Apple iPhone 5c vs Samsung Galaxy S4

For a few years, Samsung and Apple have been holding a battle for the top in the smartphone market. Samsung’s flagship smartphone, Galaxy S4, is a very popular device that has been sold in millions. Releasing the new iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c, Apple hopes to regain its part of the market. We compared iPhone 5s with Galaxy S4 in our previous article, now lets see how the cheaper iPhone 5c stacks up against it.

Size and Weight

Even though it’s an iPhone 5 in a new colored frame, the iPhone 5c has got some more in thickness and weight. If iPhone 5 felt like it’s not even in your pocket, the iPhone 5c does not. With a thickness of 0.35 inch (8.97 mm), which is 20 grams more than its predecessor, you can feel it bumping your pocket a little bit. Now it’s got a similarly weight to the Galaxy S4 (2 grams more), despite its smaller size.

	Size	Thickness	Weight
Apple iPhone 5c	4.9 x 2.33 inches	0.35 inch	132 grams
Samsung Galaxy S4	5.38 x 2.75 inches	0.31 inch	130 grams

Design and Build quality

Galaxy S4 looks much like its predecessor. Its has got a bigger screen, a smaller bezel, is a bit thiner and narrower than the Galaxy S3. Although it looks and feels a lot better, I still don’t like the cheap polycarbonate back cover, it’s just not right.

Choosing a polycarbonate unibody for its new iPhone 5c, Apple took care for it to look and feel spectacularly different. People who held this iPhone in their hands, know that this plastic feels more like ceramic. It’s just as solid as the aluminum one, because Apple couldn’t go wrong in this particular field.

Although both devices have premium specs and internals, the iPhone 5c is the a winner when it comes to build quality.

Screen

iPhone 5c has got the same iPhone 5 featured 4-inch Retina IPS LCD with a resolution of 640×1136 pixels and 326ppi, while Samsung Galaxy S4 has a 5-inch Super AMOLED display with a spectacular FullHD resolution of 1920×1080 pixels and 441ppi. Even though there is a significant variation between the two screen’s pixels per inch , your eye can’t really tell a difference. However, Galaxy S4’s display shares a higher contrast and a bit more vibrant colors. A plus in the iPhone column goes for its brighter screen, which is easier to read outside.

Hardware

Samsung made its latest flagship smartphone a powerful monster on the inside, at least on paper. The LTE version features a quad-core 1.9Ghz Snapdragon processor and 2GB of RAM, whilst the iPhone 5c has a dual-core 1.3Ghz Apple A6 chip and 1GB of RAM. Looking at these specs, you’d think the Galaxy surpasses the iPhone in terms of speed – it’s probably true. But anyway, let’s wait for real-word benchmark results for a conclusion to be made.

Operating System

As we already know, iPhone 5c runs on iOS 7 and Galaxy S4 is on Android 4.2.2. Some users may claim that iOS interface gives you a better user experience with it’s simplicity and the new design of iOS is really nice too. The thing is that some of the features that are only available on Android you can get only by jailbreaking your iPhone 5c. And since Apple makes it more impossible to jailbreak every year, many choose to forget about it.

Camera

iPhone 5c has a 8 megapixel camera and the camera app interface is very simple. You can tap to focus, enable the Grid as well as the HDR and there’s also a Panoramic View mode which is pretty accurate and easy to use.

Of course the camera on the colored iPhone is significantly down on numbers compared to Samsung Galaxy S4 that has a 13 megapixel camera and has loads of features. Some of them are Instagram-life filters, dual-shot mode, ISO settings and so on.

Both devices shoot videos at FullHD 1080p resolution. iPhone 5c has got a better software image stabilization whilst it lacks Galaxy S4’s recording quality.

Battery Life

The battery on the iPhone 5 has been tweaked by Apple to slightly increase the battery life for the iPhone 5c. Apple claims its colorful iPhone will last up to 10 hours of talk time and 10 hours of browsing over LTE and Wi-Fi. On paper, it looks less than Galaxy S4 can get, but real-world usage vary. We except them both to get almost the same results in battery benchmarks.

Early verdict

The iPhone 5c was rumored to be a mid-end priced iPhone but it still commands a premium price. Being a $100 cheaper than the Galaxy S4 with a 2-year contract and $80 cheaper off contract, you should really consider getting this phone.