Apple Announces iPhone 5 and Other Exciting Stats

Coming as no surprise to anyone, Apple announced the newest iPhone, the iPhone 5 (not called the “new” iPhone, like how the new iPad name was butchered). Apple also threw around some stats (via Tech Crunch) which included:

– 17 million iPads sold from April to June
– iPad has a 68% market share
– iPad accounts for 91% of all web traffic from tablets (note: wow)

Now for the iPhone 5. It’s made entirely of glass and aluminum, and has a dual colour back. It’s also a little longer (that’s what she said. Yup, way to trash a respectable blog post). The phone is 18% thinner than the iPhone 4S, and 1/5th lighter. The screen will have a 4-inch display, and is taller than the iPhone 4S. This means there is now a 5th row of icons on the home screen. There’s also a brand new A6 chip, which basically means the CPU is two times faster, as are the graphics.

The battery will give you 8 hours of 3G talk time, and 225 hours of standby time, which is likely much, much more than my iPhone 4S. The camera has also been upgraded to a 8 megapixel sensor.

There’s also 3 microphones – yippy! Front, back, and bottom, helpful for voice recognition. The iPhone 5 also has LTE technology, so you can surf the net at 4G speeds.

There’s also updates to Siri for iOS 6, such as telling you sports scores (which in my case, is telling me the Toronto Maple Leafs lost at hockey, or England lost at the World Cup qualifiers). Siri can update Facebook, too – but be careful with voice recognition for something like that. iOS 6 will launch on September 16.

A massive 20 billion (with a b-b-b- Bee) songs have been purchased in iTunes. There are 435 million iTunes accounts with 1 click purchasing. 350 million iPods have been sold, too.

The iPod Nano also got a face lift, and is now thinner, and more like an iPod Touch. It is 38% thinner (which is the opposite trend of your partner/spouse) and has an FM tuner, in which you can live pause your FM Music. Magic!

And what’s an iPod and other music devices without proper headphones? Apple has finally (finally!) done something about their earphones. They’re called EarPods, which sort of scares me. They were 3 years in the making, and sort of look like a white Death Star.

The Foo Fighters got on stage and played Times Like These, My Hero, and Walk. A little part of me died – WHY Dave Grohl, WHY?! Nothing wrong with corporate sponsorship, yada yada yada, but Foo Fighters, and especially Dave Grohl, just never seemed like that kind of band to me.

And that’s a wrap folks. Will the iPad Mini follow in a future announcement? Probably.