The new iPhone is finally here, but to be accurate there are two new iPhones. One called iPhone 5S while the other, is a budget iPhone called the iPhone 5C. It looks exactly like how the iPhone 5 looked last year but with improved internals and guts. It's nothing extra impressive except that it's got a fingerprint scanner this time round.

Design

In terms of design, there's nothing much to shout about except for some small touches and the addition of color. It uses the same unibody aluminum body and the same two toned design with the same 4 inch display. All those cases you bought for the iPhone 5 will still work with the new iPhones.

The Guts

The iPhone 5S is using Apple's new A7 processor which is a 64 bit chip. It's the first of its kind in a smartphone and it will make your iPhone 5S two times faster than the iPhone 5. It runs OpenGL ES 3.0 making graphics performance in the 5S pretty awesome. The A7 chip has 3x general purpose registers, 2x floating point registers and over a billion transistors.

There's also a "motion coprocessor" in the 5S called the M7. It measures motion data with an accelerometer, gyroscope and compass support and is supposed to "enable a new generation of health and fitness apps" by letting apps use all that motion data without using the A7's power. Sounds like we're going to get a whole lot of new apps for this.

Fingerprint Scanner

The iPhone 5S' home button will do double duty and work as a fingerprint scanner too. They call it "Touch ID", and it adds another layer of security to your iPhone by allowing you to use the fingerprint scanner in lieu of a passcode.

All you have to do is place your thumb on the new sapphire crystal home button and it will unlock. The silver ring around the home button will detect when your finger is on it, which means you don't have to press down on it.

You can use Touch ID to make purchases in iTunes too and set it up so it can read multiple fingerprints.

The fingerprint sensor has a 500ppi resolution and 360 degree readability.

Camera

Apple has also made the camera a tad better. The iPhone 5S features a dual LED flash that might make the flash on the iPhone camera usable. Or at least slightly better. The dual LED flash is white and amber and it will make your pictures look more natural and balanced.

The camera remains the same 8 megapixels but as one knows already, those are never a tell tale sign of the entire story with cameras. The iPhone 5S uses a larger f/2.2 aperture and a 15 percent larger sensor giving the camera 33 percent greater light sensitivity.

Here's an actual image taken with the 5S camera:



It's also got an autofocus twice as fast with auto image stabilization and a new burst mode to capture ten frames per second. The iPhone 5S also has a slow-motion camera that allows it to record 720p video at 120FPS. This is a nice welcome. More slow-mo to come, we are sure of that.

Battery Life

The iPhone 5S has slightly better battery life with ten hours talk time, ten hours LTE browsing, and 250 hours standby.

Price and Availability

Apple is keeping the same price as the previous generation for AT&T, Verizon and Sprint. The iPhone 5S 16GB will cost $199, the 32GB version will be $299 and the 64GB version will cost $399, all with a new two-year contract. You can start buying the iPhone 5S on Friday September 20th.