After picking up your brand new iPhone5, you probably immediately noticed that many of your favorite apps didn't take advantage of the iPhone 5's nice big screen. While this is a disappointment, don't fret, because a countless number of apps are being updated daily with optimizations for the new screen. But in the meantime, take a look at some of our favorite iPhone apps that have offered support for the new iPhone 5 since its release.

Tweetbot

Tweetbot has been one of our favorite Twitter apps since its release, and the already awesome experience is better than ever on the iPhone 5's bigger screen. Since the iPhone 5 has a taller screen, you are able to see at least one additional tweet making the entire Twitter experience with Tweetbot extra enjoyable and inviting.

• $2.99 - Download Now

Pinterest

Pinterest is a gorgeous app, but on the smaller screen of the previous iPhone models, the UI felt a little cramped. Well, Pinterest has definitely benefited from a taller, vs wider, screen. It's a joy to scroll though all the pins and view the gorgeous photos on the iPhone 5's vibrant display. You can also quickly scroll down your feeds without a single hiccup. If you're a recovering Pinterest addict, you may just have a relapse once you experience the Pinterest app on your new iPhone 5.

• Free - Download Now

Flipboard

Flipboard for iPhone is your own personal magazine featuring the articles and social feeds you care about most. On the iPhone 5, this magazine is just stunning. First of all, each page now displays six full squares, and second -- they're gorgeous. Since Flipboard is a very image-heavy app, the extra vibrance and contrast in the iPhone 5's screen really makes Flipboard look amazing. Your friends will be in total awe when they see Flipboard on your new iPhone 5.

• Free - Download Now

Weather 2x

Any app that provides information will definitely benefit from the iPhone 5's larger screen and Weather 2x is no exception, especially since it's paired with beautiful imagery. Weather 2x is seriously one of the most beautiful weather apps I've ever laid my eyes on. It displays basic weather information over a beautiful photograph and with a simple tap, you can see even more. Sliding the screen up will reveal a 5 day forecast, sliding to the left will reveal an hourly forecast, and sliding to the right will let you choose the location. Beautiful app -- for real.

• $0.99 - Download Now

Pocket

Pocket is a very popular "read later" service that lets you save articles that you find on the web, social networks, apps, and more. On the iPhone, Pocket displays your available articles in a list with a thumbnail featuring the articles' main image. Everything about Pocket benefits from the iPhone 5' taller screen. The list is longer, the photos are more beautiful, and more of each article can be read at once.

• Free - Download Now

Agenda Calendar

Agenda Calendar has been my favorite calendar app on the iPhone for quite some time now and my love for it has only grown with the iPhone 5. With the taller screen, I can now see my entire work week at once when in the week view. When adding an event with the keyboard in use, I can still see plenty information on the the remaining portion of the screen. If you've ever considered ditching Apple's built-in Calendar app, definitely take a look at Agenda.

• $0.99 - Download Now

iBooks

iBooks is a great app for showing off your new iPhone 5 not only because you can read more of your books at once, but because iBooks has always been notorious for being a bit laggy and lacking in the performance department. On the iPhone 5, iBooks shows off the speed of the new A5 chip. Your books load onto your bookshelf must quicker and you can quickly flip through pages without skipping a beat.

• Free - Download now

Byword

• $2.99 - Download now

I've never been a big fan of writing apps on the iPhone simply because of the cramped feeling on the small screen. The keyboard would take up so much of the screen that I would only be able to see a sentence or two at a time while I typed. Well, now that the iPhone 5 has a taller display, they keyboard takes up a smaller percentage of the screen allowing me to see more of what I've written. And what's the best writing app for iPhone? Well that's easy -- Byword!

iPhoto

We've already mentioned several times that the iPhone 5's display is phenomenal for photos, but it doesn't hurt to say it again. When you take photos with your iPhone 5, you will be dying to edit them to perfection to share them with the world -- that's where iPhoto comes in. iPhoto is an excellent photo editing app for the iPhone that is robust, yet easy to use. And since it's optimized for the iPhone 5's larger screen, you'll be able to see more of your photo at once while you edit. This is always a plus.

