Video Hands-On With The iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c

Shortly after Apple’s event this morning, Darrell and I got to spend a bit of time with the just-announced iPhone 5s and its more wallet-friendly lil’ brother, the iPhone 5c.

While we’ll wait until we’ve given both devices a proper spin before we do any sort of lengthy review, we wanted to drop a quick video hands-on and our first impressions.

iPhone 5s Impressions:

• Given the price and material difference, you’d probably assume that the 5s feels a good bit more slick than the 5c. You’d be right. The 5c still feels quite nice in the hand, but plastic is plastic.


• This thing is way speedy, presumably because of the jump to 64-bit. We only poked around the OS a little, but everything we saw was buttery smooth.


• It looks a lot like the iPhone 5. If you aren’t geeky enough to know how to spot the new color options, the Fingerprint-sensing home button, or the dual flash, you probably couldn’t tell the difference.


• The new slo-mo feature works REALLY well. We didn’t have any extreme sports stars handy to bust a kickflip or two for us, but it did do a really good job of catching us waving our hands around like dweebs at 120 frames per second.


• In our initial tests, the fingerprint detection works almost shockingly well. Setup takes seconds, and it worked consistently and instantly thereafter. After configuring a 5s to be on the look out for Darrell’s fingerprint, Greg’s fingerprint was immediately turned away. Once I added mine to the system, it worked immediately. There was literally zero frustration (the video above shows us lifting/tapping the fingerprint sensor multiple times while setting it up. It’s not failing to sense our finger properly, that tapping is just a prompted part of the process.)

iPhone 5c impressions:

• While it may be cheaper than the 5s, it certainly doesn’t feel cheap. It may not be as svelte, but it’s still a pretty dang nice looking phone.


• Between the price point and the bright colors and the commercials Apple showed today, the 5c seems aimed directly at a younger market.


• Greg says: Apple’s new 5c cases are… not my favorite. While the contrasting color options are nice, the case design doesn’t seem particularly inspired. As others have pointed out, they sort of look like Crocs. Plus, they make your iPhone say “hon” on the back.

That’s all for now, but we’ll go a whole lot deeper when we do our full review in the coming weeks. What say you? Is the iPhone 5S a big enough jump from the 5? Would you carry a 5c?

Video Hands-On With The iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c