iPhone 5C Review
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Configurations and carriers.
The iPhone 5C comes in 16GB and 32GB variations, for $99 and $199 on contract, respectively, or contract-free for $549 and $649. That's a hundred dollars less than an iPhone 5S at identical storage capacities across the board. In the US, the 5C is available on all four major carriers: AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, and T-Mobile. And T-Mobile's new "Uncarrier" model lets you buy the phone for zero (16GB) or $99 (32GB) down and spread the cost of the hardware over a two-year period, for $20 extra a month.
The 5C not only looks more like an iPod Touch, it even comes packaged in an iPod Touch-like jewel box with clear plastic. Inside you get the phone, a Lightning cable (with AC adapter), and pair of EarPod in-ear headphones with a built-in mic.
What do you give up over the 5S?
This is the question everyone's going to ask: what am I missing out on between the iPhone 5C and 5S for that extra hundred dollars? For starters, the 5S has that crisp metal design. It also has a newer, faster A7 processor, a fingerprint-sensing Home button, an even better camera with faster autofocus, burst shooting, better low-light and antiblur features, and a Slow-Mo video recording mode that records at 120 frames per second at 720p. What's more, the 5S is capable of 64-bit computing, has better graphics, and has an M7 processor for enabling future built-in motion-tracking and health/fitness apps. And it's also available in a 64GB capacity, versus just 16GB or 32GB for the 5C.
A lot of those features are theoretical, or embedded so deeply the casual person wouldn't notice. The 5C and 5S have the same screen size and Retina resolution, and the same LTE antenna bands. Those are features most people will notice a lot more. The 5C, from an everyday boot-up, application-loading standpoint, feels similar to the 5S. That said, I wouldn't be surprised to see the phones' speed begin to diverge as the months and years progress -- once more advanced apps begin to appear that are optimized for the more sophisticated hardware of the 5S.
Design
A brightly colored plastic iPhone: it sounds like something new, doesn't it? Not exactly: Apple's had brightly colored iPods for years, and the iPod Touch got its multicolored refresh in 2012. The iPhone 5C just feels like the extension of that bright-color philosophy into the iPhone line.
It doesn't feel like cheap plastic, though; the smooth, shiny polycarbonate shell around the back feels like a candy lacquer coating. It's a dense device, heavier than the iPhone 5 by nearly an ounce, but it has a comfortable feel -- maybe even better than the more hard-angled metal iPhone 5/5S. It's a return to the plastic iPhone, three years later.
The funny thing is, pull out an old iPhone 3G or 3GS and you'll see a remarkably similar finish. The 3GS looks bulbous and squat by comparison -- the 5C is flat-backed and longer, but it shares the wrap-around polycarbonate feel. This is not new so much as old and familiar.
Case and accessories
A new design means new cases: Apple's selling its own, at $29 each, in a variety of bright colors, made of the same polyurethane/microfiber material as the iPad Smart Covers and Smart Cases. The bright cases are attractive; they're punched with large holes, so the iPhone's colors and the case colors play off each other for color combinations. You can only imagine third-party case manufacturers are going to be all over this type of idea.
Apple's own cases are comfy, but oddly designed: the open holes expose some of the stamped FCC and model information on the back of the iPhone. Peeking at bits of text ruins a bit of the ultra-clean effect. Why not shift those holes higher up, or place the text elsewhere? It's nitpicky, but Apple's design usually prides itself on these sorts of details.
Display and speakers
The iPhone 5C's 4-inch, 1,136x640-pixel Retina Display seems every bit as bright and crisp as on the iPhone 5. But, it's also the same exact display: no extra pixel resolution, no added screen size. In a world of ever-larger smartphones, the iPhone 5C is more on its own now than it would have been in 2012. There's a lot of extra unused space above and below the screen.
Camera
The same iSight rear-facing 8-megapixel camera that was in the iPhone 5 is in the 5C. iOS 7 adds a few more extras, such as digital zoom when recording video. Both 1080p video recording, photos and panoramic pictures all look great, but the iPhone 5S camera is even more refined, and adds slow-motion recording and multiburst.
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