At Apple's iPhone 5 event today, I had a chance to spend a few moments chatting with Phil Schiller, the company's senior vice president of marketing.

Schiller bounced out of a holding area near the iPhone 5 demo tables with a big smile on his face, surrounded by Apple PR flacks and a variety of handlers — but he was all too happy to talk about the new phone. "What did you think?" he asked before I could get a question out. After telling him I thought the new device was handsome and reaffirmed my desire to "make love to it" (his response: "we'll get you two a room"), I queried about the design language, and if the iPhone 5 was an evolution of the older phones, or something new. "The design language is an iteration," he told me, "but otherwise this is a completely new phone." He talked a bit about the engineering effort that went into the phone, and emphasized that the company had "started from scratch" on building this device.

When I asked about how Apple was able to claim even better battery life than previous devices in a thinner form factor and with LTE, Schiller told me that it was all about the new chipset in the iPhone 5. "We're able to get much better power management with the integrated chips," he said.

Before we could continue our conversation, the Foo Fighters appeared from behind a curtain, and proceeded to entangle Schiller in an animated conversation about their performance — which Phil seemed all too happy to discuss. I quickly stepped back into the crowd, off to find another iPhone 5 to manhandle.