and moving early to ARMv8 makes a lot of sense in that light. Sure they are benefiting from the marketing benefits of having a feature that no one else does, but what company doesn't do that?
I don't believe the move to 64-bit with Cyclone was driven first and foremost by marketing. Keep in mind that this architecture was designed when a bunch of certain ex-AMDers were over there too...
Take care,
Anand
BrooksT - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
Why would Anand write cross-platform benchmarks that have no connection to real world usage? Especially when you then complain that the 64 bit coverage isn't real world enough?ddriver - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
For starters, putting the encryption results in their own graph, like every other review before that, and side to side comparison between geekbench ST/MT scores for A7 and competing v7 chips would be a good start toward a more objective and less biased article.And I know I am asking a lot, but an edit feature in the comment section is long overdue...
TheBretz - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
For what it's worth this is NOT a case of LITERALLY comparing "Apples" and "Oranges" - it is a case of comparing "Apple" and many other manufacturers, but there was no fruit involved in the comparison, only smarthphones and tablets.ddriver - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
Apples to oranges is a figure of speech, it has nothing to do with the company apple... It concerns comparing incomparable objects which is the case of completely different JS implementations on iOS and Android.Arbee - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
Please name any case when AT's benchmarks and reviews have been proven to be biased or inaccurate. There's a reason the writers at other sites consider AT the gold standard for solid technical commentary (Engadget, Gizmodo, and the Verge all regularly credit AT on technical stories). As far as bias, have you *heard* Brian cooing about practically wanting to marry the Nexus 5? ;-)I think what actually happened here is that apparently Apple engineers listen to the AT podcast, because aside from 802.11ac and the screen size the 5S is designed almost perfectly to AT's well-known and often-stated specifications. It hits all of Anand's chip architecture geekery hot buttons in a way that Samsung's mashups of off-the-shelf parts never will, and they used Brian's exact line "Bigger pixels means better pictures" in the presentation. And naturally, if someone gives you what you want, you're likely to be happy with it. This is why people have Amazon gift lists ;-)
Krait's 128 bit SIMD definitely helps, but it won't match true v8 architecture designs. I've written commercially shipping ARM assembly, and there's a *lot* of cruft in the older ISA that v8 cleans right up. And it lets compilers generate *much* more favorable code. I'll be surprised if the next Snapdragons aren't at least 32-bit v8. Qualcomm has been pretty forward-looking aside from their refusal to cooperate with the open-source community (Freedreno FTW).
As far as 64 bit on less than 4 GB of RAM, it enables applications to more freely operate on files in NAND without taking up huge amounts of RAM (via mmap(), which the Linux kernel in Android of course also has). Apps like Loopy HD and MultiTrack DAW (not to mention Apple's own iMovie and GarageBand) will definitely be able to take advantage.