[Smartphone review] | iPhone 7 and 7 plus | Price dropped

The controversial duo

Here we go, this is my review of the iPhone 7! Let's see how does it plan on standing out from the rest, this time.

Design: The iPhone 7 and 7 plus have mostly similar design language as their predecessors. Well, at least from the front. The rear end of the phone is where you'll find the slightly cleaner layout of the antenna bands, and a larger camera sensor. There are two new colors: matte black and the super glossy jet black. I personally like the matte black. It's cleanest and stealthiest, but also the slipperiest among the other variants.

Buttons are in their same places. The power button is on the right with the volume buttons to the left and theres also the mute slider. On the bottom, there are now 2 speaker grills. One is a speaker and other is just a symmetrically cut microphone. Headphone jack is out, as we knew. You'll need to use the bundled lightning earphones or their weird looking, rather unreasonably expensive 'airpods'.

R.I.P Headphone jack

The home button is a pressure sensitive glass button. It doesn't press down anymore but instead gives you a haptic feedback. It doesn't feel quite same as an actual clicky button, but you'll quickly get used to it. There are now stereo speakers, as I mentioned in my first impressions. The earpiece and bottom speaker, both give out a pretty loud, punchy sound. There have been reports of hissing noises from these speakers. It's not very noticeable and so, may not matter as much to many people, so lets leave it out for now.

Display: The new iPhones still have a 1080p IPS LCD panel with same sizes as before. 4.7' and 5.5' on 7 and the plus respectively. But the screen is noticeably brighter and a bit warmer than the previous 6s. It can produce a wider spectrum of colors than the previous iPhones, so yeah. It really is kind of a big deal, as Apple shows it off.

Outdoor visibility was never a major concern before and it still isn't. In fact it has improved. I'm actually very impressed with the deep blacks and excellent viewing angles of the iPhone 7, as expected. Though the iPhone 7 has lower resolution, it makes up for that lack of clarity with it's great colors. Both displays have maximum brightness of about 705 nits. It's nowhere near to note 7's excellent 1000 nits, but definitely more than enough for comfortable outdoor legibility.

Water resistance appreciated

Performance: Apple's new devices run on an Apple A10 quad core fusion chip. The 7 has 2 gigs and 7 plus has 3 GB of DDR4 RAM. The newer processor are hands down, the most effecient ones on the market, overtaking even the brilliant Snapdragon 820. Benchmarks show an impressive 3029 as single score score, which is way more than Qualcomm's peak. The two extra low powered cored help save battery and give you more standby. Apple says you'll get 2 hrs more on the 7 than the 6s, and 1 hr more on the 7 plus.

That'll obviously depend on your usage, bit I can tell you that the 7 plus be able to please even some of the most hardcore power users, no problems. The phones run on iOS 10. It's a bit more fluid than previous versions, as the control center now has multiple pages. Even the notification panel has been cleaned up a bit. There is a collective cards page to the left of your home screen , just like Google now. That's not to say iPhones are lag free and stuff. Even the more powerful iPhone 7 showed few stutters during gaming!

I never liked iOS because of it's rigidity. I still don't see any major compelling points to change my views on it. iPhones are for those, who are willing to adjust to the phone rather than have the phone adjust to them (like it should be). But I really see good stuff in there too. It's ability to run buttery smooth with minimal hardware needs, still surprises me. Battery standby is also usually good with iOS. So yeah, thumbs up with that.

The endless complaints of people like me, have finally been heard and answered. The base model begins with 32 GB now(finally!). There's no 16 GB model but 64 GB is gone too! Now you get 32, 128 and 256 GB storage options. The glossy jet black has no 32 GB option. It only comes in 128 or 256 gigs.

Camera: The iPhones of 2016 have new camera sensors. They're made by Sony, with same 12 mp resolution but have a wider f/1.8 aperture. Now there's OIS in the smaller iPhone 7 too! That's something which I always felt the absence of, in the 6s. Let's get to the interesting stuff, the 7 plus dual cams. One is a standard lens or "telephoto lens" as they call it, the other is a wide angled lens. So you can optically get 2x zoom without a load of digital noise.

New camera policies

There's also 10x digital zoom. I must say Apple has done really well with their cameras this time. The 10x digital zoom is smooth and maintains good details overall. The Camera has a brighter quad led flash, for brighter and more accurate luminance. The front cameras have been upgraded to 7 mp. Both cameras are excellent. There isn't a lot to say in bright lights, but in lower lighting, the new iPhones are a lot better. Autofocus seems to be much faster than the 6s too. You'll love the crisp selfies and the rich colors of the new cameras.

Battery: iPhone 7 has a 1960 mAh battery and the 7 plus has a large 2900 mAh unit. Battery life as I mentioned, is excellent. You'll easily get through the day with an average of about 4½ to 5 hrs of screen on time. This was the same with last year's 6s plus. As long as it's great, I'm not gonna complain. Why fix something which isn't broken, right!?


Price: I'm not gonna say much here. The base model of the iPhone 7 will retail for about $650 or 47,000 INR and 7 plus base model will cost you about $770 or about 60,000 INR . As always, "premium phone should have a premium price tag" mentality here. I can't recommend it as an all round upgrade over the 6s. There are definitely improvements, but the price slash on the previous models make them *that much* more reasonable.

​I can still say last year's 6s plus is a good phone, but if you want the bleeding edge of a particular ecosystem, in case of Apple, it's definitely the iPhone 7 for you. If you're coming from an old iPhone, like the 5 or 5s, then yeah! you should probably upgrade. But if you're an Android user who wants to try out Apple, I strongly recommend you buy the 6s plus and save your dough! Or wait for the price to drop a bit


                                                            
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