• $4.99 - Download now

iMovie

The iPhone 5 has a larger display, a display with a 16:9 aspect ratio to be exact. What a coincidence, that's the standard ratio for HD movies! Not only is watching videos on your iPhone a wonderful experience, but so is editing them. Since Apple optimized iMovie for the iPhone 5's larger screen, the editing tools take up a smaller percentage of the screen letting you see more of the movie you're creating.

• $4.99 - Download Now

Your favorite iPhone 5 apps?

There's just a small list of some our favorite lists on the iPhone 5, now tell us yours!

For some, simply knowing that the new iPhone 5 is twice as fast as the last iPhone is enough. But some of us want numbers. We want to know how much faster. Sure, Apple typically brings experience to a spec fight, but it's the specs that drive the experience. It's the engine in the meticulously appointed car. It's the stats behind the championship team. It's the science behind the art.

So with that in mind we ran the iPhone 5 through a whole battery of benchmarks, and to give it some context we put it up head to head, device to device against the iPhone 4S, iPad 3, and added in scores for the Samsung Galaxy S3 and a sampling of other, competing phones like the HTC One X, the Nokia Lumia 900, and the BlackBerry 10 Developer Alpha.

Benchmarking environment

Pulling a device out of the box and running benchmarks is fine, but it doesn't necessarily give real world results. Odds are the first thing you'll do is load up your iPhone 5 with the usual suspects - apps, games, contacts, calendars, reminders, music, video, etc..

So for this test I restored an iCloud backup to my iPhone 5 that's already on my iPad 3 and iPhone 4S so they're both loaded with tons of the same data. It seems a little more practical than comparing it straight out of the box. All devices were also running the iOS 6 public release candidate.

As a preface, the only thing I did before performing any of these benchmarks was close out all apps from the multitasking tray. At the time either the benchmarking app was the only thing running or Safari in order to obtain the benchmarks.

Geekbench

The iPhone 4S uses an Apple A5 system-on-a-chip (SoC), which combines a dual-core ARM Cortex A9 processor clocked at 800MHz with a dual-core PowerVR SGX543MP2 graphics chip and 512MB of RAM. The iPad 3 ups the game with an A5X SoC with the same CPU clocked at 1GHz, a quad-core PowerVR SGX543MP4 graphics chip, and 1GB of RAM.

For the iPhone 5, instead of licensing the next-generation ARM design, the A15, Apple custom-built their own Apple A6 SoC based on the ARM instruction set. It's a dual-core ARMv7 processor reportedly clocked around 1.25GHz along with a triple-core SGX 543MP3 and 1GHz of RAM.

To put all this into perspective, we performed a hard reboot on each device, killed all running apps, and then ran tests using Geekbench 2 for iOS [$0.99 - Download now].

Geekbench looks at all kinds of information across the entire system, including integer, floating point, memory, and stream performance.Higher numbers are better.

iPhone 5

The iPhone 5 scored between 1500 and 1650 each time we ran the rest. The average of 5 consecutive tests was 1615.

iPhone 4S

After 5 consecutive tests, the average was around 635. That puts the iPhone 4S far lower on the Geekbench scale than the iPhone 5.

iPad 3

Our average result on Geekbench for the iPad 3 was around 750 after 5 consecutive tests.

The A5X processor obviously performs significantly better than the iPhone 4S' standard A5 but when it comes to the A6, the iPhone 5 wins each and every time.

Other devices

If you're wondering how the iPhone 5 stacks up against other devices that have been benchmarked using Geekbench, here are some reference numbers for popular Android devices.

• Samsung Galaxy S III LTE - 1582
• Samsung Galaxy S III (North America) - 1429
• HTC One X - 1530

And just for fun:

• MacBook Air (11-inch Mid 2012) - 6866
• Power Mac G5 (June 2004) - 1580

Sunspider

Sunspider measures Javascript performance in the web browser. It includes real-world situations like encryption and text manipulation and measures response time in milliseconds for each test. After running each test 5 times, Sunspider gives an average number of time (in milliseconds).

