This is the perfect time to do an iPhone 11 Pro Review as I have been using the iPhone 11 Pro for about 6-7 months now, maybe a little longer than that, doesn’t sound like that long, but for this weird world I live in where I’m switching between smartphones all the time, testing all these different ones, that’s kind of a long time actually, for me to be using one phone, so I figured, you know what, let’s do a longer term review. This is the iPhone 11 Pro Revisited plus a look forward at iPhone 12.
iPhone 11 Pro Review – Durability
OK, so one of the things you can get a pretty good idea of when the phone first comes out is build quality. Not just how it feels in the hand, but like really how well it’s actually built. And iPhones have a pretty good track record, at least as of late, you know, of lasting a long time. But they’re also glass. And glass is glass. And I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again until it’s no longer true. I don’t use a case on my phone, never really have. So this phone just travels around just like this. So this iphone’s been in pockets, in gym bags, with cleats, in backpacks, you know, in car cup holders. It gets tossed around a lot and put in a lot of different places. Now the stainless steel on the sides has held up great, looks almost exactly like it did the day I got the phone, which you might expect. And the matte finish on the back has done a good job of hiding some of those micro scratches a lot better than a glossier phone would. But the front glass? Not so much. Some phones get this worse than others, and from my experience, iPhones tend to get these micro scratches more easily. But you can see on my iPhone a lot of visible scratches all over the display. Not so bad that it would, you know, actually interrupt the viewing experience like a crack, but they add up as phone gets used more and more. Now I’m going to say a lot of these are because I tend to put my phone face down on my desk and on counters and other places around me and we know there’s plenty of dust and random grit that can just happen to get under there and cut the glass of the phone. But it just seems like it’s worse on the iPhone than other phones I’ve used. So I’m gonna try to get out of the laying the phone down face down habit. Should you unfortunately have cracked your iPhone 11 Pro Screen, check out our iPhone 11 Pro screen replacement prices
iPhone 11 Pro Software & Performance
Internal specs have held up pretty much perfectly, and this is what I’m talking about in the initial review when I say it’s got tonnes of performance headroom. Because out-of-the-box of course, every phone feels great. And the iPhone is one of the Asus feeling phones 126 months later. But that’s a sort of a trajectory for the two years, three years, four years later when it’s still one of the fastest feeling 234 year old phones. That’s thanks to the A13 Bionic and four gigs of RAM, which don’t look like huge specs on paper, but this phone is on pace to be doing just fine in four years. OK, pop quiz. What’s rule number one of buying a new piece of tech? Never buy a piece of tech like this based on the promise of future software updates to come. Never do that. Just buy it for what it is today, and if it happens, they get better over the years, Then that’s a bonus that I think especially applies to iPhones, because they never really add any crazy features like the way, you know Android used to be when they would just change everything with a new software update, but it’s mostly been minor tweaks and bug fixes. That’s definitely more stable now. iOS 13, when it first launched, had a good amount of bugs and they’ve been ironing those out. I had this weird bug with Gmail attachments, but that’s now fixed. Other than that, not too wild in a way. It’s kind of boring, actually, if you’re hoping for something transformative and new in the software, but that’s not really what I get my hopes up for on an iPhone now. The announcements on stage and the way they talk so smoothly about how everything’s so magical, they might fool you a little bit. Like, remember, remember the U1 chip in this phone? Remember that. But you could. You could point your iPhone at another AirDrop device and it would just show up on the top of the list. That hasn’t really ever materialised. Ohh. Another big one was a Deep Fusion. Remember Deep Fusion? There’s a whole thing on stage about how a software update coming later to this new iPhone would bring Deep Fusion for improved detail and less noise and better sharpness in medium lighting.
How about the 11 Pro Cameras?
