The iPhone 7 is here. It’s at once very familiar yet radically different – a divisive phone that boldly challenges the conventions and status quo of technology – yet shies away from its true potential to pave way for next year’s 10th anniversary design. The iPhone 7 will be remembered as disruptive, not in the same way that its predecessors attempted with 3D Touch and how we interact with phones, but in the removal of the headphone jack that immediately affects your daily use and sets a new market in locomotion. iOS 10 – not exclusive to the iPhone 7, but launched along – also sets a new precedent for interactivity. Not to mention the dual cameras on the Plus model, and enhancements on the smaller phone. There’s a lot to talk about, so let’s get started with the iPhone 7 review.
An all too familiar shell
Apple didn’t go out of their way this time in redesigning the iPhone. My guess is that the effort is going to the 10th anniversary iPhone next year; however, the iPhone 7 represents the ultimate refinement on the iPhone 6 model that we have grown accustomed to. In 2016, it’s highly unoriginal, especially given the competition’s wonderful advancements in phone designs. The iPhone 7 certainly looks tried-and-tested, but the refinements are indeed welcome.
For starters, the horrible antenna bands now wrap around the phone edges, giving you a beautiful piece of metal to look at from the back. The camera module on the smaller phone is bigger, has a lovely shine to it, and elegantly protrudes from the phone. The removal of the headphone jack allows for more symmetry, but the phone has not been made thinner as a result.
The biggest visual change is the the introduction of the black colour in matte and jet black (I keep calling it piano black, for some reason); the space grey has been scrapped. I haven’t had the chance to use the jet black version, but I have seen it at the store and it looks lovely. The matte black, however, is the winner here; it’s more resilient to abuse, and doesn’t really require a case so you can appreciate its beauty. It’s a shame that the beautiful jet black is sensitive to scratches, in so far that Apple goes out of its way to recommend purchasing a case for it should this be of concern.
The biggest impact comes from the little changes
Calling them “little” changes is undermining the efforts put into them, but the intention here is that these changes – individually – are not must-haves, but together work really well in the betterment of the user experience, which Apple is highly proud of.
Let’s start with the home button: It’s gone. Not the way of the headphone jack (more on this later), but it’s no longer a physical button; it’s completely solid and part of the screen elements. There’s a new taptic engine that mimics the feel of the physical home button, and in my experience, it works really well. You can change how “strong” the vibration is (I find the medium setting to be best), but it’s likely you’ll find it weird at first until you adapt to it. Gone is the trademark swipe to unlock, too, although that’s an iOS 10 feature. The best thing you can do is go to Settings > Accessibility > Home Button, and toggle “Rest Finger to Open”, which immediately takes you to the home screen as soon as you touch (and attempt to press) the home button.
The removal of the home button ushers new possibilities for future iPhones. Now that it’s touch, Apple could potentially bake extra functions into the button, such as using it as a dial wheel for playlists, changing volume, or what have you. Apple could also potentially expand the screen, eating away from the bezels.
The iPhone 7 and 7 Plus hardware unlocks features on iOS 10 that are not possible on previous models
The taptic engine that’s giving you feedback whenever you “click” the home button is also used by iOS 10 – and only on the iPhone 7 and its bigger brother – to enhance your experience while interfacing with the system. Various actions now give you haptic feedback, such as notification, change the time while setting the alarm, choosing items in lists on Safari, and other things. Third party developers have access to this new taptic engine, so they can modify their apps – or build new ones – to take advantage of it. These are minor details, but they’re constantly there and you grow to appreciate them; the phone is simply more fun to use.
Oh, and the phone is finally water resistant.
Brighter, more colorful screen
The screen on the iPhone 7 is 25% brighter than the previous model, but that’s not really the deal breaker here. What’s different this time is the “wide colour gamut” that Apple talks about, giving you more colour depth, which is the DCI-P3. In layman’s terms, the iPhone screen can output the colour quality and range you see in cinemas and high-end 4K television sets. This has an impact on how you view the photos you take or have on your phone; the wider range is particularly visible in the greens.
The screen doesn’t only output in DCI-P3, though; it also outputs in standard sRGB that’s found in most televisions and monitors these days. This allows the iPhone 7 to switch the output to the matching colour gamut of the display without compromise.
The wider colour gamut brings cinema-quality colours to the iPhone screen
What is significant though is that with Apple supporting this wider colour gamut the iPhone (and not just the Macs), it’s opening this market for the masses. Content nowadays is mostly in sRGB, with very few supporting wider gamuts, since those displays are expensive. With Apple (and Samsung and LG), this could usher an era of cinema-quality content to everyone. sRGB is a long way from being phased out, but this is a big step.
Finally, stereo speakers
It took quite a while – a really long while – but mono speakers are no more on the iPhone 7. Not that sounds was “bad” by any means, but consuming video and audio content as well as gaming on the iPhones was always best with headphones. With the iPhone 7, you can enjoy your content in stereo.
The iPhone has become really good to consume content on using the speakers, and they are quite loud, too. The whole phone seems to vibrate as well – particularly on the higher volumes – and you feel the sound is coming from the phone’s belly, which I find quite nice. But this isn’t the biggest change in sound…
Yup, Apple killed the audio jack
Woah. Ok, it was speculated for a while, but now that it’s a reality, I have mixed feelings. The tech geek in me is all in for industry standard disruptions. Ignoring Apple’s marketing around this for a bit, I genuinely never minded the headphone jack; it’s just “there”, taken for granted on practically any piece of electronics with audio output. It’s a standard for a reason. Apple throwing it out of the window and replacing it with the Lightning connector is massively disruptive, but Apple has done such crazy things before. Because they’re Apple. That isn’t a bad thing, but there is a lot of transition to be had, particularly because it’s forced en-masse and there’s little way around it.
