After months of speculation and years in the making, the long-rumored midrange iPhone 5C model made a debut alongside the flagship iPhone 5S. As expected, its specs are mostly a rehash of already existing components, but the housing is brand new and sets it apart from Apple's tradition so far to just use last year's iPhone model as this year's midrange offering in the iOS universe.
Design
Let's start with the chassis then - the iPhone 5C is built of durable one-piece polycarbonate with a steel frame underneath that serves as the antenna, and Jony Ive called the design "unapologetically plastic," basically a polycarb iPhone 5, judging from the specs.
The phone comes in a variety of different colors for every taste and wackiness - green, white, blue, yellow, and rose. It is slim, even for today's smartphone standards, at 0.35 inch (8.97 mm), yet not thinner than the more premium iPhone 5S. It is, however, fairly light at 4.65 ounces (132 grams), as you can easily imagine from the plastic body and the compact size, but Apple could have definitely done better here, as we've got 4.7" Androids lighter than the 5C now, for instance. As for the software part, you can have wallpapers in iOS 7 matching your specific color of iPhone 5C, neat.
Specs
The screen is a 4" Retina Display 640x1136 pixels panel with the usual high brightness, precise sRGB color representation, good viewing angles and low reflection levels. Inside we get an A6 chipset, which is enough to power everything iOS throws at the handset at this screen resolution, plus likely 1 GB of RAM. Storage is taken care of with 16/32 GB models that allow no expansion via a memory card slot. An 8 MP iSight camera on the back with LED flash rounds up a very decent midrange offering.
There is a new FaceTime HD camera in the front, too, with larger 1.9 micron pixels to capture more light, and backside illumination. Apple said the iPhone 5C carries a cellular modem with more LTE bands than any other smartphone, so it should be a rather global device out of the box, but we don't know if the comparison includes the octaband Xperia Z Ultra, for example.
After months of speculation and years in the making, the long-rumored midrange iPhone 5C model made a debut alongside the flagship iPhone 5S. As expected, its specs are mostly a rehash of already existing components, but the housing is brand new and sets it apart from Apple's tradition so far to just use last year's iPhone model as this year's midrange offering in the iOS universe.
Design
Let's start with the chassis then - the iPhone 5C is built of durable one-piece polycarbonate with a steel frame underneath that serves as the antenna, and Jony Ive called the design "unapologetically plastic," basically a polycarb iPhone 5, judging from the specs.
The phone comes in a variety of different colors for every taste and wackiness - green, white, blue, yellow, and rose. It is slim, even for today's smartphone standards, at 0.35 inch (8.97 mm), yet not thinner than the more premium iPhone 5S. It is, however, fairly light at 4.65 ounces (132 grams), as you can easily imagine from the plastic body and the compact size, but Apple could have definitely done better here, as we've got 4.7" Androids lighter than the 5C now, for instance. As for the software part, you can have wallpapers in iOS 7 matching your specific color of iPhone 5C, neat.
Specs
The screen is a 4" Retina Display 640x1136 pixels panel with the usual high brightness, precise sRGB color representation, good viewing angles and low reflection levels. Inside we get an A6 chipset, which is enough to power everything iOS throws at the handset at this screen resolution, plus likely 1 GB of RAM. Storage is taken care of with 16/32 GB models that allow no expansion via a memory card slot. An 8 MP iSight camera on the back with LED flash rounds up a very decent midrange offering.
There is a new FaceTime HD camera in the front, too, with larger 1.9 micron pixels to capture more light, and backside illumination. Apple said the iPhone 5C carries a cellular modem with more LTE bands than any other smartphone, so it should be a rather global device out of the box, but we don't know if the comparison includes the octaband Xperia Z Ultra, for example.