Here's What The Reviews Have To Say About The iPhone 8 And 8 Plus
While most of the buzz about Apple's iPhone product line is devoted to the upcoming X and its distinctive "notch," there's another new iPhone coming out on September 22nd. It's the iPhone 8 and its larger Plus variant. And… not a whole lot has changed. It's got a glass back, upgraded internals, it supports wireless charging and a few other slick features, but is it a real step up from the 7? Here's what the reviews are saying:
The Basics Are The Same As The 7 (But Bye-Bye Rose Gold)
Home button: still there. Headphone jack: still gone. There's a big bezel around the screen, which looks even larger compared to handsets like the Note 8 or Essential Phone. I suspect this is the last time an iPhone will ever look this way, as the all-screen design of the iPhone X takes hold of Apple's entire lineup. It already feels outdated, especially on the 8 Plus—a humongous phone without a particularly humongous screen.
[WIRED]
It must take a lot of effort to keep reinventing the same basic design without actually changing it. The major difference you'll notice is the glass back, but other than that nothing has changed — the 8 and 8 Plus will fit right into 7 and 7 Plus cases perfectly.
As with iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, the new devices are IP67 rated for dust and water exposure. In practice, this meant I could drop the phone in a toilet or, as I did, in a sink full of water for a few minutes without concern (both phones can candle 30 minutes in up to 3.3 feet of water).
[Mashable]
The new iPhones now come in three colors (bye, rose gold, I hardly ever knew thee): basic silver, slightly less basic space gray, and an even less basic gold, which Apple calls gold, but really lies somewhere in between copper and a hip, trendy nude pink. Online the "gold" model looks more yellow than it actually is in person. The new hue extremely pretty.
[Buzzfeed]
The Big Design Departure Is The New Glass Back
The iPhone 8's a vision in glass. Aluminum (or al-yoo-min-y-yum if you're Jony Ive) keeps the body rigid; glass on the back and front keeps it pretty. It may make the iPhone 8 more fragile—Apple says it won't, my history with glass phones says it will—but it definitely makes it classier.
[WIRED]
Some have expressed concern about Apple's shift away from mostly metal bodies, and they're right to be. Who hasn't seen someone still using an iPhone with a cracked screen? Apple claims to have sidestepped those issues by using the "most durable glass ever in a smartphone" to build the 8 and 8 Plus, and they've held up well over a week of sometimes careless testing. I managed to accidentally gouge the Jet Black iPhone 7 within the first 24 hours, but these glossier, glassier 8s are still nick-free after a week of being tossed into the hellscape that is my backpack.
[Engadget]
This is also one of the cleanest smartphone backs I've ever seen. Aside from the camera, microphone, Apple logo and the word "iPhone," there's nothing else on the back of the phone. On my iPhone 7, right below "iPhone," are the tiny words, "Designed by Apple in California, Assembled in China," as well as model, FCC and IC numbers. Apple worked with all the governing bodies to move whatever text they could off the phones. If you miss them, you can find them in the printed manuals and electronic documentation. It's a small thing but speaks to Apple's insane attention to detail and never-ending quest for clean design.
[Mashable]
The iPhone 8 models are also noticeably heavier than their predecessors, but I like that too. The extra heft makes them feel more robust and better constructed.
Even If They're Not Truly Great, The Speakers Are Louder
The iPhone 8's upgraded stereo speakers are impressively good. Just as on the iPhone 7, the earpiece gets really loud to act as the second speaker, but the whole system gets up to 25 percent louder now. You can hear actual stereo separation, which is wild.
It would've been nice if these new iPhones packed a more immersive speaker setup (e.g., like the four-driver array used in the iPad Pros), but at least the speaker in the earpiece is better able to keep up with the main speaker on the phones' bottom edges.
[Engadget]
You Can Finally Do Wireless Charging… Slowly
What I like about wireless charging is that it means minimal interaction with Apple's notoriously fragile Lightning cables. The less I have to use them, the longer they'll last, right?
[Buzzfeed]
Qi is pretty slow, though — Apple's goal is to match the charging speed of its own 5W pack-in charger, but I only saw about 15 percent more charge on the 8 Plus every 30 minutes with the Mophie, which is especially pokey when you consider that you can't pick up and use your phone during that time.
The Battery Life Is More Or Less The Same, Plus You Can Quick Charge If You Have The Right Adapter
I was more concerned about battery life, especially since some internet sleuthing suggests the 8 and 8 Plus use smaller batteries than their immediate predecessors. Apple declined to confirm this, but it doesn't really matter: As advertised, I squeezed just about the same amount of life out of these phones as I did with last year's 7 and 7 Plus. In our usual video stress test, where the phones loop an HD movie at 50 percent brightness, the 8 managed to stick around for 12 hours and two minutes — that's just minutes shy of what the 7 did last year.
