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Apple has officially unveiled the iPhone 5S smartphone – and it will launch in a matter of weeks.
The iPhone 5S was announced by Apple senior marketing VP Phil Schilleralongside the budget iPhone 5C at the event, confirming months of rumours that Apple would announce two new iPhone models.
The 5S will come in three colours: Gold, Silver and ‘Space Grey’, with the gold case having previously been leaked online. It boasts a fingerprint scanner, an improved camera, better battery life and more. Six iPhone 5S case colours have been confirmed, which can be seen towards the bottom of this official iPhone 5S features page.
The phone’s chassis is constructed from high-grade aluminum, while inside the phone sits a new iteration of Apple’s mobile processor: the A7.
The A7 is a modern instruction set, with two-times general purpose registers, two-times floating point registers, over a billion transistors and 100 square mm die size.
The A7 processor is also the first-ever 64-bit mobile processor, with iOS 7, which was also detailed, running in 64-bit. Apps will be able to run in either 32 or 64-bit, with all existing iOS apps re-engineered to run in 64-bit.
Schiller stated that the phone is "over twice as fast" as the existing iPhone 5. The A7 processor is said to give a performance boost 40 times faster than the original iPhone, with graphics 56 times faster.
"It’s the most forward-thinking phone we’ve ever created," said Schiller.
The iPhone 5S will run OpenGL ES 3.0, with Schiller saying that it "will enable breakthroughs in performance for graphics-intensive games".
Donald Mustard, co-founder of Epic-owned games developer Chair, took to the stage to introduce iOS game Infinity Blade III.
"Infinity Blade III will redefine the power of gameplay. It will be available alongside the new iPhone 5S," Mustard said.
A new component to the 5S, called the M7, was also revealed. The M7 works alongside the A7 as a "motion co-processor".
The M7 measures motion data continuously through the existing gyroscope, accelerometer and compass. The data can be used by a new CoreMotion API which identifies user movement and optimisations based on contextual awareness.
Nike announced a new app called Nike+ Move which uses the M7 chip and GPS in order to keep track of the user’s activities.
The iPhone 5S’ battery life was also detailed, giving ten hours of LTE browsing or 3G talk time, 40 hours of music playback and 250 hours of standby time.
Following that, the 8-megapixel 5S’ camera (iSight) was detailed, featuring a 15 per cent larger active sensor area and a five-element Apple lens with f/2.2 aperture. It has a burst mode and slo-mo video.
iOS 7 works with the new camera to automatically set white balance, exposure level and create a dynamic local tone map. Other features of the camera app is a mode that picks the sharpest of a series of photos, as well as autofocused matrix metering. It also has a 28-megapixel panorama mode.
The camera’s new flash, called the ‘True Tone’, aims to solve the problem of clashing colour temperatures, giving more realistic skin tones. Digital image stabilisation and burst-mode shooting are also new, as well as slo-mo that shoots in 120 frames per second at 720p.
As previously rumoured, a new ‘Touch ID’ home button was also announced. The built-in fingerprint scanner is designed for security and can read fingerprints and biometric data in 360-degrees.
"Touch ID has been built deeply into iOS7," said Schiller. "You can make iTunes purchases by using your finger to authenticate."
Schiller then reassured the audience that users’ fingerprint data would never be stored on Apple servers or backed up to iCloud.
The prices of the 5S were also announced: the 16GB model will be $199 (£123), the 32GB $299 (£190) and 64GB $399 (£254) with a two-year contract. Apple’s iPhone 5S cases will be $49 (£31) each.
Without a contract, the 5S will cost £549 (16GB model), £629 (32GB) and £709 (64GB).
The iPhone 5S will be released on September 20th, with pre-orders able to be placed from September 13th (this Friday) onwards.
