Apple iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C Unveiled with Fingerprint Sensor

Apple yesterday announced two new iPhones, the iPhone 5C and the iPhone 5s. 

The new iPhone 5S, which uses a new chip and includes new sensors and camera technology, in three colours including “gold”, and also the slightly cheaper iPhone 5C, which is essentially an iPhone 5 but has a plastic shell instead of metal, and is available in five colours.

As expected, there was no iPad announcement, neither the Apple TV or watch. Before the devices, Apple also revealed that the iWork suite (Numbers, Pages and Keynote) will come free with any new iDevices. That’s a fair enough value being added for three extremely useful apps.

While the company compared the performance of the iPhone 5S to the original iPhone, which was launched in 2007, stating that the new CPU, (now a 64-bit chipset) is 56 times more powerful, the company didn’t give any comparison with the iPhone 5, which is a little disappointing.

The phone also comes with a new chip that acts as a mini processor for motion sensing, and there are major improvements to the camera features. For one thing, Apple claims to have increased the size of the pixels in the image sensor, which will lead to clearer and brighter images. The second change is the addition of two LEDs, one white and one amber, to keep images with flash from looking overexposed.

The other big new feature is the fingerprint scanner, which is called TouchID, mounted around the home button. This is just an optional security feature to unlock your handset, and Apple was also quick to assure that the fingerprint is only stored on the phone, and not uploaded online with Apple.

Overall, yesterday's event was certainly not disappointing for Apple's loyalists, and the iPhone 5S has enough new features to distinguish itself from the now discontinued iPhone 5. A huge surprise for many though might have been that the ‘C’ in the iPhone 5C stood for Color, and not Cheap - people who believed that a cheaper iPhone would be key for markets like Africa will no doubt be let down by today’s announcement.