Apple made a significant design change from its skateboard design (of the iPhone 6 to 8) to the slick new iPhone X, and now the company has come out with new iterations of the same design, with the iPhone XS and XS Max. To say the iPhone XS is almost exactly like its predecessor wouldn’t be correct. Apple has made quite a few changes, especially under the hood.
The new iPhone XS has a redesigned speaker, mic and antenna layout, and a steel band around the side that houses the mute switch and separated volume buttons on the left side, and a noticeably long Power/Lock button on the right. The back has the Apple logo and the dual camera set-up with quad LED flash and mic for noise reduction. The camera set-up at the back still protrudes from the body like earlier models.
There’s glass on the front and the back for better feel. The device is also IP68 rated, which means it is dust resistant and water-resistant for up to 2 metres of water for 30 minutes. Don’t dunk it deep into a pool of water, but you should be fine with some spills and rain.
Coming to the front, the device has a 5.8-inch notched OLED display that extends almost to the edges. That notch holds a lot of important bits of the phone — the 7 MP iSight front camera and infrared camera, Dot matrix projector, flood illuminator, and speaker grille with one part of stereo speakers. The phone weighs a little under 180 grams and feels polished and premium to hold.
Display and camera
That 5.8-inch Super Retina OLED display has a resolution of 2436x1125. The screen is bright, vivid, and usable under direct sunlight. Images and high-quality videos look crisp, and colour reproduction is mostly accurate with a slight tilt towards cooler colours.
The phone sports a 12 MP telephoto camera (f/2.4) and a 12 MP wide-angle camera (f/1.8) at the back, with a quad LED flash. Both these cameras are equipped for better low-light photos and videos. This is the biggest change the new iPhones bring over the previous model — the 12 MP cameras have over 30% larger pixel size, which basically means more light is captured when used, relative to the previous model. As a result, the iPhone XS (which uses the same camera set-up as the XS Max) delivers better low-light shots than its predecessor. Subjects look far nicer and there’s also less noise as well. Even portrait mode shots, where the camera and its software defocus the background, seem to have improved around the edges. Other phone manufacturers have had this for a while, but the iPhone can now also adjust blur level in portrait shots later.
HDR isn’t new, but Smart HDR combines many shots, including underexposed ones, to get the image right. The camera is so fast that you don’t really notice all this processing. You do kind of feel that at times the photos are aggressively post-processed for noise reduction, but it is certainly not a deal breaker for most people. In general, the phone provides a high dynamic range and takes detailed and balanced shots on par with the competition in most conditions. The phones can shoot 4K videos at 60 frames per second, and now with stereo audio recording; and the result is excellent, especially with OIS in place, making this device a great video recorder on-the-go. The stereo speakers at the bottom and at the ear-speaker grille are crisp and quite loud, providing good enough output for your needs. Trying the phone separately on two network carriers, call and network reception were nothing to be worried about, though there have been some reports of poorer network performance than the previous model. Voice over calls is loud and clear, just what you’d expect.
Software shakedown
The new iPhones run iOS 12 out of the box. With iOS 12, Apple seems to have been focused less on adding features and more on under-the-hood optimisations, but there are still a couple of nice features here. One is Siri Shortcuts. This lets users launch a set of pre-determined tasks from a single tap. What makes it even better is, you can make your own command for Siri to trigger a specific Shortcut over voice. There are a lot of shortcuts available already and you can share it among other iOS users, too.
Back to the OS, swiping down on the homescreen from the right side brings Control Centre, while the left side gives you all your notifications. The notch is certainly noticeable to new users, even more so inside Settings or third-party apps like Instagram, which have a white layout. The only stuttering in the OS I saw was at the lockscreen when the orientation got locked to landscape and wouldn’t change without unlocking, but otherwise, there were no major glitches to report.
Performance profile
The new iPhone XS comes with Apple’s latest A12 Bionic chipset that has a six-core CPU, and a 50% faster GPU and a new neural engine that takes care of on-device machine learning, coupled with 4 GB of RAM. The performance of the device is something you would have no real complaints about. The phone feels smooth to use, really responsive (thanks to the new 120Hz touch panel) and hardly ever stutters. It handles heavy or casual games with comfort and doesn’t break a sweat when switching between these. Face ID is also reportedly faster now, though the improvement there isn’t so vast, but it works fine and is arguably still the best face unlock solution on a smartphone today.
The battery unit barely lasted me a day and would often drop to 0 on heavy use before the day ended, so just on par with the competition, but there’s nothing too special here when it comes to battery life.
Family ties
The only differences between the iPhone XS and XS Max are the screen sizes and battery. So, if you’re thinking whether these new phones have anything over last year’s model, here’s all in which the new iPhone XS scores better than the iPhone X — 4 GB of RAM in place of 3 GB RAM, significantly improved cameras with better low-light photography and audio recording while shooting a video, slightly faster Face ID (only just), and a more advanced chipset that may be more meaningful in long-term usage. If you already have an iPhone X, apart from the photography, you may not find something really compelling to upgrade, but if you have an older model then there are a number of big reasons, including this design, that you may feel like upgrading, if you’re into the Apple ecosystem. The iPhone XS comes in Silver, Space Grey and a newer Gold colour option; and starts at ₹99,900 for the 64 GB variant and goes up to ₹1,34,900 for the new 512 GB variant.
There’s no denying that the pricing is steep, but this is clearly one of Apple’s latest and greatest phones, and if you are into their hardware, you might want to save up a bit and get one of these.
