iPhone 7 Review
The most eagerly awaited iPhone since the last one, the Apple’s iPhone 7 has arrived. Much has been said about its design, the absent headphone socket, and the fact that it’s now waterproof, but is it actually any good?Following on from the iPhone 6 was a tall order, which the iPhone 6S struggled to live up to, with fewer sales and less consumer enthusiasm. Two years on, the question is whether those iPhone 6 buyers will bite and upgrade to the most expensive iPhone yet, its price in the UK inflated thanks to the Brexit referendum result.
Design:-
here’s really no getting around it: the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus look more or less exactly like the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus from 2014. They are now water resistant, which is nice, although they’re not fully waterproof — keep them submerged in a meter of water for more than 30 minutes and things might not go your way. Samsung’s Galaxy S7 and Note 7 are technically even more water resistant, but I think it’s basically a push — you can get these phones casually wet now without catastrophe, and that’s a big win. If you want to go snorkeling with your iPhone, you should probably get a case anyhow.
Specifications
- Screen: 4.7in 1334x750 (326ppi)
- Processor: Apple A10 Fusion
- RAM: 2GB of RAM
- Storage: 32/128/256GB
- Operating system: iOS 10
- Camera: 12MP rear camera, 7MP front-facing camera
- Connectivity: LTE, Wi-Fiac, NFC, IR, Bluetooth 4.2, Lightning and GPS
- Dimensions: 138.3 x 67.1 x 7.1mm
- Weight: 138g
Performance:
The iPhone 7 has the new A10 Fusion chip, another product from Apple’s industry-leading chip design team. It’s a new design with four cores: two high performance cores, and two low-power cores that use less battery power during everyday tasks.
It’s lightning-fast, of course, with early benchmarks indicating that the A10 Fusion is faster than even the A9X in the iPad Pro. But In my super boring day-to-day Twitter / Facebook / Gmail / Slack / Safari usage, the iPhone 7 Plus wasn’t really all that much faster than the A9 chip in the iPhone 6S Plus — likely because I wasn’t pushing the processor enough to use the high-performance cores. It’s impressive that Apple was able to create a more efficient processor that delivers the same perceived performance as the previous generation while using less power, but that also means that in everyday use I didn’t see anything like the performance leaps that were so noticeable in previous iPhone updates.
Observations:
- The matt black colour looks good but appears a bit like plastic until you touch it
- The matt metal body is pretty slippery to hold, but doesn’t slide off tables
- The home button needs skin contact to work, rendering sport armbands and some touchscreen gloves useless
- You can’t unlock the phone without first activating the Home button
- Bluetooth performance is better, holding a more stable connection with less interference with relatively weak devices such as wireless earbuds than the iPhone 6S and some competitors
- With the antenna lines the most hidden and the screen black when off, the matt black colour is the best-looking
- The jet black glossy finish scratches relatively easy, so to keep it looking like new you’ll need a case
- The new antenna bands trap fluff in them, which is very difficult to remove.
Price:
The iPhone 7 costs £599 for 32GB, £699 for 128GB or £799 for 256GB in rose gold, gold, silver, black or jet black.
For comparison, the HTC 10 costs £570, the 32GB Samsung Galaxy S7 costs £500, the LG G5 costs £500, the 32GB Huawei P9 costs £449, the 16GB iPhone SE costs £359 and last year’s iPhone 6S cost £539 now £499 for 32GB of storage.
