At first blush, the iPhone 5c looks a bit like the iPhone 5 had a baby with the plastic-backed iPhone 3GS. It's the size and shape of the iPhone 5—long and thin—just a hair bigger in every direction, and about 20 grams heavier. And it marks the first time that the iPhone comes in anything beyond black and white: You can pick up an iPhone 5c in pink, yellow, blue, green, or white—if you're a fan of black, you'll probably want to look to the iPhone 5s.
The polycarbonate shell is, of course, the most obvious change. It's crafted from a single piece of plastic, and—as Apple design maven Jonathan Ive said in a video played during the Apple media event introducing the phone—you won't find a single seam or joint in the unibody-style design. (It reminded us of nothing so much as the final edition of the white polycarbonate MacBook.)
The iPhone 5c feels good in the hand: It's got a nice, solid build, without seeming heavy. Whereas Apple bragged about the diamond-cut chamfers on the 5 and 5s, the iPhone 5c features curved edges that feel a little more comfortable to hold. Between the hard plastic case and the metal frame underneath it, the entire phone feels solid, and not cheap.
The volume buttons, the Ring/Silent switch, and the On/Off switch are all made out of colored plastic; in our admittedly brief hands-on time, they too seemed to have the high build-quality you'd expect from Apple, without any looseness or wiggling. (Here's a free piece of trivia: Only one iPhone 5c doesn't show you an orange line when you flip the Ring/Silent switch to mute—the pink version, which instead displays a white line. The orange line likely lacked the contrast necessary to be useful on the salmon-hued model.)
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