iPhone 11 and 11 Pro review: Are they for you? By CNET

The iPhone 11, the iPhone 11 Pro, the iPhone 11 Pro Max these are Apple's iPhones for 2019 are any of them for you, let's find out now. Let's put this in perspective, what is Apple doing with iPhones right now? Every year they have a new iPhone. Now we're pushing into all these new technologies. Some of them are not fully here yet and Apple's. Looking at practical things, I'm going to make this easy and say that of all three iPhones you're, really looking at one, I phone 11 in different variations and the pro and pro Macs are the same with different screen sizes. So the difference between the pro and the 11 really come down to steel or aluminum, and you go with two cameras or three: the iPhones have speedier processors, they have better battery life, and they come in different colors, but really this year, Apple is making the big feature all about the camera.

Here. Take a look: okay, now, you're, looking through the iPhone 11 Pro Max, and I'm, holding the iPhone 11 and the iPhone 11 prep. Now all these phones have a 12 megapixel wide-angle, which is what you're looking at now, which is now at the standard camera, but they also had ultra-wide, which expands out the view like significantly. This is kind of a specialty shot. You have to play with it to get the right framing both of those have that, but only the pro phones have telephoto, which gets super close to X optical zoom.

That's something I use all the time, but you have to pay up for that. You may not need telephoto, but that's what the pro is leveraging give me that phone back, the front-facing cameras on all the iPhone 11 models are the same, and they're better than last year's 10s and 10 are models. There are 12 megapixel cameras, and they're wider, so you can fit more people into a shot which is key. That's been on other phones too, and yes, there's also the slow fee thing slo-mo selfie. Whatever you want to call this, it's not a photo mode like live photo.

Instead, what you're enabling is slow motion, video recording on the front-facing camera I, wouldn't use it all that much it's kind of like this year's an emoji, and you know what my kids really liked playing with it. It basically recorded minutes of sticking their tongues out the photos I've taken on the 11 and 11 Pro. So far, look perfect, but Apple's photo quality has already been great over the last few years. You're gonna notice at most with maybe things like smart HDR in extreme lighting conditions or, of course, with that extra ultra wide-angle camera. The camera app has changed, and you can see here that when you are zooming in more, it includes some stuff from the other camera lenses.

To show you what you might be missing, so it's framing in the square. But then it's saying hey, you might want to pull back. It's like a viewfinder portrait mode is back. You can also zoom in and out and there's a new mode called high key light mono that takes that photo and overlays it. On a white background in black and white, the iPhone 11 has two cameras.

The wide and the ultra-wide, but it's missing the telephoto you could zoom in further, but that's digital zoom, which isn't always as high quality, but sometimes is okay and in portrait mode, it's there, but it's only available in one level of zoom wide. It doesn't zoom into telephoto. There's also video stabilization on the iPhone 11 and on the 11pro models, it's better than before, I shot in 60 frames per second in 4k and tried walking around to check it out. It's not 100%, but I was using stabilization on iPhones previously. In fact, I use it to shoot at Apple events when I go into the demo room and I think this is smoother.

It still shows my footsteps, but it does seem nicer and video in general seems great. That's always been the iPhone strong suit. This one does seem a lot better, but keep in mind that a lot of stuff that these do, you can do on both models. There's also a quick take video where, when you're in the photo mode, you can just press and hold the shutter button to take a video to shoot in the aspect. Ratio of whatever you were taking a photo of now I know you want to see how night mode works, but it's not quite dark enough yet, so before we get to that.

Let's talk about design because people care about that Apple makes good-looking phones regardless, but there are some differences. The iPhone 11 has a glossy glass back and an aluminum case, while the iPhone 11 Pro has a stainless steel case. Any frosted glass back, that's like last year when the iPhone 10 are had an aluminum case and the 10s had a steel one. It's kind of a luxury upgrade here. I have two of the most controversial colors.

