To say consumers, carriers and analysts are raving about the iPhone 5 would be an understatement. Apple’s (AAPL) flagship smartphone has been met with near universal praise from consumers and has sold out across nearly all networks. And according to Display Search analyst Shawn Lee, the iPhone 5 has raised the bar for smartphone design as a whole.
Lee notes that the handset is able to pack power efficiency and advanced performance in an ultra-slim form factor, while other competing manufacturers struggle to do the same. Apple’s use of in-cell technology in the iPhone 5′s touchscreen display allowed the company to make the device thinner than before. In addition, its custom-built A6 system on a chip CPU is able to “achieve the optimal combination of performance and power consumption,” and its radio frequency power amplifier reduces the battery consumption of LTE components. Lee believes Apple will sell more than 135 million iPhones in 2012.