Round Table: Which iPhone impresses the most?

Two iPhones - 5S and 5C - were announced earlier and they are both quite impressive on paper. The iPhone 5C gets the fun element, with the funky colours and a not-too-shabby spec sheet. And the iPhone 5S gets a new gold colour option, along with an impressive-sounding A7 chip, M7 motion coprocessor, and a fingerprint scanner. The unlocked price difference between the two smartphones is just $100, so the 5C is not so much a budget option as a rethought iPhone 5. We’ll have to wait and see if this strategy works for Apple, but there is an obvious choice to be made when buying an iPhone now. So which one is the most impressive? We discuss.

Will the 5C win over hearts?

Roydon Cerejo

I definitely see the appeal of the iPhone 5C and god knows we needed a cheaper iPhone! However, a cheap phone in the US doesn't always translate well in India so I'm still expecting it to cost quite a bit of money. If I am going to be spending about Rs 30,000 for a phone, I might as well go all the way and get the best Apple has to offer. The 5S definitely got me excited more than the 5C, not so much for the fingerprint sensor but for the new 64-bit SoC and the M7 coprocessor. The latter is similar to how Nvidia's companion core functions in their Tegra 3 SoC, only here, it's a separate chip altogether. What this means is your battery won't drain as quickly as it could have if you use a lot of apps that make use of the motion sensors. Pretty cool.

More from News Analysis

Sharon Khare

So Apple's finally conceded and made one for that market share that really couldn't afford their high-end iPhones. A far cry from sombre iDevices, the 5C comes in funky, bright, young colours and is pretty good in the specs department as well. With a 4-inch Retina display, A6 processor (the same processor as the iPhone 5), an 8MP camera, Dual band Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0, on paper, the 5C does not disappoint. The company's making an effort to make a dent in the Android stronghold in markets that couldn't afford their pricey phones and it's kind of interesting to see Apple take their first shot at a budget product. Even though, at its unlocked price, it won’t be a budget phone in most markets.

Hatim Kantawalla

To me the answer is pretty clear, the iPhone 5C wins hands down. The 5C with its 4G LTE support is packaged and priced to please. Give or take a couple of thousand, my money is on a Rs 25,000 launch price here in India come December 2013. So in that sense, Apple has made owning the iPhone experience truly affordable, something the company has never consciously done before. And if the pricing does come true, then it'd be their strongest offering in our market, yet--one that has the potential to rock the Android boat like never before.

The iPhone 5S on the other hand has been given a very good upgrade, and is clearly the more desirable of the two phones in terms of specs and features. For Rs 50,000 (I'm playing the guessing game again), you'd get a phone that apart from screen size has practically everything else going for it, and that could be the the big factor in the final equation.