SAN FRANCISCO — The iPhone 5c isn’t exactly a radical departure for Apple. Just like how it created the iPod nano and shuffle, it was only a matter of time before the software and hardware maker split its relatively successful iPhone line to cover different segments of the market. The new line wraps the innards of the iPhone 5 in a colourful new aesthetic. But initial consumer and media knee-jerk reactions to the product’s cost and form factor were less than pleasant: It was too expensive for a product made of plastic. The back of the iPhone 5c’s exterior is made of exactly that. According to Apple, it’s actually a hard-coated polycarbonate enclosure reinforced with steel. The smartphone is also available in a variety of colours. You can get one in blue, green, pink, yellow and white. It might look like plastic but it feels anything but cheap in the hand. The construction is actually pretty solid — much more so than the iPhone 3G, the last model that was made of plastic and helped the iPhone make its debut in Singapore. The iPhone 5c feels dense, weighing 132g, and while it’s not the thinnest in the market it is still a slim 8.97mm. So why the fuss about the plastic and its price? The iPhone 5c 16GB and 32GB models cost S$848 and S$988, respectively, without a plan. That’s not exactly affordable. The base model, for example, is only S$140 cheaper than the flagship 5s. My guess is that most consumers would equate the use of plastic in a product with a much friendlier price tag. However, if that were the case, consider Samsung’s flagship S4 smartphone, which is also made out of plastic, and retails at S$998 without a contract. What you should really be concerned about is that the iPhone 5c bundles last year’s features (only the battery life has seen a slight improvement) at a less-than-premium price. The iPhone 5c still performs admirably well on iOS 7, even without the cutting-edge features of the 5s. However, the fact that you can now choose from five different colours does not seem like a strong enough draw in a saturated phone market like Singapore where consumers aspire to have the best device on the market. The reason why the different iPod lines were successful, I think, is that there were distinctive features that made each variation unique. The iPod nano could measure your jogs, the iPod classic provided the most storage space for music junkies and the iPod shuffle provided uber portability with its diminutive form. So far, such functionally distinctive features do not apply to the two iPhone lines if we disregard the difference in aesthetics. If Apple, for example, created the world’s thinnest phone with the 5c, and only reserved bleeding-edge new features for its flagship phone, that could have been a bigger draw for consumers because the 5c would gain a distinctive feature the 5s did not. A choice of colours does not seem like a functional enough difference to warrant a new line of iPhones. That said, the 5c might appeal to those making the first-time jump to smartphones and would like to start off with the iPhone and cut as many corners off the pricing. The hip colours that the 5c comes in and the (slightly) friendlier price tag might make it more attractive to youth as well.