The Apple iPhone 5C is finally here.
Alongside the Apple iPhone 5S another iPhone was just unveiled - the iPhone 5C. It’s cheaper and more colourful than the iPhone 5S and we’ve got all the details here.
Look
The iPhone 5C looks quite unlike any other iPhone. The shape is similar and it has the same distinctive home button, but for the first time it’s made out of plastic, leaving it looking unmistakeably cheaper and lower quality than the iPhone 5S- or any other iPhone for that matter.
It comes in white, pink, yellow, blue ( above ) or green and looks set to give the Lumia range a run for its money as the most brightly coloured smartphone out there.
Specs
The iPhone 5C has an Apple A6 chip- the same one as the iPhone 5, so while it might be relatively cheap it should still be a capable performer. It also has the same 4 inch 1136 x 640 display as the iPhone 5S, so in many ways it’s actually still a fairly high end phone.
Features
The iPhone 5C doesn’t really have any features that we haven’t seen before. In fact plastic build aside it’s a very similar beast to the iPhone 5. It retains the 8 megapixel camera that the iPhone 5 had and of unsurprisingly it doesn’t include premium new features like the fingerprint scanner found on the iPhone 5S
It does however support 4G LTE, so even if you can’t quite justify shelling out for the iPhone 5S you needn’t be stuck on a slow 3G network.
iOS 7
The one exception to the lack of new features is iOS 7, which appears on both the iPhone 5C and the iPhone 5S. It’s probably the biggest update the operating system has ever seen- certainly visually, so it’s a major change and will hopefully make everything seem new and shiny again.
Battery life
Like the iPhone 5S, the iPhone 5C promises up to 10 hours of talk time on 3G or up to 250 hours of standby time, both of which are improvements on the equivalent figures for the iPhone 5 (which had quoted stats of 225 hours standby time or 8 hours of 3G talk time) .
Release date and price
The iPhone 5C will be available to buy from the 20th of September. The bad news is that despite being the budget alternative to an iPhone 5S it’s actually still very expensive. Even the 16GB model (which is the cheapest) will set you back £469. That’s more than the HTC One. While the 32GB model is going to be available for £549 which is more than a Samsung Galaxy S4 and the same as a 16GB version of the iPhone 5S.
Those are some surprisingly high prices and we’re not really sure how many people are likely to pay them, after all surely a top end Android phone would be more tempting for the same price, or you could spend a little bit more and get the flagship iPhone 5S.
Only time will tell, but if you are in the camp that wants one you don’t have long to wait.
