Apple iPhone 8 Plus

The smartphone industry has been moving towards higher resolution displays over the last few years, but not Apple. The iPhone 8 Plus sticks to the 1,920 x 1,080 display iPhone users are accustomed to, complete with bezels and all. While Apple may not have moved to high resolution displays, but they were the first to move to a wide gamut colour for their panels. There’s still no HDR compliance on the iPhone 8 Plus, so if that’s a feature you have been wanting, then the iPhone X may be a better option for you. In terms of using the display, we were pleasantly surprised to find just how low the reflectance on the display is. Even while using the phone under the brightest mid-day sun, we faced no issues with the legibility of content. What was even more surprising is that despite having the brightness turned all the way up, neither the colour saturation nor the contrast are effected, which means, content looks great regardless of the brightness of the display.

The iPhone 8 Plus comes with twin 12 megapixel cameras on the back, one with a 26mm wide angle lens and the other with a 52mm telephoto lens. The aperture on the lenses is f/1.8 and f/2.6 respectively, which may not seem like the fastest in the market, but there’s a lot more going on here than just pure numbers. Do note that of the two lenses, only the wide angle lens has optical image stabilisation. Additionally, if you’re using the telephoto lens with what Apple’s algorithm considers not enough light, then the camera switches over to the wide angle lens, but with a telephoto perspective.

Good performance isn't just about having excellent hardware, but also about creating software that can efficiently leverage all that computing power. To this end, Apple presents iOS 11, the OS that the iPhone 8 Plus ships with by default. Right off the bat, iOS 11 feels noticeably faster and responsive when compared to iOS10. There are a number of noticeable and handy changes to iOS that make using the iPhone8 Plus a treat. For starters, Control Center has received a redesign, making it more functional and allowing you quick access to more controls than previously seen, by making it customisable. You can also now customise screenshots and annotate them like on many Android devices, but it's a handy feature to have. Apple already made it convenient to reduce space usage by deleting stock apps, but now, Apple has introduced the use of High-Efficiency Video Codec for both photo and video recording, which reduces the space used by the two by up to 50 percent, without any loss in quality. The great thing about iOS 11 is that despite a number of changes, the OS is extremely familiar. The shortcuts all remain the same as previous versions of iOS and it is extremely easy to navigate. Unfortunately, it is still missing an option to close all apps in the multi-tasking screen, but that's alright.

The 2960mAh battery on the iPhone 8 Plus might seem small when we see that most Android flagships sport 3,000+ mAh worth of lithium, but Apple isn’t known for following industry standards when it comes to numbers. In our use of the phone, we easily got a day and a half worth of use from the device, which included a minimum two hours of GPS use and three hours of Bluetooth audio streaming. There was the occasional gaming that lasted no longer than 45 minutes a day and about four hours’ worth of phone calls. Add camera use to that and you start to see just how much Apple has managed to squeeze out of the iPhone 8 Plus’ battery. What’s impressive about the new iPhone 8 Plus and its battery chops is that it is wireless charging compatible, though we could not test that out due to lack of compatible charging mats. For the first time ever, the iPhone also supports fast charging. Unfortunately, fast charging requires a different power block and a new cable, neither of which are bundled in the box. Instead, what you get is a standard wall charger that you’d get with an earlier generation iPhone and the same standard Lighting cable. It is frustrating to not get fast charging out of the box, and that you’d have to pay a whole lot extra money just to get to use a feature that’s already built into your phone. If you decide to just stick to what’s in the box, do know that it takes about 105 minutes to charge the iPhone 8 Plus from zero to 100.