The greens, this green on the 11 kind of looks like a 60s swimming pool like an aqua turquoise, it's kind of funky, while the midnight green on the 11pro has this industrial outdoors man type look and the three camera ray is a little intimidating. The whole thing has a, don't as a like a look or a kind of like a futuristic, dystopian iPhone look. While this one looks a little more friendly, but why couldn't this dovetail? What couldn't this be? Colorful and pastel, and why couldn't this be metallic? That's the way it is an iPhone land. The iPhone 11 has the same LCD as the iPhone 10 R, and it looks a lot better than you think. It's perfectly fine, but the iPhone 11 Pro has an OLED display, that's higher resolution and is also higher rest ratio this year and brighter it's just starting to become dark enough for night mode.

This isn't even quite fully dark enough. Yet will come with me, and I'll show you how night mode works night mode kicks in automatically when it gets dark enough, and you can tell because there's a little icon here, and it tells you the average length of the exposure when using it. If it gets darker that'll increase my take a photo right now. It takes a little of time for it to process, but then you can see that it really does a lot better than the previous iPhones ever did night mode works in telephoto and in wide, but when you go to ultra-wide, there is no night mode photo still look nice, but they're, not gonna. Kick in with that same night, vision that you would get in the other modes, so I have a bunch of feelings about night mode.

So far, I think it's a great overdo feature on the iPhone and a lot of other competing phones have been adding this feature, but keep in mind the added exposure time is something you have to get used to. In addition, the photos that are taken are going to produce some unusual processing effects. Some photos, look spectacular, others look, weirdly dramatic, the colors are very saturated and at times it can look like night is day and resolution on these photos can really vary. They're, not gonna, look as crisp as a full daylight photo in all instances. Sometimes you may want to turn it off completely I've only been using it for handful of days, and I'm glad it's there, but night mode is not the cure-all for everything.

There's no night mode in video, but Apple's camera improvements for video recording do look great in lower light conditions. Ultra-wide, however, doesn't pick up quite as many details in lower light as the wide and telephoto modes. Okay, guys some real talk, so I haven't even used these phones for more than a week really less than a week and there's only so much. You can observe I think these are better phones and the fact that Apple's focusing on better battery life is great. But there are some things I would have liked, for instance, you can only get a larger charger or 18 watt charger with the pro phone.

It doesn't come with the iPhone 11 and there's no USB see, and you can't charge things via the back, which is nice, for, let's say a watch which Samsung does, which you can't do yet on this I. Don't really care much about 5g yet because I, just like my own cellular connection, to work better on LTE, which, thanks to the way the nation's connectivity works, is not always the case with my commute, but hopefully that stuff will get fixed. We'll see we'll see how that pans out- and you don't even know next year of Apple- is gonna, be releasing a 5g iPhone and if they do how much that would cost right now, Apple is focused on some pretty commodity updates, faster, better battery life, better camera. What I update to this I mean most people, don't update their phones every year or every two years or every three years. A lot of people I know my family and others are updating like every four years, so you're really gonna, wait to spend money on a phone and Apple is at least acknowledging that everybody's going to be buying.

If that was in our phone, and they're pointing more to the $700 phone, which is still expensive, but at least it's not a thousand dollar phone, and it's 50 dollars less than what the 10r was. So there's a little of progress. I'd still like to see a sequel to the iPhone SE. Who knows if that's ever going to happen? In the meantime, if you've had a phone like an iPhone, 6s or a7, this is a really nice update and if you're a photographer, who wants something where you can look at all the color detail, and especially at night, the OLED is going to pay off, but also you may want to wait and see what else is coming. These are not necessary, updates, they're, good updates and that's the story of the iPhone in 2019.

Are you kidding me I've, been working on this I've seen my kids I've, been in Brooklyn I got a commute back to New Jersey, which is like two rivers? They really like taking slo-mo selfies, that's what most Salome selfies are gonna, be I mean they're. Fine slo-mo is cool but someday. After all, the technology events end I'll, see my family again, and it will be wonderful.

Source : CNET