Lower numbers are better.

iPhone 5

I ran Sunspider on my iPhone 5 three times and each time I ended up around the 915 to 920 ms mark. While running the test I had no other app open on the device other than the native Safari browser.

iPhone 4S

Just like the iPhone 5, we ran the rest three times on the iPhone 4S will nothing open but Safari and after another hard reboot. All three tests resulted in a time of around 1800 ms.

When it comes to rendering Javascript, it's quite obvious the iPhone 5 can process it almost twice as fast as the iPhone 4S can.

iPad 3

The iPad 3 faired better than the iPhone 4S with an average score of around 1450 ms. It isn't a huge difference when it comes to rendering Javascript and probably not one that many users would even notice.

When compared to the iPhone 5, however, the A5X chipset can't hold its own against the A6. It's obvious the iPhone 5 is an all around faster device when it comes to system and rendering benchmarks.

Other devices

Here's some average benchmarks for other popular devices on the market and how they score with Sunspider on average. Remember, the lower the number the better.

• Samsung Galaxy S III LTE - 1442
• HTC One X - 1650
• Nokia Lumia 900 - 6800

HTML5Test.com

HTML5Test.com measures how well a browser supports and renders HTML5 content. While it isn't as in-depth as tests like Sunspider and Geekbench, it's still worth taking a look at.

iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, & iPad 3

Considering the iPhone 5, iPhone 4S, and iPad 3 all run the same version of iOS and support the same native Safari browser within it, all three devices scored a total of 360 points plus 9 bonus points. HTML5Test.com uses a 500 point scale.

Other devices

Here's how a couple other devices stacked up when it came to HTML5 compatibility and support.

• Blackberry 10 - 447 plus 10 bonus points
• Android 4.x - 371 plus 11 bonus points
• iOS 5.1 - 324 plus 9 bonus points
• Windows Phone 8 - 300 plus 6 bonus points

One of the anticipated features of the iPhone 5 was its new camera. Now, even though Apple didn't boast too much about how much better the camera is, they did say it has a new sensor with better HDR and low-light capabilities. They also managed to cram all of that glass into a body that's 18% thinner than the previous iPhone. Lenses like depth, so getting even the same quality out of a camera 18% thinner is an impressive feat of engineering. Despite all this, many people, myself included, were still expecting noticeable improvements to the iPhone 5's camera and in my review of the iPhone 5's camera, I repeatedly mentioned that the colors and vibrancy of the photos were a huge improvement over the iPhone 4S -- but was I right?

If you follow my iPhone photography column, you know I take a lot of photos with my iPhone. A lot. When I was performing my tests by taking identical photos with the iPhone 5 and iPhone 4S, I was consistently wowed by the improvements of the iPhone 5 over the iPhone 4S. Occasionally, I'd take photos that didn't have much of a difference, but for the most part, the iPhone 5 blew the iPhone 4S out of the water. Then I started preparing this article.

Photo after photo proved me wrong. Sure, there are differences between the iPhone 5 and iPhone 4S photos, but very minor differences. Do the iPhone 5 photos have better color? Yes. Are the iPhone 5 photos more vibrant? Yes. Will the average untrained eye be able to tell the difference if shown the photos immediately after each other but not side-by-side? No. In fact, many people may not even be able to tell the difference between photos that are side-by-side.

This really bothered me. I was so convinced that the iPhone 5's camera was far superior to the iPhone 4S. Then I remembered this bit from Apple's website regarding the iPhone 5's display:

Colors get a boost, too, with color saturation that's 44 percent greater than before. So with iPhone 5, the games you play, the words you read, the images you see, and the apps you love look and feel incredibly vivid and lifelike.

So it's not that the iPhone 5 takes much better photos, it's that the iPhone 5 has a much better display. Here's a photo that shows the iPhone 4S display on the left and the iPhone 5 display on the right.

