My feeling on this entire issue is this: If you are counting on a small sensor device like an iPhone for your primary photo engine then you are simply going to have to live with some purple fringing issues. This is not all that uncommon. Lots of good photo review sites spend part of their reviews on the amount of (purple) fringing in photos. Many times the difference between a $300 lens and a $1000 lens is in part due to the reduction in visible fringing. There are expensive post processing engines that deal specifically with purple fringing. The iPhone has a tiny little sensor packaged in a tiny little frame, same as any other cell phone camera. The fact that the iPhone camera (or any other cell phone for that matter) can provide acceptable photos at all is an engineering marvel. That being said, if the quality of your photos is so important that some color aberration is going to be a deal breaker then you shouldn't be using a micro sensor camera in the first place. There is a reason a good DSLR + lens costs more than an iPhone.
As discussed earlier, that's not the point. I've personally taken over 20,000 photos with my iPhone 4S. I use it for work photography (group events, defective parts, machine tool training, all kinds of stuff), with my family & friends (birthdays, holidays, get-togethers), and for hobby photography. Flickr is currently showing the iPhone as the most popular camera on all of Flicker. Dismissing an issue as visible as this purple flaring problem as a non-issue due to it being "just a smartphone camera" really isn't a good option. It's an 8-megapixel camera with a 1080p camcorder used by millions of people every day. Anyway, I haven't run into an issue with this particular problem before. That's why I started this thread. It is an issue on this particular release of the iPhone.
Also as mentioned, this is not traditional chromatic aberration, which is a purple fringe on objects. This is a flare/haze issue, due to off-camera light sources in particular. I've been fine with the limitations of the iPhone 4S in the past...yes it has lens flare, yes there's no optical zoom, yes to a lot of things, but it was usable and I was happy with it. The new version 5 has a purple haze issue. It's not about upgrading to a dSLR or using pro lenses or getting a different camera, it's about using my smartphone as a camera. I have a dSLR. I have plenty of great lenses. They don't fit in my pocket and they don't let me edit pictures instantly or email them or post them on Twitter or on Facebook right away. So what I'm saying is, don't count it out as a camera just because it's not a professional camera. The point is, there is an issue here that wasn't a problem before on prior models. That's it.