APPLE has delivered another kick in the guts to its smartphone rivals this week. The new iPhone 5 is already a huge success and it hasn’t even gone on sale.

According to analysts an incredible ten million will be sold in the handset’s first week.

It looks a lot like the existing iPhone 4S but it’s 18 per cent thinner and 20 per cent lighter. The biggest change is the screen, which, at 4-inches corner to corner, is larger but still some way shy of the best Android phones.

Continuing Apple’s obsession with making its handsets objects of desire, the iPhone 5’s back and sides are now fashioned from a single piece of aluminium.

Inside there’s a new A6 processor – which is even faster than the chip used in the latest iPad and is twice as fast as the CPU used in the iPhone 4S. Word is that Apple has combined this with twice as much RAM for lightning fast response times.

The old handset’s 8 megapixel camera was one of the best on the market so Apple has merely tweaked the low light performance and added a new panorama mode.

The iPhone 5 will also be one of the first phones to work on the new 4G network.

Due to be trialled in several large towns and cities (including Newcastle) 4G promises faster than WiFi speeds – although I do recall something similar being said for 3G.

Athough 4G will grab the headlines we should remember just how bad 3G coverage is in the North-East before getting too excited. Your 4G smartphone will be quick when it is close to a transmitter but I confidently predict massive gaps in coverage and a swingeing impact on battery life.

For now, network providers should concentrate on finishing the 3G cover before moving on to something else.

Also, 4G is only available to customers of Everything Everywhere (formerly Orange and T-Mobile). If you are with another company you can forget it until the middle of next year.

Apple has also changed to yet another type of Sim card, called the nano-sim which is smaller than the card in the iPhone 4S. Get your provider to install the card – it’s incredibly fiddly.

The familiar dock connector has also gone. So any peripherals you may own, like a music dock or a charger, won’t work. Apple will sell you a clunky adaptor but it’s expensive at £25.

Of course, none of this matters if you are a confirmed Apple fan.

Thousands of people are expected to queue up outside stores to be among the first to get hold of an iPhone 5 when it goes on sale on September 21.

If you don’t buy one with a contract it will cost a hefty £529 for the 16GB, £599 for 32GB and a mighty £699 for the 64GB. It’s good – but it’s not that good.