iPhone 5S review

Faster, new camera and a clever fingerprint reader. But is it enough of an upgrade?

iPhone 5S review
A phone that's so much more than a iterative update

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In terms of benchmarking, the iPhone 5S is head and shoulders above all the other iDevices, with it smashing all other units through each of our tests.

It offers almost double the performance of the iPhone 5 and 5C, showing that the 64 bit chip is not only strong for the future (although that's debatable given the 1GB of RAM on offer) but also helps with heavy lifting for editing video and photo processing.

Check out the results for yourself below. However, the results haven't changed much at all with the new iOS 7.1 update - we were expecting something of a power boost, but nothing has happened on that front.

iPhone 5S benchmarks

iPhone 5S benchmarks

iPhone 5S benchmarks

Gareth Beavis
Formerly Global Editor in Chief

Gareth has been part of the consumer technology world in a career spanning three decades. He started life as a staff writer on the fledgling TechRadar, and has grown with the site (primarily as phones, tablets and wearables editor) until becoming Global Editor in Chief in 2018. Gareth has written over 4,000 articles for TechRadar, has contributed expert insight to a number of other publications, chaired panels on zeitgeist technologies, presented at the Gadget Show Live as well as representing the brand on TV and radio for multiple channels including Sky, BBC, ITV and Al-Jazeera. Passionate about fitness, he can bore anyone rigid about stress management, sleep tracking, heart rate variance as well as bemoaning something about the latest iPhone, Galaxy or OLED TV.