Best things about the new iPhones

The much awaited Apple Event has ended and the 3 new iPhones are now official:

• iPhone 8
• iPhone 8 Plus
• iPhone X (pronounced iPhone Ten)

iPhone 8 and 8 Plus

The old-school looking iPhone 8 and 8 Plus have the same design and look as the 7 and 7 Plus. They are 4.7 and 5.5 inches respectively and still have touch ID while also keep the bezels. However, they now feature glass back panels allowing for wireless charging using the Qi wireless charging standard.

Apple has said this is the most durable glass ever used on a smartphone (same applies for the iPhone X).

iPhone X:

The new bezel-less iPhone X is called TEN because it marks 10 years since the first iPhone. It is a radical design marking Apple’s entry into all display designs that Samsung, LG, Xiaomi and other companies have already been doing. The iPhone X has an edge-to-edge 5.8 inch OLED display (first OLED on iPhone) with a 2046×1125 resolution, with 455 PPI. The rumuored under the display fingerprint didn’t make it just yet. So instead of touch ID, the X has something Apple are calling face ID. And it packs a lot of tech:

The rear camera features a 12-megapixel sensor, with dual-lenses at f1.8 and f2.4 apertures (which is brighter than the 7 Plus telephoto). It comes with dual-image OIS quad-LED TrueTone flash.

Best new things?

So what are the overall best new things from the announcement? It is somehow easy to forget the inner, not always seen announcements or updates. The following stood out for me:

• The A11 Bionic Chip: All the new 3 iPhones come with this new 6 core processor. Two are high performance cores while four are efficiency cores. And this looks to be the most powerful chip on any smartphone. Also all the 3 come with the first ever Apple-designed GPU which has 3 cores.

• Artificial Intelligence: So yeah the chip is powerful. What can it do? It can learn your face through time whether you grow your beard, wear a cap, have glasses on, etc. It also helps with Augmented Reality, Animoji, and with next level photography.
• Portrait Lighting: This is a new powerful way of taking portraits that lets users take professional looking photos using a real-time depth and light analysis of the subject. It is very cool tech.

• TrueTone Display: When you are looking at your phone’s display, there are many things involved including light reflection which alter colour. TrueTone kicks out the reflection and automatically adapts the display to your current lighting conditions. first on the iPad Pro, now comes to the iPhones.
• 4K Video at 60 fps: This is very big news. Not many cameras (including cinema quality cameras) can do this. And now this is on a smartphone! Also, all the new phones can shoot 1080p video at 240 fps!
• Augmented Reality: iOS 11 comes with AR features. But the cameras have in-built factory calibration to support AR so they can track motion more accurately using the gyroscope and accelerometer. This is so cool you can be in a stadium and the phone camera will give you info and stats of the players!

• Animoji: (I know it sounds so much like ANIMAGI from Harry Potter). This is as creepy as it is cool. You can animate all your emoji! Like the camera picks your expressions and makes any emoji you want replicate those expressions! Sick!

• AirPower: This one comes in 2018 and will most definitely be pretty expensive. It is a charging mat. Yes a mat. But… It charges all your devices at once. Get home and place the new watch, the new iPhone and airpods one the mat and they’ll all be charging with stats on their percentages on your phone.

So there you go! What were your best announcements? What were your worst? We all know this is what most people will be talking about for the coming days:

Overrated? Worth it? Share your thoughts.