Charles Arthur on the iPhone 5

Charles Arthur:

For existing iPhone owners who have an iCloud account to which they have backed up their phone, there’s a nice welcome that didn’t exist last year. If you activate a new iPhone with that iCloud account, you can set it up with everything — including photos, apps, settings and passwords for email and calendars and Wi-Fi, and even details such as your alarm times.

Everything is as it was on the old one, seamlessly. That’s better than either Android or Windows Phone, the two principal contenders, which will download your apps but leave you to fill in the settings and recreate your alarms and app settings.

Agreed. I restored my review unit from the iCloud backup of my daily-use iPhone 4S, and within an hour, it was like I was picking up right where I took off. Really nice upgrade experience. (I did have to re-enter my passwords for my IMAP and Twitter accounts, though.)

★ Wednesday, 19 September 2012