Apple iPhone 5S Launched With Better Camera, Fingerprint Sensor And A7 Chip

Tech giant Apple has finally unveiled the much awaited iPhone 5 successor, the highly anticipated iPhone 5S at the exclusive event set in Cupertino headquarters today. GizBot has carefully compiled all the details for you from the launch event on the basis of specs, features, release date along with the price of the newly launched iPhone model. Here we go.

Form Factor

Starting with the exterior, the iPhone 5S can be picked up in three colors, Silver, Gold and Space Grey. What we love is that the phone is made out of high-grade aluminum, with cut chamfered edges. There's a prominent, slim, steel ring around the home button, which houses a fingerprint scanner. The display size of the handset is 4 inches, supported by the dimension of 4.87 x 2.31 x 0.3 mm at a weight of around 111 grams.

A7 Chip

Moving under the hood, the handset runs on an A7 64-bit chip, the first ever on a smartphone. Based on this, Apple claims that the phone's CPU and Graphics performance is two times faster than the iPhone 5. And here's the important part, there is support for OpenGL ES 3.0, which will allow the handset to play graphics-intensive games.

Apple claims that the CPU performance is 56 times faster than the original iPhone, and more than half of the increase comes from the A7 processor.

If you're looking for some finer details on the chip, then you should know that the A7 has 2 time more general purpose registers, 2 times more floating point registers, over 1 billion transistors and 102 square mm die size. For the uninitiated, that's twice as many transistors for roughly the same size as the A6, which was used on the iPhone 5.

And yes, iOS 7, the brand new mobile OS from the company works well with 64 bit as well. Obviously, it is backward compatible, so thëre's 32-bit compatibility as well.

M7 Motion Processor

Apart from all this, there's a component called the M7, which will work alongside the A7. It happens to be a motion co-processor which will measure motion data continuously, ie the accelerometer, gyroscope and compass support. This, according to Apple, will enable a new generation of health and fitness apps. How? well, developers can access new Core Motion APIs that take advantage of M7 by telling apps if you're stationary, walking or driving. Using this, they can create even better fitness and activity apps.

Battery

Now while all this powerful hardware might sound vicious and power hungry, Apple says the iPhone 5S will be much more battery efficient than the iPhone 5. The company promises 10 hours 3G talk time 250 hours standby on the iPhone 5S. Also worth noting is that there is support for 13 LTE wireless bands.

Camera

Moving onto the camera, the new phone has an 8 megapixel iSight camera that features a 5-element Apple designed lens with f/2.2 aperture. The active sensor area will be 15 percent larger when compared to the one on the iPhone 5.

Not only does the phone automatically set exposure levels and white balance, it also creates these dynamic local tone maps and does autofocus matrix metering.

The new flash has two LEDs. One happens to be a cool white and the other is a warmer amber. Now by combining these two, Apple claims that the phone gets the right color balance out of the flash, allowing your pictures to look more natural.

And then there's auto image stabilization, which the phone performs by taking multiple pictures and combining them for different light levels. It then goes on to pick the sharpest one form the lot.

Its new burst mode offer 10 frames per second and picks the best shots automatically after analyzing them in real time before presenting a selection to you. This way, you don't have to select from a plethora of pictures. When you use its 28 megapixel panorama feature, the iPhone 5S adjusts exposure levels automatically as you pan.

For video, it captures HD video at 720p at 120FPS. Apart from this, it can even deliver Slow-Mo at 120 FPS. Here's the best part, when you're capturing video, you can go ahead and choose to have certain parts of the video at normal speed and certain parts in slow-mo. There's also a new FaceTime HD camera in the front that offers better low-light performance.

Protection - Fingerprint Scanner

Apple wants to move beyond pass codes and so the home button on the iPhone 5S comes with a built-in fingerprint sensor called Touch ID, which will be used to unlock the phone. It uses a capacitive sensor and is 170 microns thin. It has a 500 ppi resolution and can scan in 360 degrees. This feature has been expected ever since Apple acquired fingerprint reader and identification management software company AuthenTec back in July 2012. The component can handle multiple fingerprints too.

Apple went on to add that Touch ID is for more than just unlocking phones, it can also scan your fingerprint to authenticate iTunes for buying apps, music and more. Worried that someone could steal your fingerprints? Well, Apple says fear not, because none of that data available to third party software developers or companies. Plus, fingerprint data will never be uploaded to Apple's servers or backed up to iCloud.

Availability

The 5S and 5C will be available on Sept 20th in stores at US, Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, Singapore and the UK. Also worth noting is that this is the first time that China will get the iPhone on launch day. However, the company added that the iPhone 5S will be available in over 100 countries by December 2013, this should include India as well.

Prices

As always, pricing is based on the device's internal storage capacity, which is 16GB/32GB/64GB. The prices are $199(Rs 12,000 approx.), $299(Rs 19,000 approx) and $399(Rs 25,000 approx). All these prices are for two year contracts in the US. Apple's also offering up proprietary cases at $49 a piece.