Traditionally, Apple announces their new iPhones on September and today was the day we got to see the new phones and we have several surprises.
Apple officially announced the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus where the company has backed the trend of releasing an S variant in this ‘tock’ cycle.
First of all the design: Apple has decided to maintain the same design they used with the 7/7 Plus generation, but they added a glass back, which is reminiscent of the glass back iPhones that was used in the 4/4S generations. The iPhone 8 and 8 Plus will be available in space grey, silver and gold thereby ditching the Jet Black and Matte black options we saw with the previous generation.
Powering the new iPhones is the new A11 Bionic chip, which is a 6 core design with 2 performance cores that are 25% more powerful than the predecessor and 4 efficiency cores that are 70% faster than those in the A10 Fusion. The A11 Bionic also has an Apple designed GPU with three cores that are 30% more powerful than the previous chip.
There is also a new 12MP primary camera that is shipping with the iPhone 8 generation. Apple says that it has a new sensor with a new colour filter and ‘deeper’ pixels. It will be paired with a new image signal processor which will deliver ‘advanced pixel processing’. faster AF (autofocus) in low light, better HDR (High Dynamic Range) photos and a wider colour capture. There is also a new quad True Tone flash with Slow Sync which will lit backgrounds and foregrounds uniformly.
However, my favourite feature is that the new iPhones will shoot 4K at 60fps which is insane! They will also shoot 1080p video upto 240fps which means better looking slo mo videos for you to shoot. Since iOS 11 supports HEVC (High Efficiency Video Codec)F, this will allow you to shoot these high quality video files with file sizes that are half the size compared to other compressions, which saves precious storage.
The new cameras also introduce a new feature with the iPhone 8 Plus: Portrait Lighting which will allow you to shoot photos with studio lighting effects. This is an update to the Portrait mode announced last year with the iPhone 7 Plus which allowed users to shoot photos with that shallow depth of focus that we enjoy with DSLRs (Digital Single Lens Reflex cameras).
Another key feature that the new iPhones bring to the table is wireless charging. Thanks to that new glass back, they have been able to add wireless charging to the iPhone 8/iPhone 8 Plus within the Qi wireless standard.
Other features include the same Retina HD displays like the previous generation but now with True Tone technology that adjusts the display colour temperature to match the surrounding. The stereo speakers are now 25% louder which is great for watching videos or during gameplay. The new iPhones are also designed for AR where apparently the cameras are individually calibrated with new gyroscopes and accelerometers plus the world tracking and scene recognition from the A11 Bionic CPU for the best AR experience.
The new iPhones have an updated pricing: The iPhone 8 will start at $699 for the base 64GB model and the iPhone 8 Plus will start at $799 for the same capacity. You will also have the 256GB models for $849 (iPhone 8) and $949 for the iPhone 8 Plus.
But wait, there’s more… check out the iPhone X, Apple’s future take for the iPhone.
