Apple has officially announced the iPhone 5s. It comes in three colors — space gray, silver, and gold. The iPhone 5s is made of aluminum, with chamfered edges. It uses a Touch ID fingerprint scanner within a sapphire Home Button, for security purposes. Touch ID can be used to unlock the iPhone 5s, or to authenticate iTunes purchases. It can be set up to read multiple fingerprints. Apple says fingerprints will never be uploaded to its servers, or backed up to iCloud. The data will be encrypted. The Touch ID sensor is 170 microns thin, with 500 ppi resolution.
It can be read in any orientation — 360 degree readability. A ring around the Home Button is a detection ring that activates the Touch ID.
It contains a 64-bit A7 processor with 2x general purpose registers and one billion transistors. Apple pointed out the 5s is 40 times faster than the original iPhone, while graphics are 56 times faster. It’s noted that iOS 7 has been reengineered for 64-bit, and is backward-compatible with 32-bit apps. The iPhone 5s runs Open GL ES 3.0, which will allow for greater graphic performance. A demo showing off the graphics used Infinity Blade III, which will be along with the iPhone 5s.
A new part, the M7, works as a motion coprocessor alongside the A7. It continuously measures motion data, with accelerometer, gyroscope, and compass support.
The new iPhone 5s iSight camera has a newly developed five-element Apple lens with f/2.2 aperture, and a 15 percent larger active area. iOS 7 is designed to work with the new camera — to set white balance and exposure level, and to create a dynamic local tone map. The camera actually takes multiple photos and picks the best one available. True Tone Flash is the expected dual-flash LED — one cool and white, the other warm and amber. The flashes are used in tandem to improve color balance. Auto image stablization has also been added, and a new 10 frames-per-second Burst Mode is activated when holding the button down to take pictures. Exposure in a 28MP panoramic shot can be adjusted automatically.
As for video, the iPhone 5s camera can record slow-motion video and 720 HD video at 120 frames-per-second. It’s possible to select separate parts of a video to be normal speed or in slow-motion.
