What you see above is (was) my old phone. Your basic 5+? year old bog standard Samsung flip-phone as issued by Verizon. I have been a Verizon customer since it was GTE back in the ’90s. In fact my first product was a pager, not a phone (but I digress).

Anyway, remember back a few posts ago when I said that YOKS (Ye Olde Kid Sister) got me the first generation iPad for father’s day out of pity because the all time geek did not have an iPhone?

Yesterday #2 son and I got up at 7 AM and drove over to the new Verizon store on the edge of town. I had stopped by the previous evening to confirm that they would have the iPhone 5s in stock. We got into the short line (# 0010) and waited the half hour until they opened at 8 AM. We each got the “Space Gray” 64 GB model. I might have gotten the Champagne Gold model if they’d had it, but as we all later found out, they are in extremely limited supply. Space Gray is fine for me.

We decided to try to get them on release day for fear they would quickly sell out and be unavailable for weeks. It appears we were right. While standing in line I was speaking to the fellow ahead of me and he told me that he had originally gone to a different Verizon store, but the line was already wrapped around the side of the building.

Impressions

Fast, really fast, to quote South Park “hellafast”. At least compared to my gen 1 iPad. But it should be. It has 4x the RAM. The Geekbench overall rating is almost 5x better. I am surprised that the Geekbench number was’t even higher based on pure specs, but maybe Geekbench isn’t optimized for 64 bit CPU. Web surfing is MUCH faster even on LTE. Videos play smoothly on LTE.

The finger print scanner works as advertised. It is very slick.

Although the battery life is probably close to that of my iPad, it feels as if the battery drains a bit faster. It definitely needs to be plugged in overnight.

Assuming that the new iPads are based on the same 64 bit A7 chip, I will absolutely be   getting a new iPad or iPad mini later this year. Whereas the iPhone fits in my pocket, the screen is too small to work on all day long (I am still posting this from my olde iPad).

Oh and I finally have a camera again. I used the iPhone to take the pictures of my old phone. By all accounts it is a good camera. Standby for cat pictures …

iPhone lovers: you can hate me now 🙂

Apple haters: you can continue to hate me. BTW the iPhone 5s appears to be the fastest mobile device of any kind as of today (Source: AnandTech)

PS
“And I’d have given anything
To have my own PacMan game at home.
I used to have to get a ride down to the arcade;
Now I’ve got it on my phone.”
Brad Paisley, Welcome To The Future

As promised in 2001, I now have 2001 A Space Odyssey on my phone. I also downloaded PacMan. 🙂