thanks for your help fred and aszter
my wife's iphone 5s is having the same problem as mine.
I also compared them to my daughters ipad mini that runs 7.0.4 (A5 chip). and that thing runs properly.
FASTER than both our iphone 5s!!!!
wait it gets worse.
I dug up my old 4s installed 7.1.1 . Guess what?
it opens apps with the same speed as my 5s (as slow)
it seems that apple has on purpose implemented an artificial lag on all devices so that the new iphone will appear snappier than the older ones.
not sure about you guys but this is definitely not making me want to go out and stand in line for their new kit and to think that I was actually looking forward to buy an iphone with a bigger screen. not so much any more..
As you can tell I own a lot of apple products. maybe I will come around - it's not like samsung is god's gift to humanity. But This is definitely making question apple. Maybe HTC deserves a chance by me.
I also have a developer id so I am downloading the correct 7.1 ipsw as well and I will try again right now to put it on. first attempt didn't work out, I just upgraded itunes as well to see if that helps, I am putting it on recovery mode.
Just for the record, closing wifi, seems to randomly improve performance in some cases but not all the times..
biggest problem is in photos.