iPhone 5s – Week 1 Review

Dad was asking me about my new iPhone this morning, so I thought I’d give a quick review before I head to bed.

I purchased the phone outright from Apple, unlocked, so I don’t have to get stuck with a locked up phone for years that can’t use other sim cards.

I went for the biggest size. I had a 36GB iPhone 4 and I had to wipe off a lot of my music because the hard drive was getting full, so this time I splurged for the 64GB, assuming I’ll have it for another 3 years ago and will outgrow another 36GB phone.

I prefer the black front, over the white, so I went with the space gray colour, and I got the black leather case from Apple.

There is a lot of conflicting information when you look into the prices for data and voice plans when you own a phone outright. As it turned out, there isn’t near the discount there should be. However, Bell Canada’s plans have changed a lot in the 3 years since I bought my last phone so I was able to make some changes and save some money.

Gone are the Fav 5 and Fav 10 lists. Instead, Bell pushes their unlimited nationwide calling plan with a 1GB of data (that is ALOT of data and chattering!) I have been paying an additional monthly fee for 3 years for caller display. Now voicemail and call display are included in most, if not all, of Bell’s data+voice plans. The voicemail is a small account with room for 3 one-minute messages, but I didn’t even have voicemail before, so I’ll take it!

We don’t have a strong cell signal at home, so I rarely use the voice minutes. That meant I could go for one of Bell’s Lite packages that has 500MB of data and 1,000 minutes. Perfect. Enough to make calls when I’m not at home, and enough data to use my phone however/wherever I please. My data use is often just over 300MB/month, so I’m good with the 500MB limit. I don’t think I’ve ever gone over 500MB.

Because I own my phone, the discount however is only 10% off the plan’s price. Huh? But there is no contract, and it is month to month and it is probably $20 cheaper/month than I was paying without losing any features, so I went with it. The more expensive packages had $20 off I think, but it was still more monthly than the package I went with.

It took about 30 seconds to switch my number, and the new iPhones taker a smaller sim card, so they left the disabled one in my old iPhone. That means my old iPhone is essentially an iPod touch now. Cool! Not sure we need it though, so if you want to make me an offer on a used iPhone 4, 36GB, with a few small scratches on the screen, let me know!

The new iPhone is WAY faster so I’m really glad I upgraded. I am not very good at buying myself things, especially expensive things, but I use my iPhone every day, often, so it was worth the upgrade.

I *LOVE* the fingerprint reader. It is built into the home button on the front and you can program in a few fingers. Then, instead of typing in your security passcode, you just touch your finger or thumb to it and presto, it types in your passcode for you, and you’re in! This alone made the upgrade worthwhile for me!

I used iTunes to make a backup copy of my phone before the switch so I was able to easily download all my settings and apps. Really easy. Definitely do this instead of setting up all your mail and iPhone settings again! At some point I had told iTunes to stop syncing and downloading my apps, so I did have a bit of catching up to do to download some recent ones, but nothing worth any aggravation!

The phone is a different shape, longer, but I thought it would be narrower than it is. It is definitely lighter than the old one, and already feels familiar. Not too many growing pains here! (Sorry iPhone 4, I know we were close.)

The leather case is nice. Different. Not really leather feeling. Kinda like dense foam. Nice though.

The screen feels so new and shiny and it is so easy for my fingers to slide. I love the new screen feeling 🙂

I bought Apple’s Lightning to 30-pin adapter for my Philips Fidelio Docking Speaker so I continue to use it as a docking station for charging and playing music and radio programs while I work. Unfortunately the lightning adapter side won’t fit into the new iPhone 5s far enough with the new case on it 🙁 Bummer! All the reviews are saying the same thing, but I ordered before most of them came in. Turns out I should have bought the longer cable adapter.

I haven’t given the camera much of a test spin, but I see I can now do panoramic photos and slow motion videos. Cool! I’ll post some test shots soon!

Hope that convinces you to upgrade Dad! And Julie!