Touch ID is awesome. No, it’s not just a marketing ploy to describe multi-touch (I am ALMOST sure that Apple would do something like that, as blunt as that sounds). It is a fingerprint sensor. While it is kind of overkill because the average user is not a flipping SPY, it’s just…it recalls those spy films and futuristic films where everyone talks to each other on watches and there’s flying cars and everything. It’s really cool…it just FEELS good to unlock a phone with your fingerprint. *cough*LGismakingaphonewiththesensornearthesimcardslotwhy*cough* You can enroll multiple fingerprints as well, so your friends can unlock it…or you can make the phone learn both your hands, thumbs and all.
THe new chip voodoo it has makes this phone the fastest frickin’ thing I’ve ever seen. You know that GTA Vice CIty app? Remember how it took a really long time to load or maybe it was just me and my iPad 2 but shut up? THe load time is nuts on the 5S…it loads instantly. I am not kidding. Even when you exit a building into the main world, the loading screen dosen’t have time to display itself on the screen, it’s that fast.
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Now the bad. I’ve gotten this thing to bluescreen. I didn’t say crash, I said BLUE SCREEN. THe Windows BSOD of death (that was redundant but shush). That thing Microsoft did that turned the screen blue and Windows said something about an error that nobody including their mother and their kitchen sink understood.
Now the iPhone dosen’t display any text when it does this…the screen just turns solid blue and then it crashes to the Apple logo. It kinda looks like that screen debugger in the iPod nano when you tell it to display solid blue.
Now I know what you’re thinking: “You got the phone to freak out and now your iCLoud/iTunes syncing will be messed up or something!”
Nope. My phone is fine. ANd it isn’t just the phone freaking out and displaying blue because that color is first in the color hex table or whatever.
It’s an honest-to-god Jony Ive design choice. Why the hell is that so? Because I’ve gotten the blue screen to act like a panel and slide over the rest of the screen.
Little techno-jargon to explain that:
Every 2D container that is not affected by the gyroscope has to be defined as either a bar, which is an unchanging set of elements usually used for menu buttons, or a panel, which is the main content window and can support gestures like scrolling and swiping to the right to go back a page.
Panels can have slightly different behaviors depending on how it’s coded. Panels can slide different directions and support different gestures.
THis “bluescreen” panel slides down from the top of the screen with an underlying shadow. So it has to be defined as a panel in order for it to work like that, so since it’s defined as something the phone can understand, it is not simply random signals as the CPU dies.
I don’t know why Jony Ive decided that a bluescreen would be good…but I guess it’s better than the phone instantly switching to the Apple logo for seemingly no reason.
Although I have gotten it to switch to the Apple logo without even displaying the bluescreen…but then it didn’t even seem to know it had crashed because then it didn’t ask me for my passcode (which it usually requires you to do after a restart). I don’t know how I did that though, so eh.
UPDATE 11/03/2013: I’ve been told that Apple has completely removed the bluescreen from the OS. Good. Now people won’t be shouting about how Apple is turning into Microsoft or something. Or maybe they still will because it was there in the first place. They probably will…oh well. Here’s hoping the iWatch will crush/hide/mute/sort-of-obscure that claim.