Each successive Apple iPhone that rolls out is a nipped and tucked offshoot of the previous model – with modifications that keep getting more and more sophisticated. However, in its fifth installment, is the iPhone 5 merely a retouched version of its predecessor?

What’s New

At 7.6mm, Apple’s new baby is the world’s thinnest smartphone. And if you thought the 960×640 resolution of the iPhone 4 didn’t play up the subtleties in your photos and videos quite enough, the newcomer’s 4-inch screen features a 1136×640 resolution Retina display. Each pixel doubles as a touch-sensing electrode, a departure from the double-layered touch screens of old that feature touch sensors below the pixel display. It is this clever quirk that enables the iPhone 5 to weigh a wispy 112 grams.

The A6 chip and iOS 6 mobile operating system join forces to deliver “twice the CPU and graphics performance,” claims the press release. Always striving to be superlative, Apple has created the first smartphone with LTE wireless capabilities, which support speeds of up to 150Mbps – a godsend for those who enjoy streaming movies on the go.

Critics have marveled at the ‘Panorama’ feature of the gadget’s 8 megapixel iSight camera, which “stitches” sequences of shots together to form a 240 degree photograph by swiping the phone across a scene. Furthermore, the camera’s sapphire crystal lens is more scratch-resistant and dust-deflecting than the iPhone 4’s standard glass lens. The 1.2 megapixel front-facing FaceTime camera is supported by cellular wideband audio that cancels background noise for clearer video calls.

Apple has bumped off Google Maps, supplanting it for software of its own that features real-time traffic data and turn-by-turn navigation. 3D rendering of major cities and tourism hotbeds is, for the most part, reliable; however, picture quality tends to deviate as users navigate away from these sites.

What the World Says

Despite Apple’s uncanny ability to stretch the iPhone’s product life cycle, technology experts are divided between the impressed and the skeptical. As the first iPhone to feature a 4G network, the iPhone 5 is “playing catch-up with other smartphones on the market,” according to David Bottomley, Business Editor of TODAY. The Economist rates the iPhone 5 a “five out of ten,” dismissing its new advances as “incremental changes.”

The new ‘Lightning’ dock connector has also caused considerable contention, as it renders the charging cables, car adapters and docks of previous models incompatible – unless users purchase the cable or plug adapter for $39 and $29 respectively. “These adapters should not be a profit center for Apple; they should be a gesture of kindness to those of us who’ve bought accessories based on the old connector,” wrote David Pogue in The New York Times.

These minor grievances notwithstanding, analysts have predicted sales of 10-12 million units this September, with stocks for online preorders having depleted within the hour of its 12:01am opening on September 14.

Should users of the iPhone 4 switch to the iPhone 5?

Apple idolaters will no doubt trade their iPhone 4 for the newbie – by no means a shortchange – however, those who watched Wednesday’s episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live may hesitate. ABC crew took to the streets to ask passersby to test the “new iPhone 5.” Subjects were handed the iPhone 4S, presumed to be the iPhone 5, and asked to compare. Not one person surmised the hoax. “Oh my God, it feels a lot lighter and more high quality!” one man enthused. Three others made remarks about its “superior” speed. One woman took out her iPhone 4, held it up next to the fake iPhone and nodded. “Yeah, that one’s definitely faster.”

While the spoof may have been a hilarious TV moment, audiences began to realize how media hype and trendsetting informs much of Apple’s brand loyalty. In a move that might seem self-effacing, Apple is enabling the iOS 6, the operating system which distinguishes the iPhone 5, to be downloaded for free onto previous models of the iPhone.

The iPhone 5 retails in the USA, UK and Canada on September 21.

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Fiksu (www.fiksu.com), the industry’s first mobile app user acquisition platform spanning the entire mobile ecosystem, reported that the swell of new iPhone 4S users, combined with iOS 5 app updates, generated escalated app discovery activity and peak download volumes for the top 200 apps.

The Fiksu App Store Competitive Index (which measures the average aggregate daily download volume of the top 200 free U.S. iPhone apps) continued its upward trajectory initiated during October when the iPhone 4S launched. The Index peaked at 5.65 million downloads per day in November; a 15 percent increase over October’s previous record high of 4.91 million daily downloads.

By comparison, app download volumes in November 2010 were 83 percent lower, illustrating the enormous demand for and growth of mobile apps in just twelve months. The Fiksu Cost per Loyal User Index remained steady in November, down just four cents to $1.43 from October’s $1.47.

