As an Apple shareholder, I have to say I have been encouraged by the first reviews of the new iPhones.
Apple (AAPL) gave these iPhones to a group of carefully selected gadget hounds a week ago. Apple then allowed the reviews to be published at 9pm Eastern time last night.
The reviews were quite positive.
First, there was the near-universal hyperventilation about the fingerprint sensor that Apple put on the more expensive new iPhone.
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This fingerprint sensor, which allows you to unlock your phone by pressing your finger on a button instead of typing a password into the screen, could easily have been a crappy new feature that didn't work very well and that no one really wanted. But it actually sounds as though the fingerprint sensor works quickly and well.
The unlocking, by itself, does not make the sensor a "game changer," as one esteemed reviewer gushed. When used to unlock the phone, the fingerprint sensor will save you at most a couple of seconds. But, more broadly, allowing you to authenticate yourself with your finger instead of with a login and password combination could reduce a lot of headaches and friction in the digital world at large.
Apple is already allowing users to buy stuff through iTunes with only their fingerprints. That's a handy improvement from having to remember and type your iTunes password. And this is presumably only the beginning. It's not hard to imagine that, a couple of years down the road, Apple will have cut deals with Amazon (AMZN), eBay (EBAY), and other big ecommerce companies that will allow you to buy stuff on these sites, or sign into other web sites, with the touch of your finger. And it's also not hard to imagine that you'll be able to "sign" for things in the real world (credit card receipts, for example) with your finger, pass through security and border controls with your fingerprint, start your car with your finger, and so on.
In short, now that we know that the fingerprint sensor works well, we can get excited about applications for this new technology that are a lot more exciting than saving a second or two when unlocking your phone.
Second, it sounds like the new camera in the new iPhones is visibly better than the prior version. That's also good news. iPhone users take a lot of pictures. And no one is going to object to having those pictures look better.
Everyone is also gushing about the new iPhone software (iOS7), but all recent iPhone users are going to get that software. Also, it's software -- after 12 hours with the phone, you'll forget there was ever any different software. (It's certainly encouraging that people don't hate the new software, but they've already had a few months to get used to it. So, again, there's not much news here.)