Incredible! (The photo displayed on the screens was taken with an iPhone 4S.)

General photography: iPhone 5 vs iPhone 4S

Now, let's finally take a look at some side-by-side comparisons of photos taken with the iPhone 4S and iPhone 5 cameras. For each comparison, the photo on the left was taken with an iPhone 4S and the photo on the right was taken with an iPhone 5.

HDR photography: iPhone 5 vs iPhone 4S

HDR was one of the areas that I was expecting some improvement since Apple claimed better HDR capability, but in the photos I took during my tests, like the one above, the differences were hardly noticeable.

Low light photography: iPhone 5 vs iPhone 4S

Something that really stands out to me with these low-light photos is that the iPhone 4S photos are much warmer. I tend to prefer warmer tones, but not in this case. The iPhone 5 photos look more realistic to me, particularly with the candle. In the photo of the candle taken with the iPhone 4S, you can barely even tell that it's green, but the iPhone 5 shows that off very well. So it seems that the iPhone 5's camera does a better job at preserving colors in low-light scenarios.

Front-facing cameras: iPhone 5 vs iPhone 4S

These next photos were taken with the front-facing cameras of the iPhone 4S and iPhone 5.

It may be hard to tell in the smaller versions displayed above, but the quality of the iPhone 5's front-facing camera is actually much better than the iPhone 4S. You can also see the difference in the colors produced by the two cameras in the ocean and sky.

Panorama photography: iPhone 5 vs iPhone 4S

Now let's take a look at a couple panorama photos. This first one was taken with the iPhone 4S.

And here's the iPhone 5's version of the same pano.

Lastly, here's one more panorama comparison. The first one was taken with an iPhone 4S and the second one was taken with an iPhone 5.

In the photos above, you can see that the iPhone 4S camera did catch some lens flare, but I can't say for certain that the angle of the camera to the sun was exactly the same for each pano. So it's very possible that the flare is due to user error.

The bottom line

As you can see, there isn't that big of a difference between the cameras on the iPhone 4S and iPhone 5. There is improvements to the iPhone 5's camera, but if you were wondering if you should upgrade because of the camera, the answer is definitely no. However, if you want a thinner phone that still takes great photos, if you want a better screen that gives a more accurate representation of your photos, if you want the ability to take photos while shooting video, then taken together, the answer could very well change to yes. In fact, if taking and enjoying photos with your iPhone is one of your primary passions -- if you consider yourself an "iPhoneographer" -- the display alone is worth the upgrade to the iPhone 5.

Every time Apple releases a new version of iOS or a new iPhone, it seems battery life becomes an issue. On the positive side, that also means we're getting really good at troubleshooting it and helping everyone get back to good battery life. If your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad on iOS 6 suddenly losing charge far too fast, or if your brand new iPhone 5 is draining before your eyes, here are some things you can try.

First: Are you using it more?

The first thing you need to do is make sure you simply aren't using your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad more than you used to. I know it sounds silly, but when you have new features like Flyover or turn-by-turn navigation to play with, or when you have a brand new iPhone you just can't put down, your battery might be draining because you're using it a lot more. With iOS 6 there are more notifications, location features, and other battery consuming features than ever before, and the iPhone 5 has a bigger screen and an LTE radio to really put the drain on.

Before you do anything drastic, put your device down for a minute make sure you're not the battery drain cause, because that's the easier thing to fix.

Second: Is there a problem with the OS or the device?

If, in general, your battery life is consistently short and you're basically just watching the indicator drain down before your eyes, here are some things to try, in order of how easy they are to do.

