As expected, Apple's just announced the iPhone 5s, its latest flagship smartphone. It runs iOS 7, and looks almost exactly like the iPhone 5 but comes in different colors: silver, a new "space gray," and gold — as was heavily rumored. The standout feature is Touch ID, which is an integrated fingerprint sensor in the new sapphire home button that scans your "sub-epidermal layers" at 500 points per inch to read your fingerprint and unlock the phone. You can also authenticate purchases, so buying apps, music, and movies in iTunes and the App Store just got a lot easier. There's a capacitive ring around the home button that activates the sensor, and it can read your fingerprint in any orientation. You can also have it authenticate multiple fingerprints, so you can share your phone with specific family members without having to reveal your passcode.
Importantly, fingerprints are encrypted and stored locally on the A7 chip in the phone itself — Apple says fingerprints aren't available to apps, nor are they sent to any servers or shared with iCloud.
The iPhone 5s will start at $199 for the 16GB model on a two-year contract, with 32GB for $299 and 64GB for $399. It'll go on sale September 20th, and Apple says the 5s will reach 100 countries and over 270 carriers by December. To help with that international expansion, the company has built in support for 13 LTE bands, which it claims is the highest number found in any smartphone.
A NEW TOUCH ID FINGERPRINT SENSOR AND M7 MOTION COPROCESSOR
As for internals, the iPhone 5s has a new A7 chip, which Apple says is the first 64-bit chip in a smartphone; iOS 7 and the built-in apps are all 64-bit optimized. That all adds up to what Apple claims is up to a 40x bump in CPU speed and a 56x bump in graphics performance (compared to the original iPhone), as well as support for OpenGL ES 3.0. Apple demoed Infinity Blade 3, which looked pretty astounding.
The 5s also has a new M7 "motion co-processor," which continuously measures motion data from the accelerometer, gyroscope, and compass — it's there to enable "a new generation of health and fitness apps." It works with a new CoreMotion API in iOS 7 that identifies user motion. It sounds a lot like the dedicated motion core in the new Moto X.
