iPhone 7 is here. It is not the most exciting new model ever. In fact, it looks almost identical to iPhone 6 and iPhone 6S. So similar form factor in 3 years from Apple. Under the hood, the update is somewhat more respectable. A10 processor is a fusion chip touted to perform twice faster compared to iPhone 6. The battery is promised to have the longer survival time in any iPhone. It is now water resistant and dust resistant. The screen is updated with 25% brighter wide color gamut. The back camera is 12 MP ƒ/1.8 aperture with optical image stabilisation and Quad-LED True Tone flash. The front camera is 7 MP, the highest resolution front camera in Apple device. It has 3D touch just like iPhone 6S. The home button is changed from physical button into something that uses taptic engine. Finally, don’t forget about the infamous removal of 3.5mm headphones jack.
Despite the low excitement, I pre-ordered iPhone 7 on first day of pre-order, and today I received my new phone, on the first day of availability. There’s a simple reason for that. Smartphone technology is rather stable now, so I kinda adjust my expectations with every announcement of new devices. Hoping a groundbreaking new innovation every single year is no longer something reasonable with respect to how fast technology is evolving. Therefore, when my plan contract ends and my phone is due for an upgrade, I simply choose the latest generation on the mobile OS of my choice. I am not saying that Android is worse in any way here. Yet it was still a fact that my multiple times of flirting with it always end up with disappointment and I simply won’t spend thousands of dollars on another experiments. All those fantastic on-paper specs and massive battery capacity mean very little when I am not comfortable with how the OS works. It’s certainly good for some types of users, not for me.
So here I am with my new iPhone 7 in the most boring choice of color: white front and silver back. Why again? Because my work desk is white-themed. I spent some investment on making (most of) my mobile accessories white. Even Apple’s own cables and EarPods are white. So white front seems like an obvious choice for me. Silver back is just the best option available because I don’t really fancy gold or rose gold.
First impression, iPhone 7 looks almost identical with my iPhone 6. Of course, the antenna at the back is placed on different location now so it’s one of the notable physical differences. The others are slightly bigger camera unit and the absence of 3.5mm headphones jack. I quickly noticed how the new home button might take some time to get used to. After all, it’s no longer a real button in physical sense. It’s now something powered by taptic engine, while it does work well so far, it gives different sensation. I am one of those guys who fear more about the idea of removing home button from my smartphone, far more than the disappearance of 3.5mm jack. For me, pressing something on the side of the device to start using it is so counter-intuitive. I have owned Nexus 5 for a while and I am still annoyed by it. If this change of home button is a hint of what Apple plans for the future, it makes me slightly less afraid of the day they will make an iPhone with edge to edge display because I know I could still turn it on by pressing something on the front screen.
In the box, I get the usual 5W charger, standard lighting cable, wired EarPods with lightning connector and a free adapter from lightning to 3.5mm for all our wired third party headphones. This adapter is a lot smaller than what I expected. With that size, I wouldn’t mind to just leave it connected to my Bose SoundTrue Ultra as my everyday wired headphones. There is absolutely no issue with the removal of 3.5mm jack so far. The phone does come with a bundled wired EarPods, plus all my current collection of wired headphones still work fine.
With stereo speakers, casual listening using the phone speakers (no headphones) sounds noticeably better. I am not entirely sure whether that comes from the stereo effect, or just because now it has two speakers instead of one.
Camera is another strong point of this new model. I can tell that the back camera captures the photos of my son (who is actively moving) a lot better than what my iPhone 6 can do. I don’t do selfie a lot, but 7 MP front camera makes selfie somewhat not so awful anymore because the result file has decent resolution now (it was only 1.2 MP in my iPhone 6). I am not saying that megapixel count is everything (because it’s not). Generally, above 8 MP, other specs of the camera matters more than the pixel count. But when comparing 1.2 MP camera with 7 MP, just the resolution already bring the whole lot of difference.
Going from iPhone 6, 3D touch is another new feature for me. While it is somewhat cool to have alternate function from firm touch, so far I don’t find it very useful because not many third party apps are using it, and when they do use it, usually it’s for something not so important so that people using iPhones without 3D touch won’t miss out. I guess we’ll have to wait for a while until most iPhones out there are models with 3D touch before it could get actually useful.
Thanks to A10 chip, iPhone 7 delivers solid performance. It is not the most obvious thing to notice in casual usage because iPhone 6 was already fast, but when I am using apps with somewhat heavier processing, the snappier feeling is noticeable.
Battery life looks good so far, but it will need few more days to test it properly. It’s probably worth to note that Touch ID sensor in the home “button” works real fast now, almost instantly. I have another story on my process of moving my personal data from iPhone 6 to iPhone 7, but that would be something for a different post. Also, I am not discussing things that are part of iOS 10 (hence not iPhone 7 specific) here, including that crappy Music app and stupid UX design on the new Control Centre, because I had written iOS 10 article on that.
After migrating all my personal data into the new phone, I started real usage of iPhone 7 just few hours ago. Still too early to discover specific issues, but at least I can report one thing: after connecting iPhone 7 to my iTunes to sync something, Bluetooth connection stopped working. I have repeated this process three times so far and it always happened. Lucky that the solution is very easy. Simply turning the Bluetooth off then on again from Control Centre fixed the issue. Not a super big deal, but definitely annoying. This should be something they can fix with a software update though.
Overall, I like my new phone. There’s nothing particularly exciting about it, but it does work as expected and I know I can continue relying on it for the next 12 or 24 months, depending on how interesting (or dull) next year’s iPhone is going to be.
Hmm..
no say about the new OS ?
seems the notification system is out of unity from the OS…
*not even trying to go to the music app…
But I had written about iOS 10 in a separate post. That crappy Music app is iOS problem.