First Impressions – iPhone 8 Review
The iPhone 8 Review, it looks pretty similar to the previous iPhone 7. What’s different is that you don’t have that designed by Apple in California sign here anymore. It’s a little more minimal, and the antenna bands up here are now gone, and they’re only on the sides. Of course, since it’s the smaller than the iPhone 8 Plus, there’s only just a single camera lens, no dual camera, and the other major difference is that there is a glass back instead of metal and that will get to later, but it basically allows wireless charging. The buttons are all in the same place as usual with all the iPhones. It’s power button here, SIM tray on the right, volume rockers on the side and as well as the mute switch. Just like the iPhone 7, there’s no headphone Jack anywhere, so that means you have to use the included 3.5 millimetre to Lightning converter, or you have to rely on Bluetooth headphones or wireless headphones that you have. As you can see, the front of this phone looks pretty similar to almost every other iPhone. You have the chunky bezels on the top and bottom. It would have been nice to see this bezelless trend that we were seeing with phones like the LG V30 or the Samsung S8, but I guess that’s why we have the iPhone X.
iPhone 8 Review – Screen
The display isn’t really much different from the iPhone 7 display. You still get a 1334 by 750 resolution. The only major difference is now this functionality called True Tone. It’s a technology from Apple that was first on the iPad Pro, and we can take a quick look over here. This is just a quick way to toggle it on or off. Right now it was off, but what it does is it adjusts the display to the environment you’re in. So if you’re in a harsh lighting situation where things are a little yellowish, the display will also accommodate and be a little more yellow to make it look a little more natural in the lighting that you’re in O. Let’s take a quick look. It might be better if we actually went directly to the settings and so you can see the display right now let’s turn it off and it just got a little cooler. We turn it on and it’s a little warmer and it kind of actually matches the environment that we’re in right now. It looks a little more natural and it’s just a little easier on the eyes.
iOS 11 on iPhone 8
The phone runs iOS 11, which recently was released on September 19th. And as you can see, not much is entirely different from previous the iOS 10. The Control Centre is definitely the biggest change. It looks different. It’s on one screen now, and you can actually customise what you have on this screen by going into the settings. So you can choose what kind of toggles you want here for quick access. The other major difference is this lock screen. It actually looks like the lock screen, right? It’s actually the Notification Centre. So let’s take another look. This is the lock screen, the control centre. But if you go home, when you pull it down, you’re actually taken back to the lock screen. This is now where you’ll get your notifications and you’ll have to swipe through to get your past notifications and more. But one other weird thing is now you can access the camera directly from this screen by swiping to the left. And the same is true you can swipe to the right and access the Today widget. And that’s again, basic functionality that used to be a part of the lock screen, but now it’s sort of baked into this notification centre. And there are other interesting features such as a new App Store. This App Store is now focused more on a magazine style layout where it’s telling you tips and tricks, featured stories of a developers as of the day. So that keeps you coming back. The layout is a little different now there’s a specific games tab. It just overall looks a lot nicer and this theme of big bold fonts is followed through everywhere in iOS 11.
Under The Hood – iPhone 8
Like the iPhone 8 Plus and the iPhone X, the iPhone 8 is powered by Apples, a 11 bionic processor. It’s super fast. We haven’t seen any issues with that in terms of performance. Apps swipe through quickly and open quickly, and again, it’s just an all around powerful processor. Especially in the benchmark results, they show it beating out Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 and Samsung’s processors as well. But we don’t really see a lot of this performance improvement in this device because iOS is already fluid. There’s just not really much going on here that requires so much power. But one thing that May is AR Kit. AR Kit is a new framework introduced in iOS 11, and it basically lets you use augmented reality with the camera in your iPhone. So now there are a lot of error kit apps. For example, Let’s take a look at IKEA Place. It’s a new app by IKEA that lets you basically place furniture in your room so that you can see what it looks like. What you first need to do is move the camera around and this is usually done for most AR kit apps. And now we can sort of browse through IKEA’s catalogue. Let’s pick this chair and it just pops up. It’s a huge chair, so I’m going to move it a little further away. Ohh, too far. Let’s try and grab it. All right, let’s try that again. Let’s grab this little basket here so you can that just gives you an approximate estimation of what that product might look like in your room. So it’s super handy. And there’s a lot of these furniture type ones, one from Wayfair for example, that lets you try out furniture in your room. There are more interesting ones such as AR measure kit, which basically lets you measure random things in front of you with your iPhone. So you don’t really need a ruler, which is pretty handy. There’s also tonnes of games that use they are, and you can, you know, see the true power of the 11 Bionic running.
iPhone 8 Review – Camera
The camera on the iPhone 8 isn’t as known for anything special like the 8 Plus which has the dual camera. But it doesn’t mean it’s a bad camera at all. It takes photos instantaneously as you can see it, and the output is generally really good. There’s always on HDR, which means your photos are automatically exposed into the best of its ability. But one of the more interesting features is that now in the camera you can actually shoot in 4K at 60FPS 4K at 30FPS and 24 FPS gives you that nice cinematic look. But of course, if you don’t need to shoot at such high resolutions, there’s 1080P for 60 and 30 frames per second. Of course, Slow MO is my favourite feature because I like taking slow motion videos, but up until now you could shoot 240 FPS before, but it was shot in 720P, which didn’t look that great, but now you can do it in 1080P and you know, videos just look much better in that kind of slow motion, which is super slower than 120 frames per second.
Wireless Charging iPhone 8
The other new feature on the iPhone 8 offers wireless charging, and that’s because of this glass back. It’s what lets it wirelessly charge. So all you have to do is really just plop your iPhone 8 down on a wireless charging pad and as you can see, it’s charging away. No need for a Lightning port that you need to fumble for in the middle of the night, but what you should know is Apple is using the Cheese standard, which is actually has been around for some time and Android phones have been using this standard for some time as well. So you now have a lot of options to choose from when you’re looking for wireless chargers. Mophie and Belkin have specifically worked with Apple to make a really efficient charger, but here’s a look at the Mofi one that we have here or you should also know, is that currently the iPhone 8 is available. It can take up to 5 watts of a charge. Technically, there’s going to be an update later on this year where the iPhone 8 will be allowed to take in 7.5 watts and the Mophie and Belkin are capable of delivering that 7.5 Watt charger or charge. So that means you’ll be able to charge your iPhone a little faster later in the fall when that update comes.
iPhone 8 Review – Battery
Although Apple does not publish its official battery capacities for its phones, we believe that the iPhone 8 has a battery life is comparable to the iPhone 7. We were surprised that there was no upgrade to battery capacity, considering the other improvements. On closer inspection, it seems the iPhone 8 battery actually has a smaller battery than the iPhone 7. Looks like an iPhone 8 battery replacement may be needed sooner rather than later. iPhone 8 battery is 1,821mAh, according to tear downs of the smartphone. That’s a fair amount smaller than the 1,960mAh power pack inside the iPhone 7, but that does not mean it will not perform comparably to the iPhone 7.
The good news is that the iPhone 8 does in deed perform much like the iPhone 7, but the iPhone 7 was not that dazzling in the first place. There were a several days when we had to top-up our iPhone 8 in order to get it to last the day. Under normal use, we say iPhone 8 battery reach its end of the day around 9pm. I hope this iPhone 8 Review was helpful
