Apple announced the iPhone 5S on Tuesday, brining its flagship offering up to date this year with a slew of new innovative features. So how does it stack against the top smartphones on the market right now? Here's a comparison of the Apple iPhone 5S to the current flagship for Sony, the Xperia Z1.
Display
The Apple iPhone 5S has a lot of updated features, including its operating system, security hardware and camera.
One thing Apple didn't really change was the iPhone's screen. The iPhone 5S comes with a 4-inch LCS display, with a "Retina" resolution of 1136 x 640p.
Meanwhile, like most top of the line Android smartphones, the Sony Xperia Z1 comes with a 5-inch screen. It is capable of a full HD resolution of 1920 x 1080p, putting it close to the very top of smartphones in its category with a pixel density of 441 pixels per inch. That beats out the iPhone 5S's 326ppi.
Size
The smaller display on the Apple iPhone 5S makes it a lot easier to slip into your pocket and carry around than the Sony Xperia Z1 though.
With dimensions of 128.8 x 58.6 x 7.6mm, the iPhone 5S is smaller and slimmer than the Xperia Z1's 144 x 74 x 8.5mm chassis. The Sony Xperia Z1 is also one of the heaviest smartphones, at 170g, compared to the iPhone 5S's incredibly light 112g.
Storage
The Sony Xperia Z1 is a media-intensive smartphone (more on that in a bit). Though it only comes with 16GB of internal storage, it appropriately features a microSD card slot for up to 64GB more.
Compared to that, the iPhone 5S comes up short. The maximum storage space you can have on an iPhone 5S is 64GB - less after you count built-in software - and that's at a hefty price.
Camera
Here's where the comparison gets interesting. The Xperia Z1 was built as a photography-intensive phone. It comes with a 20.7-megapixel main camera - which is better than almost every smartphone on the market except for the Nokia 1020's monster 41-megapixel camera.
While the iPhone 5S's camera has a new, larger sensor that takes better low-light pictures and can capture 720p video in slow-motion 120 frames per second, the Xperia Z1's camera still beats the iPhone's.
The Xperia Z1 corrects for motion blur, has image stabilization (which the iPhone just got), and can take high dynamic range photos. Still, the iPhone 5S's camera is a big improvement over its predecessor's.
Battery
The Sony Xperia Z1 has an enormous 3000 mAh battery (part of the reason why it's so heavy) that has been rated for as much as 880 hours of standby time. While the iPhone 5S has a huge battery life increase of up to 250 hours of standby time, it still loses to the Xperia Z1, simply due to physics (the Xperia Z1's huge, heavy battery).
Other
There is so much about Apple products that's unique that it makes it hard to compare many features against other competitors.
Take, for example, the iPhone 5S's processor. It comes with an A7 processor, which is the first chipset to be built with 64-bit architecture.
Apple says it packed roughly double the amount of transistors into the A7, as opposed to the A6, making the iPhone 5S twice as fast as its predecessor.
Until we get benchmark results, we'll have to take Apple's word for it. But if the iPhone 5S's A7 processor really is twice as fast as the iPhone 5 chip, it should blow the Sony Xperia Z1 away, even though it sports a top-of-the-line quad core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 CPU with 2GB of RAM.
Another difficult-to-compare aspect of the iPhone 5S is its new iOS 7. Some love the redesign, and others hate it. But as far as having the most up-to-date operating systems, the Xperia Z1 and the iPhone 5S are in a tie, as the Xperia Z1 has Google's Android 4.3 Jelly Bean, which should be the newest Android system until Google releases Android 4.4 Kit Kat sometime this fall.
There are a couple of features that are unique to each phone that are not comparable, but make each contender stronger. The Xperia Z1, like all of Sony's new offerings, is water-resistent up to about three feet underwater for appoximately 30 mintutes. The iPhone 5S, meanwhile, brings a different feature to the table with its security - a focused fingerprint scanner.
One last comparison is currently impossible to make, but it might put the iPhone 5S in the winner's circle anyway. The iPhone 5S is available on Sept. 20 for a starting price of $199.
Meanwhile, the Xperia Z1's release date and price is still a mystery, but it certainly won't be available as soon as the new iPhone.
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