How about the 11 Pro Cameras?Now this wasn’t low light, that would be night mode, and night mode is pretty great on this phone, but it’s not that. And it wasn’t highlight either. It wasn’t normal daytime photos, HDR and all of that takes care of it Great. But this was for medium light. Well, the iPhone definitely got this software update and it definitely has Deep Fusion now and I definitely can’t tell the difference. And it doesn’t even really tell you which photos were taken with Deep Fusion on and which ones are just regular photos. So yeah, I guess the point here is to say at the end of the day, it’s just good old familiar iOS running on the iPhone, just like we all expected. There are some new features here and there, but again, not too many surprises here. And yes, the cameras are still really good. I’ve been taking great photos all the time in the month since this phone came out. And also also pretty much every video you’ve seen on my socials, You know, Twitter or Instagram. And every time I go live on Instagram they are, with almost no exceptions, all from the iPhone iOS 13.2. They finally listened and put video resolution and frame rate controls in the camera. They’re a little hard to press where you can go from 30 to 60 to 24 and 4K to HD finally. Thats all I have on the iPhone 11 Pro Review for the cameras
Battery, 3D Touch, Face ID – iPhone 11 Pro Review
OK, a couple of the smaller things. Battery life has stayed really good. Before I did the iPhone 11 Pro Review, I had the 11 Pro Max for almost my entire use, but I guess when I reviewed the iPhone SC it kind of got me missing smaller iPhones for a while. So for the first time in a long time, I’m not using the absolute biggest available version of a phone. I’m using the smaller iPhone 11 Pro now and I was wrong about 3D Touch. I miss 3D Touch. Three Touch is one of those things that you know, it was the pressure sensitivity of underneath the screen. Apple no longer makes any devices that support 3D Touch anymore. They’ve gone back to just Haptic Touch, which is just basically a long press and it’s nowhere near as good. 3D Touch, while it wasn’t necessarily taken advantage of by every single developer, it was actually a really well done and uniquely iPhone feature. It set them apart, where Haptic Touch is basically just that long press, and it’s much slower than the pressure sensitivity was. So I’m not sure I wouldn’t trade some extra thickness to get 3D touchback, and I don’t think I’m alone there And then Face ID. We’re all super used to what Face ID is by now, but it was supposed to get improvements and be better with this new iPhone. It’s still really good, but I think it would feel magical. It would feel amazing if they could do just a couple little things, namely shrinking the notch and making it work from more angles, like from this. This sideways angle doesn’t work when it’s this far off, and when it’s sideways and upside down and other angles, it’s not quite as good. So actually it doesn’t work at all when it’s upside down. So Face ID could be more magical. Tim, if you’re listening, but actually, Tim, I hope you’re not listening because let’s use that as a way to segue into looking forward a bit at the iPhone 12. When you think about it, this phone can look a little bit dated, can feel a bit dated. It’s got those rounded corners, it’s got the biggest notch in any phone. It’s still got the proprietary port at the bottom, still got a 60 Hertz screen. It is one of the fastest feeling phones with a 60 Hertz screen thanks to the 120 Hertz touch refresh rate, but it is still 60 Hertz and of course no 5G.
Consider Before You Buy
Now iPhone 12 Rumours floating around right now point to the boxier shape similar to the iPad Pro super looking forward to that, 5G should be added as well and adding that Lidar scanner from the iPad Pro, a classic case of the customer paying for a feature they may not ever use just because it comes built into the phone. But now there’s a whole new lineup of iPhones planned at various price points which are really interesting to me, all of which should have 5G. So I’m curious, which one of these do you think you would get? Look today iPhone 11 Pro as a flagship, it’s kind of in this weird place because Apple never updates their prices. This phone launched £1000 upgraded for 1100 and it still costs £1100. And till the day the next phone comes out, in September or October, it will still cost 1100 bucks. This phone was a pretty good buy when it came out, but if you can wait, if you’ve waited this long and you haven’t bought a new iPhone yet, if you can keep waiting to the iPhone 12, I think that’s the move. I think that’s the one to wait for. That’s the one I’m excited about. That’s the one I can’t wait to upgrade to with that new shape. But until then, this has been a pretty damn good phone for the months it’s been out. I hope you enjoyed this iPhone 11 Pro Review. Should you need an iPhone 11 Pro battery replacement, just click the link and you can fund us in Brislington, so pop in for a chat
