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o yeah, this one’s relevant more than my usual revisits since this is a value product. People
don’t usually switch their iPhones very often as they pay a pretty hefty amount for the device.
This one though, changed the way of OEMs do their camera and “Headphone” jack! We
started seeing a dedicated telephoto lens and no headphone jacks since Apple did it and
people accepted. Meh.
Well, here’s what I think about this infamous iPhone from 2016 which made Airpods a standalone Billion dollar company.
The design straight away feels old school since we had started to see Galaxy S8 kind of
phone in this era; but this is an iPhone anyway and its fine to fall behind.
But yet, I like the choice of materials! Matte finish back; so cold and smooth. I am personally
a fan of metal backs and would mostly want to choose metal over glass almost always. The
button placement is fine and I’m glad they moved to a side mounted power button unlike top
mounted in older times. The fingerprint placement is subjective mostly and we cannot have a
best position for that.A camera bump is there, but a flat back would have been a great option.
The compactness is something which this one has and I like it! Being able to reach all comers of the device without worrying about dropping is nice right? Yes, even though it’s slippery.
The LCD panel with HD+ resolution feels much more than that since apple is always good with polishing the things. Even though it’s a LCD display, it feels so color accurate. Also, LCD displays have an upper hand over OLED panels in terms of durability and cost of repair.
With 4.7”, the screen might not be the best to watch movies and videos but it is good enough for social media and all the basic things a smart phone does. Also, it gets so dim at lowest brightness which is perfect for night crawlers; and it’s bright enough for using outdoors. One major thing to note thou: the display is pressure sensitive! Which means you can have two different type of touch at the same place; which I totally admire and love. It changes the way you use your phone and it is so much better than that long press on Pixel launcher. Also, it
makes your response time faster in games which support this feature (e.g. PUBG). The display is decent and so are the speakers; yep decent and not great. The reason being they are downward firing and can be easily blocked; and there isn’t any stereo setup here since it’s a solo speaker and the earpiece doesn’t double as a secondary speaker. You mostly won’t miss calls on a normal day but content consumption won’t be very good.
It is the 4 th year since this device was launched and we are still running the lasted version of iOS! So yeah, we are getting some good software support and this is what we expect from other expensive flagships as well but they are mostly focused on launching their next device rather than actually making the current device better. The integrity of the OS and the hardware is unmatched. There are hardly any other OEMs which are able to do this. The
level of optimization is so good here that this phone has just a 1900 mAh battery and it still manages to do things same as a 3000 mAh device. Plus iOS has such smooth interface, it’ll make you want to use it more. Addition of features in iOS 13 has made the experience better from what was already good. But here’s what I don’t like about apple: they don’t do simple things just because they want people to switch to newer devices. Last year they released iPhone XR with a single lens camera. The portrait mode there was working with the software
edge detection; previously released iPhone 7 & 8 also have single lens, but they didn’t roll out this feature to these devices and that’s just a turn off since these are still a good devices. But that’s classic apple anyway.
iPhones have been known for their camera quality ever since ! And this little guy here is no exception either. Good thing about investing into an iPhone is that you can open up the camera app, click a photo or a video; and be confident that it is going to be a good one. And same is the case with this one; Apple was pushing limits with the iPhone 7 as they went for a bigger lens for a better low light photography; it was commendable back in the day but the low light games has seen some big changes in recent years so this is just okay now. What’s not just okay but excellent is the videography! I love the videos shot on this device because they look complete; you are not relying on a tripod stand for a good stable video here. Also, you got to acknowledge that the noise cancellation and the audio quality here is still really
good after 4 years. Whatever may disappoint you, the cameras won’t except for the portrait mode shots.
What Apple pushed besides the camera game is that they made their devices water resistant! Yep not a big deal now but was a big deal then. Since we know how expensive repairs at Apple costs, it’s good that we have this assurance. I wish they had scaled up batteries too. 1900 mAh seems less, very less on a phone. But it isn’t as bad as it seems!
You still can get through a full day of light use with some battery saving tips. But that involves a compromises and some tips and tricks. If you are someone who’d play games too, then carry you charger around as you will require to charge maybe twice or even thrice
a day.
So, how I see this, is that Apple generally does most of the things right; and these things add up in being a good phone. But a good phone cannot check all the boxes. So this in my opinion is a good phone and can be definitely kept for coming 1-2 years looking at the track record of Apple. You might need a battery replacement but that’s fine.
Butt! But if you want to take is extreme is scenarios like gaming, or camera or battery king kind of case; then it may disappoint you.
No need to get it now no matter how much of an Apple fan you are. But if you have it, you can probably keep rocking it for the time to come.
So that’s pretty much it for this classic revisit. Thanks a lot for reading.
You are awesome
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