Leigh D. Stark
Apple hasn’t paid much attention to the smaller phone sizes of late, forcing iPhone owners to move to a bigger 4.7 or 5.5 inch device, but the older 4 inch iPhone has now been made new again.
If you weren’t sure if the larger iPhone styles of the past two years were for you and have been holding out for Apple to make something with all the high-end stuff in a smaller device, good news because it is finally coming.
After pages of rumours have pushed their way through the web, Apple has officially confirmed that the iPhone 5S now has a replacement, updated well and truly with the guts of an iPhone 6S plonked inside a slightly updated body of an iPhone 5S.
An iPhone like this can’t just be called the iPhone 5 nor can it be called an iPhone 6 — there have already been instances of each of those — so this amalgamation of Apple designs is coming together in the iPhone SE, a special edition, so to speak, that delivers the 4 inch size many have liked but with the updated tech found in the iPhone 6S launched near the end of last year.
“iPhone SE is an exciting new idea,” said Philip Schiller, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing at Apple, adding that “we started with a beloved, iconic design and reinvented it from the inside out.”
“The result is the most beautiful and powerful phone with a 4-inch display in the world,” he said.
So what is inside “the most beautiful and powerful phone with a 4-inch display in the world”? Glad you asked.
For this new generation of iPhone, we weren’t kidding when we said this was basically an iPhone 6S inside of an iPhone 5S body, because that’s what you’re looking at, with Apple’s 64-bit A9 processor, the M9 motion co-processor, and a choice of either 16GB or 64GB storage.
Over on the camera side of things, even iPhone 6 owners get a reason to be jealous, because there’s the 12 megapixel rear camera with 4K video capture support, something only 6S owners received. Meanwhile, the front-facing FaceTime camera stays on par with the iPhone 6, providing the same 1.2 megapixel selfie camera iPhone owners have seen for yonks.
Connections are pretty standard for any Apple phone, with 802.11ac WiFi (backwards compatible with 802.11a/b/g/n), Bluetooth 4.2, 4G LTE, and a bit of NFC likely there for ApplePay since Apple devices don’t tend to support standard NFC on devices.
About the only thing missing from the 6S is that 3D Touch / Force Touch display, and that’s no huge loss.
The screen is the same old screen iPhone 5S owners have had for ages, with a 4 inch display capable of showing 1136×640 which in turn displays Apple’s “Retina” pixel count of 326ppi, and even Apple’s fingerprint ID system is here under the button also known as “Touch ID”.