Tech World

The digerati mostly greeted the iPhone 5 last week with a collective yawn. So much was already known – a longer, larger (yet not wider) screen, thinner body, a new connector offering instant obsolescence for hundreds of accessories – that its Tom Daley-like lack of splash was declared, in this Olympic year, to lack enough of the technology motto citius, grandior, vilius (faster, bigger, cheaper) – even if it is the first two. Like statisticians poring over Olympic outcomes, they declared too that it didn’t break any records – not the biggest screen, not the world’s thinnest phone, not packing the most features. But as anyone who watched the Games would tell you, it’s not the record-breaking that matters; it’s the experience. That starts when you hold it: raw specifications (18% thinner than last year’s 4S, 20% lighter, 12% less volume) don’t explain how it seems to float in the hand, and how typing or swiping feels like touching the very pixels. (New processes ...