“Unlike October‘s intermittent spikes in downloads and costs, November saw a steady increase in demand for app downloads without any notable fluctuations in mobile app marketing costs – even overThanksgiving weekend,” said Micah Adler, Fiksu’s CEO. “Signs indicate that app marketers have become savvier about planning and executing their ad spends during seasonal periods to avoid paying premium prices for acquiring users.

In fact, November presented them with a somewhat unique opportunity to add more users at costs that were actually below October’s.” The Fiksu Indexes measure monthly fluctuations in competition for rank in the app stores, and the cost to acquire loyal users(1), helping mobile app marketers benchmark their performance against industry averages.

For Fiksu’s full analysis, visit http://www.fiksu.com/resources/fiksu-indexes#analysis.

Data for the Fiksu Indexes was sourced from more than 7.6 billion mobile app actions – such as app launches, registrations and in-app purchases – and more than 156 million downloads recorded by apps marketed via the Fiksu for Mobile Apps user acquisition platform.

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Apple has officially announced its latest iPhone and it’s not an iPhone 5. The latest upgrade to the iPhone family has been dubbed the iPhone4S. The highly anticipated announcement came on October 4^th from Apple Headquarters in Cupertino, California in front of a packed auditorium full of high level executives and members of the press.

Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, was the first of several Apple executives to address the eager crowd.  Cook’s portion of the presentation was a bit lackluster it focused mainly on the history of Apple since introducing the iPod 10 years ago, public reaction to the launch of Lion OS X, and the integration of iPads in educational and workplace settings.

It was a testament to how far Apple has come in such a brief time span; while truly extraordinary this was not the  story people were interested in. Cook’s presentation was oddly void of anything iPhone related, with the exception of an off the cuff hint that iPhone news would come later in the presentation.

The logical guess would be that Cook in his first keynote address as CEO would deliver news of a new iPhone. However Cook threw a curve ball and deferred to Phil Schiller, Senior Vice President of worldwide product marketing, to usher in the iPhone 4S. Schiller, a regular presenter at Apple keynote addresses, very subtly broke into the new iPhone news after reeling off some updates about the iPod Nano and iPod Touch.

There were several new but otherwise bland features introduced for iPhone 4S they included an 8 megapixel camera, 1080p filming capability, and inclusion of the A5 processing iPad2 chip into the iPhone. Each new feature is a technological step in the right direction, but none are close to being “blow-away”, the term used by Apple presenters several times during the presentation.

There were some more impressive upgrades as well, including a new antenna system which intelligently switches between two built-in transmitters to optimize call quality and data transfer speeds, boasting faster download and upload speeds on par with 4G, and the inclusion of CDMA and GSM chips which allows the 4S to be compatible on all networks across the globe making it a “world” phone.

Even these failed to possesses that familiar Apple wow factor that leaves you wondering how in the world did they do that. With the iPhone 4s presentation coming to a close, Apple had one last chance to blow our collective minds. The job of showstopper was left up to the highly rumored voice recognition feature, Siri.

Siri is being marketed as having your very own interactive intelligent personal assistant in the palm of your hand. Scott Forstall, Senior Vice President of iOS Software, demoed the new feature by saying, “What’s the weather like today?” and Siri spoke the current forecast in Cupertino; this garnered a huge applause from the crowd.

Even more impressive than being able to tell you the weather Siri can compose and dictate email, set timers, look up contacts, create notes, search the web, and search Wikipedia. Siri is definitely an impressive feature, but at the same time it’s not Apple jaw dropping impressive.

It’s destined to be a feature that it is cool for a while, but not one that makes scores of people camp outside of Apple stores the week before launch. The iPhone 4S will be available for pre-order on October 7^th and hit retail stores on October 14^th. It will be available in black and white, 16GB for $199, 32GB for $299, and 64GB for $399. It will also be available on AT&T, Verizon, and for the first time Sprint.

This puts some validation in reports made by the Wall Street Journal that Sprint purchased 30 million iPhones over the next four years. It is interesting to note that Cook shied away from former Apple CEO’s Steve Jobs trademark “One More Thing” statement, a move that is being preemptively being dubbed the “Cook-tease”.

Who knows, maybe this keynote was one big Cook-tease for what we really want, an iPhone 5.

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