Apple iPhone 5 Arrives – Hands On and First Impressions

The iPhone 5 has arrived in select locations, and I got to play around with it for about an hour. Here are some photos and some videos of Apple’s iPhone 5.

My first impressions on the phone were best described as, “Meh..”

Having owned a Verizon iPhone 4, it doesn’t feel like that much of an improvement in terms of use. It’s definitely works as well as the iPhone 4 and 4S, but if you already own one of those devices and are satisfied with your current data speeds, I just don’t see a huge need to upgrade. Now, where the phone does see some improvement is on the camera application and the LTE service. This was not an activated device, so I couldn’t utilize LTE, but Apple has managed to keep the battery performance fairly high (10+ hours) while using LTE on AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint.

Camera:
I have a video demo of the camera that I’ll be uploading later and will post below here, but so far it’s very nice. The only thing I felt was lacking was the ability to capture burst photos while holding down the shutter. You can crank out photos as fast as you can tap the camera button, but you tend to end up with jittery pictures. My HTC One S seemed to have the advantage with respect to the camera features. The panoramic photo feature was also nice, operating almost exactly like it does on the HTC One Series phones. The stitching of photos works fairly well as long as you don’t have a lot of people in the shot and you keep the camera moving steady.

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Shane Paris

​Shane is the founder and Technical Editor-in-Chief here at That's It Guys. He enjoys Star Trek, 80s and 90s action movies, and everything tech related. Shane is highly skilled with computer hardware, software, and electronics.