The box of delights…

The piggy bank has been broken open, and the necessary pieces of paper (actually web forms) have been signed, sealed and delivered. As of last week, I have a new piece of shiny in my life in the form of an iPhone 5S. None of your gold-plated rubbish here, just the standard black for me. “Space Gray,” if you’re an Apple marketer.

Given that my previous phone was an iPhone 4, this marks a three-generation jump. It’s been interesting to observe what that change means in concrete terms. As it turns out, it all comes back to something I’ve mentioned before: the 5S is a phone that’s even better than its predecessor at disappearing when not needed.

The speed of the 5S is the first enabler of this. The 4 was far from a sluggard, but I had to switch off some of the frippery of iOS 7 in order to avoid stuttering animations. With the 5S, everything is silky smooth and instantly responsive. Apps launch without hesitation, and the notification and control centre overlays pop up immediately. Being able to deal with everything swiftly also helps with the already decent battery life—the more time the phone spends snoozing, the less its battery drains.

One of the 5S’s most marketable features is another time saver: the TouchID fingerprint sensor. Like most of the best Apple developments, it verges on being a gimmick but is saved by the fact that it just works. The time saved by using it instead of entering a security code is minimal, but the ability to jump directly to what you want to be doing rather than through a security hoop makes a meaningful difference, and it’s going to encourage people to use security if they weren’t already.

Something of a surprise to me was just how useful an older feature of the iPhone is: Siri. I tend to use features like the timer and alarm a lot, and while iOS 7’s control centre made it easier to get to that functionality, Siri pushes it up another level. You have to speak clearly, as the poor dear gets confused by enunciation that falls too short of BBC diction, but it’s already proven itself more than a toy.

I’ve yet to make more than a cursory acquaintance with the rest of the 5S’s feature set. The camera is clearly an improvement, especially in low light conditions, though I’ve not toyed with slow motion or burst shooting yet. The GPS seems to work a lot faster than in the 4, though as yet few apps make use of the phone’s vaunted motion coprocessor. Battery life seems solid enough, though this can dip quickly when the phone is searching for a decent connection, as mine was at last week’s Dublin Web Summit.

Taken together though, the theme stays the same. This is a phone that does what you want it to, faster and with fewer hurdles than before.