(Credit:
Sarah Tew/CNET)

News flash: The iPhone 5 is not the end-all and be-all of the smartphone universe, a fact that should thrill Nokia and Samsung alike.

Here’s what it is: a strong improvement to the iPhone 4S that offers up a larger screen, 4G LTE speeds, and a terrific camera. The iPhone 5 carries on the goodness that Apple excels at, like iTunes entertainment and cloud storage.

Apple ‘s new iPhone 5Apple iPhone 5: First impressionsiPhone 5 vs. Galaxy S3 vs. Lumia 920Full coverage: The iPhone 5 arrives

But however good the iPhone 5 is, it lacks the knockout, gasp-inducing feature that Apple followers have come to expect: perhaps double the battery life of any other phone on the market, or an innovative camera feature that lets you drag and drop subjects around the screen, or other far-out concepts come to life.

Instead, we see a lot of catching up: LTE support, panorama mode, and photo capture while a video records, maps with turn-by-turn navigation, and a slightly larger screen with the same pixel density as on the iPhone 4 two generations… [Read more]