Thinner, faster, bigger: Apple unveils new iPhone 5

In a packed conference hall at the Yerba Buena Centre in San Francisco, Apple marketing chief Phill Schiller called the glass and aluminum smartphone the "most beautiful product ever made bar none," and described it as the best engineering that Apple has ever done.
The new phone is available for pre-order on Friday in the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Australia, Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore, and will ship one week later. By the end of the year it will be available in 100 countries through 240 carrier partners, Schiller said.
The new iPhone features a 4-inch (10.16-cm) screen, the largest ever on an iPhone, which has sported 3.5-inch (8.9-cm) screens since their 2007 launch. While competitors from Samsung, Motorola and HTC offer bigger screens, the "phone has to be designed for the hand. It should fit in your hand and be easy to send messages, type emails and surf the web," Schiller said.
Schiller shared a few other key statistics about the phone, which at 7.6 mm thick is the world's thinnest smartphone and 18 per cent thinne rthan its predecessor. The iPhone 5 weighs 112 grams, 20 per cent lighter than the 4S.
The phone runs on an Apple A6 chip, twice as fast and powerful as the A5 chip used in the previous version of the phone. It will access the latest LTE cellular networks and feature a battery good for 10 hours of web browsing over wi-fi.
The camera is built around an 8-megapixel sensor and features a precision, five-element lens for better low-light performance and 40-per-cent faster photo capture. Apple improved both video capture and the phone's audio system, including a noise-cancelling earpiece, Schiller said.//DPA