Wesley's Tool-Box

These screenshots tell you about the reality of SKT (Korea's #1 mobile carrier by subscriber count) LTE network working on iPhone 5S.

First of all, the so-called "wide band" LTE does work on it. In the "Serving Cell Info" within Field Test app, "Download Bandwidth" shows 20MHz, which is twice as wide as the regular LTE service. "Freq Band Indicator" says 3, which means it's operating at Band 3 (1800MHz). This is SKT's secondary LTE frequency, as well as where the wide band service is provided.

SKT's cell towers with Band 3 support, let alone being wide band, is currently limited largely to Seoul metropolitan area. In fact, these screenshots were shot at Samseong subway station in Gangnam district (yes, THAT Gangnam), the area which can arguably be called the central business center of Korea.

SKT has just started bringing wide band support to Band 3 towers last month, with 10 districts (out of 25) in Seoul getting the treatment as of today. Nationwide deployment is said to be done by mid-2014. So while SKT is blasting away advertisement about how it has both LTE-A and wide band LTE, the people who can enjoy them is pretty limited, to say the least. KT (#2 carrier) is said to be slightly ahead, as it claims full deployment in all of Seoul at the end of last month.

The screenshot on the right shows the speed measurement, showing 33.1Mbps down and 5.30Mbps up. iPhone 5S can do 100Mbps downstream given the wide band support, but it only gets 1/3 of that. Of course, getting this much speed in the bustling commute of a large business zone is not unimpressive. But unless conditions are perfectly met, you won't see anything like the speeds that the ads are so proud to show you. Of course, you knew that already.

What it also means is that the maximum speeds that wide band LTE can supposedly provide, 150Mbps, isn't really going to be missed by iPhone 5S supporting "only" 100Mbps max. So prepare to enjoy your iPhone 5S - Apple says it'll be coming to Korea on October 25th.

Over the past four years, I have bought all the iPhones that had been officially released in Korea on the first day of domestic availability, starting with iPhone 3GS. iPhone 5S is the first one that I didn't wait. Of all those phones, iPhone 4 is currently on leave (dad is using it), so I have 3GS, 4S, 5, and 5S for simultaneous performance testing.

This may be something a lot of people would be curious about and I hope to give you a good basis in considering an upgrade for your previous generation iPhones. Read on and let's get started.

Probably the biggest new feature in the iPhone 5S that is completely hidden to an outside observer is Apple M7 (NXP LPC18A1), the motion coprocessor that handles a variety of sensor inputs (accelerometer, gyroscope, and compass) independent of the main processor, A7. Its main potential use is for health and fitness apps, and rightly so, they are the first apps to take advantage of it. Argus (Sept. 20) and Strava Run (Sept. 24) were updated right after iPhone 5S release to use M7. I see it as a big feature because this would enable a lot of apps to poll sensor data without draining battery much at all.

Interesting enough, when you run an app with M7 support, you'll be asked to allow access to motion activity. This is a good sense on Apple's part because these data can be easily used to track user's habits. GPS data merely tells you that a person was there. Motion activity data tells you how you were moving around there very precisely. Let's take a more careful look.

Apple acquired AuthenTec back in 2012, and a lot of rumours circulated about the possibility of iPhones using fingerprint sensors created by this company. Come 2013, this has come true in the form of an integrated fingerprint sensor called Touch ID on the home button of iPhone 5S. In the process, the iconic rounded square marking in the button was sacrificed in the name of progress. The physical button is still clickable as always. The sensor works only when you leave your finger on the button without clicking.

Many experts view biometric authentication such as fingerprint scanning as a good way to "augment" security. It is by no means a complete replacement for existing measures because you can't change your biometric characteristics, and the detection can be fooled with sufficient resources and will. So it's generally recommended that this is used in conjuction with another authentication method such as ID & password. That said, Apple has decided that it's good enough to be used as an alternate method of entering passcode for unlocking lock screens.

This doesn't sound good from strict security standpoint because the biometrics are used to "replace" rather than "augment". However, Apple's rationale is that a large number of people don't even set passcodes, and by providing this alternative in a convenient package, phones would be somewhat secure, than not secure at all. Then, the convenience angle must be sufficiently strong to gain traction.

Using this feature for some time, I can say that this would indeed be the case. Read on to see my demonstration.

Apple has constantly improved the iPhone camera's overall quality over the years, and this time is no different. It has touted iPhone 5S's larger sensor (1/3.0", compared to 1/3.2" in iPhone 5) that results in bigger pixels (1.5 microns instead of 1.4) and brighter lens (f/2.2 instead of f/2.4) that lets more light in. These are supposed to gather 33% more light, and low-light performance would be improved as such. One thing not mentioned is the focal length. Both devices are fixed to 4mm, but 35mm equivalent values are different - iPhone 5 is 33mm, while iPhone 5S is 30mm. This means the latter has a slightly wider field of view.

iPhone 5's camera already takes great outdoor shots, so I felt that improvements from these upgrades would be most noticeable in indoor shots. Therefore, I decided to use both iPhone 5 and 5S to take several comparison photos in the house, with iOS version both at 7.0.2. First one shown here is taken in a brightly lit room, and the low ISO value tells you that the sensors should be subject to minimal noise. This should be typical of the photos that were taken with good lighting. You can see that both phones perform similarly, but iPhone 5S does apply slightly more smoothing. This makes the 5S photos in good lighting conditions look a little too clean. Fortunately, the details are mostly there and the file size did get a bit smaller on average as a result. This seems to be more or less the difference in post-processing pattern than the sensor performance itself.


When the lighting is dramatically reduced, the difference in sensor performance becomes evident. The photos here were shot with identical ISO and shutter values, yet iPhone 5S's photo preserves the details of the objects and letters much more than iPhone 5's. You can make out the letters with 5S, while 5 gives you muddled goo. Both had noise reduction kicked in, but it iPhone 5 clearly had less detail to work with in the first place. Apple's efforts are paying off here.

Of course, camera module itself is only half the story. Let's take a look at a photo in even worse lighting and go from there.