The iPhone 5S Review: Probably The Best All-Round Smartphone To Date

Cards on the table, this is not going to be a forensic review of the iPhone 5S. Seven weeks ago it reached the hands of the public, and since then Apple has struggled to keep their latest flagship smartphone in stock. It’s hard to disagree with those sort of sales numbers, and after spending two weeks with the iPhone 5S I haven’t found any reason to even try. The iPhone 5S is the best all-round smartphone on the market right now.

Yes, that’s a statement that’s going to raise a lot of eyebrows (and I can imagine the comments are already being mentally composed). There is a lot of choice in the smartphone market right now, and there is no right answer to the question of ‘which is the best phone to buy.’ Every handset and every operating system is a collection of compromises, and the iPhone is compromised in a different way to an Android, Windows Phone, or BlackBerry handset.

The iPhone 5S puts much more focus on ease of use and simple choices than an Android handset such as the Samsung Galaxy S4. Where Android opens up a world of choice in settings, layouts, launchers, and options, the iPhone 5S provides a standard platform for everyone using the handset.

That reduces the appeal of the the iOS platform to the vocal power-users and hacker community who want a platform to play with, but it also makes the handset much more appealing to the general public. For many, smartphones are still complicated little beasts, which is where Apple’s whole ethos for the iPhone and iOS comes in to play. The iPhone 5S is designed for everyday use and to just work, not something that needs to be tweaked and maintained.

The iPhone 5S is unashamedly aimed at the mainstream user, and it achieves that goal with ease.

The focus of the application model used (go into an app, do something, move back to the launch screen, go into another app) is uncluttered, which makes it approachable and understandable. Without a home screen for icons and widgets, or external launchers, you know where to find everything, but this trade-off for minimalism does reduce the configurability that many Android fans enjoy.

The iPhone switches effortlessly between 3G, 4G LTE, and Wi-fi data, keeping the bills down and the speed as high as possible. The mobile version of Safari is smooth and quick to render pages. I’ve not come across any issues in using it for my regular browsing.

Connecting to my computer remains one of the joys of the Apple system, if you are happy to buy into the iOS ecosystem. While there are various application suites and connectivity packages on other platforms, there is still no easier way to move a managed music collection from a desktop computer over to a smartphone than iTunes. There’s no need to worry about directory structures, location and copying files on your deskbound computer, or play around with DRM issues. iTunes just works, both for local and purchased media.

The iPhone 5S builds on the design of the iPhone 5, adding in the new 64-bit A7 processor, and introducing the M7 motion co-processor. Both of these are very much on the bleeding edge, with only a handful of applications set up to make use of them at the moment. Going forwards though, these two chips and their architecture are going to be keystones of the platform, which makes the 5S as future proof a smartphone as you could hope to buy.

While the 5S is geared towards being a mainstream phone with appeal, it’s not perfect. Much of that is down to the software, specifically iOS 7. The reworking of Apple’s mobile operating system has been critiqued from some areas as reducing the functionality of the device, looking like a ‘My First Smartphone’ OS, and reducing the flexibility of the handset.

I think a lot of the noise around the look of iOS 7 is more to do with the familiarity of iOS 6 rather than an appreciation of iOS 7. When things change, it’s rare for the existing user base to be anything other than vocal about a change. While I could point out the countless changes as a cosmetic level, the loss of highlighting on selectable text options, and the abundance of the white backgrounds and spindly text, this is the almost modernist look that Apple’s Jony Ive has chosen.

That’s not to say there are areas that should have been examined. The look of iOS 7, and therefore the look of the iPhone 5S is not quite consistent. Apple’s strength is keeping everything simple and easy to understand, and that requires a laser-like focus, so it’s just a shame that there are a number of areas that make me do a double take on the OS. Case in point the keyboard. For whatever reason, there are three different styles of keyboard that could show up – a modern dark style, a modern white style, and the old grey and black keyboard. There may be technical reasons why these are still available to first and third party developers, but it’s an area I would have expected Apple to be a lot more professional.

I found the various options and locations in the Settings app to be a mixed bag as well. There’s a certain logic to grouping settings by function (such as notifications), but you also have individual apps names for other settings . Splitting these out over multiple locations means a lot of hunting for a specific option in an app, with the settings for alerts, retrieval, and updates in different locations.