5S definitely a nice upgrade and I don't see any reason to get a 5C beyond color and slight battery life advantage (presumably on non-motion usage). Saving $100 on a $2,000+ service contract is nothing.
But I'm super disappointed that Apple didn't target 5S battery life for dramatic improvement. The 5's battery life is already awful and it looks like 5S is even worse. Ugh.
You're being snarky, but using my smartphone as an actual phone might be my least-performed activity. There's a running joke between me and all my tech buddies that my phone (32gb iPhone 5) is a terrible phone, but an awesome pocket-computer.
I know exactly how you feel, but I'm pretty sure people using smarthphones nowadays practically stopped caring about battery life as it's close to non-existent anyway since you have to plug in your device every single day.
Personally I couldn't live like that (nor can you probably, if I interpret the tone of your post correctly), partly because I don't want to be enslaved to charging partly because I would forget it anyway, so the only option left is to either buy a phone that's not so 'smart' hence doesn't starve the battery in a day or get a smartphone and don't use it's smart features. As far as I can see, there's just no way around it. Which is an utter shame of course. As a comparision: I've always been a portable audio fan and in that area there seems to actually have been an increase in battery life while for the phone market it seems to be the other way around. I have a semi-professional portable player/recorder and using two standard AA batteries it serves me well playing audio for over a month. Or actually so long I never counted, but will be easily over 40 hours. It's a joy to use compared to any phone I ever owned, except the fixed on on my desk :]
I agree. I was really, really hoping for a MacBook Air-style 2x improvement in battery life (either through a physically larger battery and/or silicon improvements).
The problem with battery life:
1) It's already terrible. If I go out to a bar or whatever after work and I haven't charged it through the day to >75%, it will be dead most likely by the time I'm trying to get directions home/phone a taxi.
2) No VoLTE support, so you need to have both the 3G & 4G radios on when making a call and using data at the same time, which sucks.
3) iOS7 will likely allow much more aggressive multitasking by developers, which will reduce battery life further. This hasn't really been seen on these benchmarks but I think once developers start pushing through these things, battery life is going to take a nose dive.
4) iPhone batteries aren't user replacements and people use them very heavily. I imagine many people will easily do 500 cycles a year, which makes performance suck pretty quickly.
VoLTE is largely a matter of carrier support, when it does get enabled on a major network it shouldn't be too hard to add support for it via a software update. The baseband might need to be updated as well, but the radio support is all there simply by supporting LTE.
But I'm super disappointed that Apple didn't target 5S battery life for dramatic improvement. The 5's battery life is already awful and it looks like 5S is even worse. Ugh.