Apple had a pretty big day last week. In standard Apple fashion, their mystery (not so much) press conference captivated the eyes and ears of millions of people - something they’ve become quite good at. From tech industry execs, to die hard Apple groupies, to Mrs. Peterson’s entire 8th grade classroom, to even your Grandmother, there weren’t many that didn’t know about the release of the new iPhone 5.

Although most were fairly certain that a new iPhone would be the jewel of this San Francisco conference, there was some speculation as to what it would actually be called. These doubts were put to rest, however, when Apple’s official acknowledgment of their announcement was a simple “September 12th” casting a shadow of the number 5. And just like their smooth hint at what was to come, the conference was pretty smooth itself. The conference kicked off with CEO Tim Cook announcing the brand new (Gaudi inspired) Apple store in Barcelona, Spain. Apple’s reach and influence is becoming more and more international as they are entering their 13th country to have an Apple store (Sweden) and the Apple store encountered over 83 millions visitors just from April-June of this year.

Next on the list was some facts and stats regarding Mountain Lion (fastest selling OSX of all time), MacBooks (#1 in market share), and of course - the iPad. In the words of Tim Cook, “The iPad is driving the post PC revolution”. There were 17 million iPads sold in just the time span of April-June 2012. In fact, there were 84 million iPads sold in the world through June! The iPad has a 68% market share in all tablets - talk about domination.

Now what everyone’s been waiting for: the iPhone 5 took the stage. While a slew of new features and improvements were announced, it is easy to say that this is the best iPhone yet. What is hard to qualify however, although improved, is if the next generations of iPhones to come will have the same innovative and brilliant leaps and bounds that occurred when Jobs was still around. We’ll let you decide!

Here are some of the best (and most significant in our opinion) features of the iPhone 5 that were announced last week:

Dual color back (made entirely of glass/aluminum)
4" screen (5th fow of icons on home screen, natural 16:9 aspect ratio)
Apps don't stretch or scale (slight letter boxing)
Thinnest phone ever (7.6mm)
Lightest phone ever
LTE (HSDPA+ DC-HSDPA support)
Single chip (A6) (single radio, dynamic antenna, 2x faster CPU and graphics)
Retina display (326ppi, 44% more color saturation, 1136x640 pixels)
Ultrafast wireless technology
Even better battery life
Lightning adapter (say goodbye to all of your old accessories... or purchase a $30 adapter)
New camera (8 megapixel sensor, 3264x2448 backside illuminated, 5 element lens, f/2.4 aperture, 25% smaller, faster photo capture)
Panorama photos (28 megapixel images)
1080P HD video (video stabilization, 10-face detection)
Facetime over cellular networks
3 microphones built in (better voice recognition, improved speaker design, reduces noise in area)
Uses iOS6 (new vector maps, turn by turn directions, notification center, iCloud tabs, passbook, share photo streams, Siri improvement)

Apple ended the press conference with announcements about iTunes (redesigned), next generation iPod devices, and of course... The Foo Fighters. If Dave Grohl doesn't make you want to buy an iPhone, I don't know what would!