Tech News

The first iPhone appeared way back in 2007, and be you an Apple fan boy or a hater off all fruit-based technology, it revolutionised the mobile phone market.

By Alan Metcalfe

What do you need to know? Well, apart from the fact it probably wont survive if you drop it in the jacks in Coppers...

It's only 7.6mm thick, 18% thinner than the iPhone 4S

It'll be made of glass and aluminium - with pretty tasty metal back

It only weight 112 grams, that's 20% lighter than the 4S

Retina Display for iPhone - 326 pixels per inch, 4 inch screen, 1136 x 640 resolution. Lots of numbers here, but when you hold up an iPhone 4 next to my old knackered original iPhone, the difference is remarkable. You can imagine how good the iPhone 5 is going to look like.

Ergonomically designed to fit in one hand

Another row of apps - 5 instead of 4

New apps designed specifically for the new screen size, but old ones will be letterboxed with black borders so they appear centred and unstretched

"Ultrafast wireless" - ultra nerdy super duper techy tech that makes the data connection over 3G a bit quicker...

New CPU and Graphics chips - makes it all 2 times faster than the 4S

Battery life has been improved - Standby 225 hours, Use (including Talk/Browsing etc.) 8 hours. Hmmmm... We'll see about that.

Camera Changes

8-megapixel, 3,264 x 2,448 backside-illuminated sensor, five-element lens and f/2.4 aperture. Same as the iPhone 4S but thinner, and it'll work better in low light

Most importantly, actually taking and capturing the photo takes 40% less time - nice for quick snaps in the dark pub

Shared Photo Streams - a new feature that allows you to automatically share a list of photos with friends

Panaoramic Photos - just swing the photo around and it'll take a 28 megapixel image

1080p video with better stabilisation, facial recognition, and you can grab photos and stills from videos you've shot

Front facing camera (i.e. the Face Time of "Is my hair a mess" camera) is now 720p

Wideband audio - now there's 3 mics on the phone to help capture better audio while filming video or talking on speaker phone

A BRAND NEW CONNECTOR

Yup. Ready yourself for the "Has anyone got a nokia charger? No, the small one..." conversations all over again

It's called "Lightening" (The sister of the "Thunderbolt" connector they developed for Mac accessories)

80% smaller

Bose, JBL, Bang and Olufsen etc. are working on new speakers/docks as we speak

Don't worry though, they'll be releasing adapters to connect to the original 30 pin connector we've all come to know

The Price

Well in the states it'll be $199 for the 16GB, $299 for the 32GB, and $399 for the 64GB - on contract of course! Sim free? God knows... And as for the Euro price - I imagine we'll be paying a premium as always.  Good news being, the iPhone 4 will drop to "Free" on most contracts, and the 4S will be pretty cheap in comparison.

Pre-order from 14th September, available to buy the 28th September.

Add all of this to what we already new was coming with the iOS6 software, and you have yourself a very tasty piece of kit...

Images via Getty