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September 16, 2013
Update on October 08, 2013:Apple’s Latest iPhones Sell Well; iPhone 6 in the Spotlight
The Apple iPhone 5S has now entered the market amid much hype and hoopla. Considered to be the company’s golden phone, the 5S comes with several interesting features and functionality. How is this device different for the mobile app developer? Here is an analysis of the iPhone 5S from the point of view of developers.
Design and Display
Design-wise, the iPhone 5S looks very much like its immediate predecessor. This smartphone has the same shape, form factor, aluminum body and glass front panel. Both the devices are extremely lightweight, yet, feel solid to hold. The former, though, comes with more color options than the older iPhone 5, which comes with usual the black and white variants. Also, one can notice a metallic trim around the Home button on the new phone.
The display of the iPhone 5 and 5S remain the same. Each of these models comes with a 4-inch IPS LCD display with 1136x640 pixel resolution at 326 ppi. The color reception is bright and the contents on the screen are clearly visible to the eye. Hence, there is nothing app developers specially need to know in order to work with the display and resolution factor.
Processor Power
Both the devices come with powerful dual-core processor, though the new A7 chip is more powerful and is clocked to about 1.7GHz.
Both phones have 1GB of RAM. The internal storage versions of 16GB, 32GB and 64GB remain the same and neither of the models offer support for microSD cards.
The main difference between the two smartphones lies in the inclusion of the A7 processor in the company’s latest flagship model. Apple claims that this chip is twice as powerful and fast as its older A6 chip, which powers the older phone. Additionally, the latest phone is considered to be the first of its kind to use a 64-bit architecture in its chip.
From a game developer’s point of view, the iPhone 5S would be a veritable treat to develop apps for, given its sheer power, speed and high performance. This device would open up a world of opportunities especially to advanced game app developers who use immense graphics in their apps. These graphics would render better than ever before, thanks to the support for Open GL ES 3.0.
The M7 Coprocessor
Apple’s latest iPhone model has another ace up its sleeve – this feature would prove to be especially useful for third-party developers. The new addition, the M7 motion coprocessor, has been designed specifically to measure motion data; something that would normally have been the job of the main processor. While the user remains idle or is busy with other things, the M7 automatically recognizes the temporary inactivity and reduces the phone’s network activity. This “side” processor hence helps the device save battery power and would prove to be a boon for fitness and activity tracking app developers. Incidentally, the M7’s CoreMotion API is available to all app developers and so, it is up to them to stretch its possibilities to the maximum.
The M7 would prove invaluable to the iPhone 5S even without third-party app support, as it know when to activate certain features and when to slow down when not necessary. This would also mean that users would get more talk time from their device.
Touch ID
One more noteworthy difference between the iPhone 5 and the 5S is the inclusion of the Touch ID fingerprint scanner on the latter’s Home button. This helps users unlock their device and substitutes a password or PIN, which is otherwise the method used. The Touch ID feature can also be used for making purchases via iTunes. App developers, though, are currently not given access to work with this feature. The company has further mentioned that it does not plan to let developers play with this functionality in the future either.
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