So the iPhone 5—“the thinnest, lightest, fastest iPhone ever”—has been fully revealed, and after the dust has settled on the highly anticipated, highly touted Apple event in San Francisco, many of us were left unsure of what to think of the latest and greatest iPhone yet.

One thing’s for sure, though: it’s not a game-changer that Android—including Google, Android phone manufacturers, and fans of the platform—should fear.

Catching Up

You’ve likely seen the new iPhone’s specs by now: a 4-inch Retina Display screen, an 8-megapixel iSight camera, a new processor of unknown clock speed as of this writing (although the Apple website says the processor is up to twice as fast as the processor on the iPhone 4S), 16/32/64GB of internal storage with no option for microSD expansion, and the new proprietary port, among other things. Oh, and the iPhone now packs LTE.

Apple iOS 6

Let’s take that last item. LTE is, for a variety of reasons, still not seeing as widespread use as it should be. Still, it’s quite accessible now, especially in markets like the United States. So yes, that’s a big plus for Apple fans and longtime iPhone users who want to experience the blazing speeds of LTE. For others, though, the notion that this is not a must-have iPhone will stick. And that includes some current iPhone owners.

For Android smartphone users, they know they’ve been enjoying the new offerings of the iPhone 5 on their own phones for several months now. They enjoy smooth performance from their dual-core or quad-core devices, get to use features like VoIP service through mobile apps and their own high-speed mobile Internet connections, and a rich content consumption experience because of already large screens. Face it, fanboys—the iPhone 5 is really just a catch-up maneuver.

Manufacturer Reaction, or Lack Thereof

It would be really interesting to see how Android phone manufacturers react to this new iPhone. For one, what’s there to react on? The iPhone 5 didn’t bring anything to the table worth emulating—or copying, to be frank about it. The design is dated, the specs aren’t ground breaking, and the overall scheme of the phone won’t seem to bring much impact to the status quo.

Android

Whereas manufacturers used to scramble to get new stuff rolling off manufacturing facilities when Apple released a new phone model, now it seems those that had already revealed their major cards can concentrate on polishing these and pushing them to a market that’s hungry for some differentiation.

People are already anticipating the release of the Motorola Droid RAZR Maxx and its brethren. Of course, the challenge isn’t just going to come from Android—there’s the Nokia Lumia 920, too, along with its fresh Windows Phone 8 OS that’s trying to gain traction and take some of the market share away from iOS and Android.

Aftermath

There’s no doubt that the iPhone 5 will sell a lot of units. Millions will go for it, the preorder slots will fill quickly. Some will upgrade, some won’t. Some will make the switch from iPhone to Android, and vice versa. Still, with this latest iPhone being more of a snoozefest than a game-changer, we see the status quo being preserved.

In fact, the Lumia flagship probably has more potential to shake things up as far as the smartphone market is concerned. And with Android building on its massive amount of daily activations and in terms of OS market share, it’s easy to see that the platform and the players involved in it have nothing to fear.