• Restart/reset your device. If you haven't rebooted in a while, give it a try. There could be a rogue process or something else doing what it shouldn't be doing, and a restart can often fix that. (Here's how to reboot](http://www.imore.com/2010/12/17/beginner-tip-power-reset-ios-device-hit-problem/))
• Power cycle. About once a month, and certainly if you're having problems, you should completely drain your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad's battery -- drain it until it shuts down on its own -- and then charge it back up to full.
• Restore your device as new. The single biggest cause of battery life problems with iOS devices occurs when they are restored from backup and not set up as new devices. Whether it's cruft or corruption, a clean install as a new device -- incredible pain in the butt though it may be -- is usually the best fix for any battery life issues. This is the nuclear option. You will have to set up absolutely everything again, and you will lose all your saved data like game levels, but in most cases your battery life will be better than ever. (Here's how]
• Go to the Apple Store. Sometimes you do get a lemon, or your iPhone or iPad develops a real problem that only Apple can solve by either swapping it for another device or otherwise figuring out a fix.

Third: Are you plugging it in?

Like our friend Phil Nickinson from Android Central always says, don't be ashamed to plug in your device! If you're using your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad a lot, plug it in to recharge whenever you can. At home, at work, in the car, there are plenty of opportunities to top up your battery.

Sure, it's a bit trickier with the iPhone 5, since it uses the new Lightning connector and that means you need new cables, and/or you old cables need pricy new adapters, but if you work on the road or in an office, the price is easily worth it.

Fourth: Have you turned off what you aren't using?

Anything running on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad uses up the battery. So if you've tried everything else and it turns out you're just using your device more than the battery will allow for the length of time you need to use it, you'll need to make some hard choices. You'll need to stop using some of the features you don't really need in order to keep using the ones you do. The more you turn off, the longer your batter will last -- but of course the less you'll be able to do. It's a balancing act but one that can help you squeeze out a little extra juice when you really need it.

• Turn off Siri's Raise to Speak. Go to Settings, General, Siri. Readers keep telling us this has helped them with battery life due to accelerometer issues.
• Turn off Location Services. Go to Settings, Privacy, Location Services, and turn off any app you really don't need tracking or using your location.
• Turn off Push Notifications. Likewise, go to Settings, Notifications, and turn off any app you don't care to be alerted about.
• Turn of Notification Center widgets. Stocks, and particularly weather in Notification Center seem to be causing our readers some battery grief. Since weather can be location-based now, the potential is there for more battery abuse.
• Kill power hungry apps. Double-click the Home Button to activate the multitasking dock, hold your finger on an app to enter "jiggly" mode, and kill any apps that might be running in the background, especially VoIP (like Skype), streaming audio (like Pandora), or navigation (like TomTom). (Here's how)

Here are some old standbys as well:

• Set Auto-Lock to 1 minute
• Turn off any extra sounds, like keyboard clicks
• Turn off the iPod EQ
• Use headphones instead of the speaker if you have to listen to audio or music
• Turn down the screen brightness
• Turn off Bluetooth when not using it
• Turn off Wi-Fi when not using it
• Turn off LTE when not using it
• Turn off cellular app and media downloads.
• Set all email, calendar, and contacts accounts to "Fetch" (turn off Push)

Bonus tip: If you're really desperate, put your iPhone or iPad in Airplane Mode and save the radios for when you need them. If you're really desperate, you can also turn your device completely off until you need it (it will still use a tiny amount of power but far, far less than anything else).

How to get more help with your iOS 6 or iPhone 5 battery life

Be sure to let us know how what you're seeing with your iPhone 5 and iOS 6 battery life, and if any of these tips, or any other tips, help you improve it, make sure to tell us!

• iPhone 5 Forum battery life thread
• iOS 6 Forum battery life thread

If you don't have time to read our definitive iOS 6 review but you still want to see all the highlights -- Maps, Siri extensions, Passbook, Guided Access, Shared Photo Streams, and more -- then here's everything you need to know about iOS 6 in just 6 minutes.

iOS 6 includes 10 major and, according to Apple, 200 new user features overall. It may not be as audacious as iPhone OS 2 was with the App Store, or iOS 5 was with iCloud, and Maps may cause some pain for some users for some time, but it does set the foundation for Apple's platform going forward.

To find out much, much more, head on over to our iOS 6 review.