Surprising Enhancements to Apple’s iPhone Line

The 5C is the budget model. It’s basically last year’s iPhone 5 but with a plastic body (lacquered for extra shininess!), available in five colors. It will be $100 with a two-year contract.

Inside, though, there’s a new processor, which Apple says is twice as fast as before. It’s also the cellphone world’s first 64-bit processor, according to the company, which is an especially attractive feature for game makers; it can “load in” new scenes five times faster than the previous chip.

There’s also a coprocessor — a smaller, assistant chip — dedicated to monitoring and processing data from the phone’s motion and location circuits. It can continuously monitor your activity and location (for fitness and journaling apps, for example) at a battery cost of only one-sixth what the main processor would require.

There’s also a more refined camera. Apple says that it has an f/2.2 lens, meaning much better in low light, and that its pixels are bigger than before, meaning even better in low light (and color and dynamic range are better). The sensor itself is 15 percent bigger, which is a great help.

The flash is worth writing home about. It’s actually two LED flashes — white and amber.

When you take a flash photo, there’s an initial flash; that’s the camera measuring the color temperature of the scene. Then there’s an immediate second flash, the real flash. The two LED’s fire in combination, balanced to match the light in the room to keep colors pure. In combination, they can flash in 1,000 different color-temperature tones. The idea is to eliminate the ugly white bleached-out look of most flash photos. Apple says this is the first such color-adapting flash on any camera — not just on a phone.

You also get 10 frames-per-second burst mode and 120 frames-per-second slow-motion video. The samples look great.

Finally, the iPhone 5S has a fingerprint reader, ingeniously built right into the Home button. You don’t have to push the button — just touch it — to wake the phone and unlock it. It works at any angle.