It’s here! Three days early. I’ve barely used it, but here’s the early impressions upgrading from the iPhone 4.

physics

It’s tall, thin, and light. It does kind of feel like there’s a lot of air inside, but doesn’t feel cheap to me. Just empty. I wonder who made the call not to stuff it with more battery. The 4 was probably my alltime favorite industrial design. Holding it in my hand, I couldn’t help but think I could step ten years into the future and it wouldn’t look out of place. It looked futuristic, but not in an outlandish hey, look at me, I’m from the future way. The 5 (in black) looks like the 4’s evil cousin. The matte back and darker trim give it a different flavor. Even the little square on the home button is darker.

Not really relevant to anything, but I just noticed that the box the iPhone comes in is made of the strongest cardboard I think I’ve ever handled. The lid in particular feels like it’s made of some cardboard adamantium alloy.

upgrade

Turned on iCloud syncing on the 4, then turned on the 5, signed in, and things appear to have worked. Would have liked to get my text message history on the new phone. Not sure if that’s a failure to enable the right sync/backup options or a builtin shortcoming. Went to the App Store, tap tap tap, downloaded the apps I wanted to use. I think I’ll avoid iTunes syncing this phone.

I keep exactly one song on my phone, my ringtone, and yet again I can’t figure out how to transfer it. I remember it being an ordeal last time, but don’t remember the solution.

screen

It’s taller. Makes it easier to read web pages. Don’t think I want anything wider or I can’t get my thumb across it one handed. Already, if there’s a back button on the top left corner it’s getting hard to reach.

maps

Works for me! Haven’t done any navigating, but they feel a lot faster scrolling around. Tiles load quickly. There’s lots of little dots showing me where random things are. On the whole, seems like a better application. If they can fix the nav data, I’ll be happy. btw, I have a bunch of google maps horror stories as well (errors in the data, not just reflecting one client), so I’m hardly going to cry over losing that.

Comparing with the 4, maybe the speedup is more a result of hardware. I think they’re either loading more tiles or using a larger offscreen buffer. With the 4, I can scroll past the rendered area and then watch it draw in the details. With the 5, I had to work at moving past the already rendered area.

The 3D maps are awesome, where they work. Maybe Google Earth did this before? (Having now played with the Google Earth App, the Apple Maps version is way better, at least in the areas with 3D data. Google Earth just smears a texture over a flat surface.) It’s a lot more responsive than street view was. That said, seeing the top of a building is less help than peering into a store front, but it makes walking around and knowing where you are considerably easier.

After using the maps for a few days, there are some issues. Pins tend to get dropped about one block away from where they belong.

LTE

Fast. I’m getting about 18Mbit down and 3Mbit up, which is within spitting distiance of my cable connection. Latency is higher than cable, but much lower than 3G. Interactive terminal sessions and editing files in vi is hardly noticeable, compared to the utter pain it was over 3G, where roundtrip times could often be in excess of half a second. We’ll see how long the party lasts once everybody on the block has a 4G phone.

cable

I am a little sad that my collection of 30 pin cables won’t help me. I’ve got about three old cables in every room of my house, never know when you’ll need one. That said, the new connector is better (and better than micro USB too). This is what the micro USB connector should have been. I jab the cable in the vague direction of the phone and boom, it’s connected. Never upside down. I never know which way my Kindle charger cable is supposed to be connected, so every time I plug it in requires about three attempts (wrong, other wrong, right).

small stuff

The weather app is updated to show hourly weather because there’s more vertical room. I find it distracting though, and would prefer the tap to reveal behavior.

fast

Feels fast. Supposedly something like at least 4x faster than the 4. Maybe that’s why maps feel faster? Updating the 4 to iOS 6 to check. Yup, at least some of the maps awesome sauce comes from the hardware.

battery

I’m not seeing the extended battery reviewers were getting. With LTE turned on, even not using it, I seem to drain a fair bit of battery. Playing around now without LTE on by default. But I think I get better idle battery from the iPhone 4.