Apple iPhone 7

First Impression is that it looks extremely similar to the 6 and 6s. The only easy way of telling if you have the newer model is if you have one of the two black versions of the phone. There are some subtler differences between the 7 and the 6s, the antenna lines now hug the edge of the phone, it has an even larger camera hump and you can look at the bottom, RIP headphone jack. Overall it’s still a great design but it’s disappointing not having a bigger change. But cutting to the chase; that headphone jack, or lack thereof. Did Apple make the right decision? No. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it, why remove a port that’s so universal? They have tried to minimise the impact. So in the box along with the lighting earpods they give you a 3.5mm to lightning adaptor. But it’s tiny and you know you’re going lose it. It means when you want to plug into AUX in the car you just can’t, unless you want loads of tiny adaptors everywhere. It’s a problem I found almost immediately when using the phone, I’d forget I didn’t have a headphone jack and try to plug in things to my phone, looking stupid when I realised I just can’t do it. Apple really want to push you to using wireless headphones like their airpods, but they’ve been delayed until 2017. On a more positive note, something I do think they got right is the new home button. It doesn’t feel like a button click, it’s more like the whole bottom chin of the phone moving. However the feedback it gives is excellent and the reliability of having a non-moving part means that unlike buttons on prior phones, they won’t break as easily. Something which is extremely annoying when locked into a two year contract on a phone that has a one year warranty. There is a rationale to having a solid state home button and removing the headphone jack, other than courage and that’s to make the phone water and dust resistance. So it can stay under 1 meter of water for up to 30 minutes. I’ve been testing it, gingerly at first, however after a while I realised that it is the real thing. This is something that Apple have been working on since the 6s, whose internals were good at resisting water. However, now they’ve sealed the openings of the phone, like the lightning port and the speakers. However, waterproofing the phone hasn’t had an effect on the media experience of the device, in fact it’s better than ever. The iPhone now has stereo sound for the first time, using the speaker at the top previously reserved for phone calls, as a front facing speaker. It’s not quite as good as the sound on the HTC M8 with those boomsound speakers, but it is a massive improvement. What makes this phone even better for consuming media is the new screen. So both the 7 and 7 plus feature new IPS screens that are 25% brighter and have a wider colour gamut than previous iPhone screens. It makes using your iPhone outdoors, that much easier, and the wider colour gamut really shines when looking at photos and video taken with the phone. They look more vibrant and colours come across a lot richer. Watching movies and TV looks gorgeous, the colours are accurate and the screen has great viewing angles. Sadly though, it still isn’t an OLED panel it’s an IPS panel. OLED screens allow you to turn off individual pixels so when you have something on screen that is black, those pixels turn off giving you a true black. Unlike what you get with an IPS panel like on the iPhone where the whole screen is always on. because that isn’t black. The displays still have 3D touch but now with iOS 10, they take advantage of this functionality a lot more. So with time more apps have come to support it with quick actions like before and swiping hard from the left side of the device allows quickly changing between apps. However now, with first party apps like weather, you can 3D touch into a widget for a quick view of the weather. Some third party apps take advantage of it too like the Google Maps app to give you travel times to home and work. There are other hidden features too, in notifications you can clear all notifications now with a hard press, instead of having to click x on every one. Hard pressing the torch in quick settings you can select how bright you want it, or use it to quickly set a timer. They’ve baked in a lot of new uses for it and the best way to find out new features, is to just press down hard on everything. The screens on both the 7 and the 7+ are still the same resolution as they were in the 6 and 6+, however I think adding more pixels isn’t really necessary for displays this size, even with the huge amounts of power that this thing is packing.

So what is at the heart of this new iPhone? The new A10 system on a chip and it is an absolute beast. It’s a new quad-core processer, with 2 high and 2 low performance cores. Allowing it to shift basic tasks to the much more power efficient low performance cores, without compromising when you need the speed with the full fat ones. Apple chips totally blow away the competition such as those from Samsung and Qualcom. In geekbench this translates to a score of 3449 in single core tasks and 5562 in multi core, it blows everything away on the android side, even the Google Pixel, a review which is coming soon, so if you want to see that, hit the subscribe button down below.  Flicking through the UI and multitasking is buttery smooth, even with only 2GB of ram. It’s so fast you can even close down apps before they open. The GPU has been beefed up as well, there aren’t many games that take advantage of the extra horsepower yet, however in the next few months we should be seeing some gorgeous games. One anticipated update with the 7 was definitely the new camera, and simply put, the pictures that come out of this thing are gorgeous. Where you’ll see the most improvement is with low light photos. This is due to the new 1.8/f aperture along with optical image stabilisation allow for a longer exposure in low light situations. All of these photos were taken in extremely dark environments and the camera holds up really well. In more favourable situations the camera is still incredible, it does an extremely good job with white balance and exposing the photo correctly. Colours are accurate and that new wide aperture really allows for some shallow depth of field in macro shots like this one.

The new image signal processor that Apple raved about at the event appears to be doing its job because the photos are honestly beautiful. The selfie camera has improved as well, it’s a new 7MP sensor, and it takes decent selfies. Unfortunately not a wide angle lens like on the S7 which would have been nice to see. However, it still takes decent selfies. With all that power, louder speakers, the brighter screen and more advanced camera, what’s battery life like? It’s definitely better than the previous generation of iPhones. The slightly larger 1960mAH battery paired with the more efficient A10 would get me through pretty heavy day with around 10-20% before I went to bed, much better than the 6s where it would die almost every day. However, using GPS a lot is a battery killer, on days where I needed navigation it would die before I got home. Obviously the battery life on the 7+ will be much greater because of the larger battery, so if you don’t mind the extra size, consider upgrading to the 7+. Overall, it’s a really solid phone, but it would have been perfect if it had a wide angle selfie camera and if they just left the headphone jack where it belongs. So thank you guys for watching, please drop a like down below if you enjoyed this article.Thanks for reading.