Hands on with the iPhone 5

21.09.2012

If you painstakingly organized your home screens, it's time to redecorate. Now that you can fit a fifth row of apps on your iPhone 5, you'll need to make new decisions about which apps go where. Or, we suppose, you could leave everything exactly the same and have a gaping empty row across the bottom of each screen.

While the iPhone 5 is noticeably taller, the change is actually less dramatic than you might expect. If you regularly clad your iPhone in a battery case, for example, the caseless iPhone 5 may well be shorter than what you're accustomed to.

The height difference is also a personal thing: If you're accustomed to sliding up a finger to trigger the Sleep/Wake button, that may now take more effort than it did before; you may have to slide the phone down in your hand to access that button, whereas before it was always within reach. The Notification Center can be a real stretch.

As we've all heard, the iPhone 5 is as surprisingly light (3.95 ounces). There may be no such thing as too light, but some may find that it feels like a toy: it's surprising, when you turn the iPhone 5 on, to realize that a device this light is actually a real phone, and not just a plastic replica that you give your kids to play with. For years, there's been a notable difference between the weight of iPhones to their comparable iPod touches; the difference between the iPhone 4S and the iPhone 5 feels that dramatic.