The removal of the headphone jack means you’ll need to carry the dongle with you everywhere or have two sets of headphones for your various devices
By little, I am referring to the dongle that Apple has graciously bundled with the iPhone, so you don’t need to throw all your headsets away. That said, it just looks silly, and you have to make a mental note to carry it with you everywhere you go, and you’ll likely lose it.
The inconvenience isn’t in having to carry the dongle, though. It’s all the switching back and forth that you need to do, and the iPhone 7 is the only Apple product at the moment with the audio through Lightning. That means you cannot use the new EarPods on your MacBook, and the dongle is 3.5mm to lightning, not the opposite. So you’ll have to carry around two pairs of EarPods, or park the Lightning EarPods on the side and just carry with you the 3.5mm ones with the dongle in case you’re carrying multiple devices. It’s an inconvenience until the market opens up and matures, and until Apple implements the same across all devices. Whether the competition will follow – and how – is another story; the reprecussions of Apple’s decision are still to be seen.
The biggest camera improvement isn’t here yet
Perhaps the biggest hype around the iPhone 7 is the dual-camera system found in the Plus. That is not to say that the smaller iPhone has not improved; in fact, the regular iPhone 7’s camera is a vast improvement over the previous models.
The bokeh (blurred background) feature for the iPhone 7 Plus is not present at launch
At face value, you can’t really tell the difference. The iPhone 6s and 6s Plus had very good cameras, but the competition has been ahead, particularly in low-light and macro. Unfortunately, with the iPhone 7 taking a macro photo without additional third-party lenses remains futile. That said, the f/1.8 (a marked improvement over the f/2.2 lens on the 6s) makes a difference in low-light conditions, and the wide-colour capture gives photos a punch.
The biggest improvement over the 6s on the regular-sized iPhone 7 is that optical stabilisation is no longer exclusive to the Plus mode, so you get beautiful images and smooth videos. This, alone, is good incentive to upgrade for many; stabilised videos are just another level of day-to-day brilliance. With the wider f/1.8 aperture, you get 2/3 stops of light which you will particularly notice when you’re shooting video at 60fps. Speaking of which, there’s still no quick way to change the video settings from within the camera app. This is a sore point for me and could easily be remedied with a tiny software patch.
Optical stabilisation is now present on the smaller iPhone, which is a huge improvement
The Plus model is a different beast. The two lenses function together: one lens is the same one found on the regular-sized iPhone, and the other is a telephoto lens that allows you to optically zoom without having to lose quality. In our testing, it worked great, not that the smaller iPhone 7 is a slouch when you digitally zoom in to 2x.
The real advantage of having the dual lens system, though, is currently unavailable, and it’s surprising that Apple has not made this feature ready in time of the launch, given at how it truly distinguishes itself from the smaller iPhone. That feature is the “depth of field” or commonly known as the “bokeh” – in layman’s terms, the blurred background in portraits. The two lenses work together to figure out the depth of the image and the position of the subject relative to the background, and blurs the background accordingly. I tried this on Huawei’s P9 with the Leica-powered lenses, and it worked good in many situations but not others. I am keen on trying this out when Apple releases the update, but for now the differentiator between the two iPhone 7 models with respect to their cameras lies in the zooming capabilities. Third party developers need to also tap into this dual lens system. Now that Apple has integrated dual lenses into the iPhone, it will be here to stay for a while, so where Apple takes the functionality from there is anyone’s guess.
The front camera has been upgraded as well to 7MP, and the image is sharper, but more importantly it takes better-lit photos than the previous models.
With iOS 10, though, you can shoot in DNG format and not just regular JPEGs. You’ll need third party apps for this, though, as the iPhone’s default camera app won’t let you shoot in DNG format, possibly because Apple does not want to complicate the camera app for those who are not savvy in the world of photography file formats. The freedom in editing that DNG format gives you, though, is outstanding. Again, this is an iOS 10 feature, but the iPhone 7 cameras add even more detail to the DNG files, so you can work more with them. Below is the same scene taken using the default camera app in JPEG, and another in DNG format, and edited with the same settings. The results speak for themselves.
Blueprints to the future
Make no mistake, the iPhone 7 is incredible. That said, its features, some of which are significant, feel out of place at the moment because the market is not ready for it. The camera system combined with iOS 10 would definitely appeal to those who take iPhone photography seriously, or use their iPhone as their primary camera for their trips. The iPhone 7 will also appeal to those who want to enjoy iOS to its fullest, since the phone’s hardware enables features not experienced on the older phones. The increased capacity – double the storage for the same price as the previous phone – is another incentive.
All those things said, though, the iPhone 7 feels like an option (but good) upgrade, particularly because the iPhone 6s and the 6s Plus are incredible and do not feel outdated. The iPhone 7 is a refined user experience that grows on you; the iPhone feels “alive”, as it were. All the features and prowess built into the phone do not yet have a solid market to take advantage of it. For all practical purposes, using the iPhone 7 feels like using the iPhone 6s, with added dongle complexity. What the iPhone 7 does is that it sets the stage for what many believe would be the ultimate iPhone for next year’s 10th anniversary. By the time the ecosystem around the display, Lightning port, and dual camera system evolves, the iPhone 8 – or 7s or whatever Apple ends up calling it – will be ready for prime-time.