[Engadget]
What's different about the iPhone 8, however, is that it now supports fast charging (or, officially, anyway). That's supposed to give you 50% in 30 minutes with any charger that's 29 watts or higher. Regular charging, with the included five-watt iPhone adapter, powered up the devices 50% in one hour. In my tests using the 29W USB-C adapter with a USB-C to Lightning cable (sold separately for $74), I got 40% in 30 minutes almost every time, for both the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus.
[Buzzfeed]
The A11 Chip (Which Will Also Be In The X) Is Seriously Fast
Apple's new A11 chips (and new motion processors, graphics, camera sensors and image signal processing) are similar across the 8, 8 Plus and X, according to Apple. In our benchmarks, we saw a slight boost in the clock speed of the 8 Plus' A11, and the 8 Plus has 3GB of RAM versus 2GB on the iPhone 8. We don't know about the iPhone X's performance yet, but Apple promises a similar speed.
[CNET]
To test the new chip, I used an app called Geekbench that measures and compares the processor performance of devices. Without getting too technical, the iPhone 8 models blew away everything else in Apple's lineup.
All that extra horsepower really comes in handy when you're trying to augment reality. I got to test two non-final AR apps — Ikea Place and the Machines game demoed at the launch event — and both ran almost surprisingly well. I've been curious about how well Apple's ARKit apps would run, compared with software designed for Google's Tango and all its additional hardware. At this very early stage, I'm quite impressed. The 8 and 8 Plus seemed to do just as well (if not a little better) at rendering virtual objects onto physical planes, and those objects tended to "stick" to surfaces better than similar simulacra in Tango apps. Granted, two unfinished apps can't accurately foretell the future of Apple's AR endeavors, but they're enough to make me more than cautiously excited.
[Engadget]
The Camera And Portrait Features Are Serious Steps Up
The best part of the new camera, though, is the sheer number of new things you can do. You can shoot slow-motion video in 1080p. You can shoot 4K video at 60 frames per second, which makes everything look super smooth and fake. You can even shoot at 24 frames per second to satisfy all your hipster friends. In addition to Portrait Mode, the Plus now offers Portrait Lighting (still in beta), which lets you artificially change the light in a photo. You can take a brightly lit photo and make it look like there's only a spotlight on your subject, or tweak the light to bring out your subject's features even more. When it works, it's cool; half the time the effect is ridiculous and bad. Hence the beta tag.
[WIRED]
In my tests, Portrait Lighting didn't work reliably. The lighting conditions had to be just right or the background effects could bleed onto the subject. Apple, however, says the feature is still in test form and Portrait Lighting will improve with future software updates. In the meantime, if a Portrait Lighting photo doesn't turn out the way you want, you can tweak the image after the fact.
Contour Light is meant to make faces pop with more dramatic lighting, but it typically just made me — a brown-skinned man — look even darker and more ominous than before. (In an informal poll of co-workers I've shot in this mode, nearly all of them said it accentuated features they wished hadn't been.)
[Engadget]
Compared To Other Phone Cameras, The iPhone 8's Might Be The Best… Until The X?
The iPhone 8 and 8 Plus consistently churned out photos that looked more true to life, but the [Samsung Galaxy] Note 8's shots looked a little brighter and more… idealized. They seemed to reflect the world the way I wished it appeared, rather than the way it did. Bear in mind, that's with HDR enabled on both cameras — the 8 and 8 Plus now shoot HDR by default, though you can turn it off if you really want to. In low light, the Note 8 churned out photos that were marginally brighter without a flash, but Apple also built in an improved quad-LED flash that very quickly flashes after a longer exposure. I generally don't love shooting with the flash, but Apple's approach helped change that for me. Given Samsung's excellent work with its cameras, the fact that Apple's camera is just as good — if not a little better in some ways — is something to behold.
[Engadget]
The results are better color with a wider range of tones across all kinds of shooting environments. Apple is particularly fond of their work capturing skies with the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, because skies are chock full of light of all spectrums. That holds up in my testing — less banding, more gradations of tone that reproduce more accurately.
As great as the 8 Plus camera is, here's the rub: the X, on paper, is better. On the X, both rear cameras will have optical image stabilzation (OIS) — versus just the main one on the Plus — and the X's telephoto lens will have a better f/2.4 aperture, versus this phone's f/2.8. The X will get the Portrait Mode features on its front-facing TrueDepth camera, too.
[CNET]
TL;DR
After spending a week with the 8, I can't think of a single compelling reason to upgrade from an iPhone 7. The 7 is still extremely fast, offers virtually the same design in a lighter package with a bigger battery, and will get almost every feature of the 8 with iOS 11.