iPhone 12 Pro: Road Trip Review By MrMobile [Michael Fisher]

- A portion of this video is sponsored by Woven. There's much more to a smartphone than its camera, but these days the camera is usually the component that changes the most between generations. So when I plucked the latest iPhone out of its curiously thin box on Saturday, the first thing I wanted to test was that updated camera and the same duo of David's who helped me test the LG Wing were down to clown in another town. So join me for a weekend in the City of Brotherly love, seen almost entirely through the lens of the iPhone 12 Pro. Now this video will mostly be sample footage from the iPhone 12 Pro, which I'll indicate with this call out here, but first, a very biased, initial impression of the hardware. Biased, because my favorite iPhone of all time was the iPhone 4, whose slab-sided combination of aluminum and glass was like no other phone back in 2010.

When Apple pivoted to the palm-friendly curves of the iPhone 6, it made sense from an ergonomic perspective, yes, but I always missed those assertive angles from the four and the five. So I'm very glad Apple has resurrected that feel all these years later. My pacific blue device packs more personality than the graphite or silver options, but if you really want to make a statement, you'll want to go for my man, David Cogan's, pick because this gold pops. More impressions to come, but I'm eager to get goin'. So let's serve 'em up on the road to Philadelphia.

(upbeat music) Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cogan, what's the plan in one word? - Cheese steak. - That's the plan in one word. (upbeat music) So Cogan very properly recommended we go to a cheese steak place, which I'm really jazzed about. I just didn't know the one he picked would be next to a mac and cheese place.

Now I'm sad. - We can get both. Appetizer! - Very good. - Oh yeah. - Now that's a classic.

- Highly average. - Highly average, he says. Well, for some reason, I think I'm gonna have more luck. Better, right? - Oh yeah. - Spicy though.

- But you can't taste the steak at all. (laughs) - Yeah, who needs steak when you got spicy. - Yeah, agreed. - When you stop to remember that these clips came from a smartphone, this is very impressive stuff. And it's a good reminder of why I've carried an iPhone 11 Pro alongside my other phones for the past year.

For quick and dirty run and gun B roll, it's hard to beat the iPhone. Now I do wish the telephoto offered more proper magnification than just 2X. And as you'll see, the wide angle continues to suffer in low light, but together with the primary sensor, they offer enough tools to accommodate most common shooting situations. Now this footage could look even better if you were watching in Dolby Vision HDR, but I'm not set up to edit in HDR, partly because Apple's own Final Cut Pro doesn't yet support it in Dolby vision. Sadly, I failed to notice that on the 12 Pro, Apple defaults the camera to HDR.

Thanks to Renee Richey and Jonathan Morrison for teaching me how to convert the resulting footage using iMovie so I could edit it, but that's still added a very tedious six hours to the process of building this video. So if you're planning on doing any editing with your iPhone video in the near term, to save yourself a lot of trouble, remember to toggle HDR off. Okay, back to Philly. (upbeat music) Brief moment of panic after filming what I took to be 4,700 reels of film, low battery, 20% warning, right before five. So I started the day at 10, 20% left at five.

If you take a lot of pictures and videos, watch out. Phone's on the battery pack. I'm 20% of the way through digesting that cheese steak, so I guess it's time for dinner, isn't it? Cocktails first. Selfie camera, audio, and video, low light. We'll see.

(gentle music) (upbeat music) Well, the city shut down, but there's a place that's promisin' to sell us $7 margaritas, and I ain't gonna say no. We'll let ya know if it works out. Thank you, Philadelphia. - Strawberry. - Mango margarita.

I did have another phone with me on this trip, Google's Pixel 5. So I took some stills side by side with the iPhone 12 Pro and as expected, the phones go punch for punch, but occasionally a subject like Philadelphia's historic City Hall will showcase the differences in approach, with the iPhone bringing more light, and in this case, a warmer tone. While the pixel really leans into the dynamic range and sharpening to show every corner of the building's detailing. Punch out to wide angle and it's the iPhone that carries the day with its wider field of view, trouncing the comparatively narrow 107 degree lens on the Pixel, to say nothing of the much nicer colors from the Apple product. Heading across town to the sad, rusting hulk of the SS United States, we see those colors again, amplified much more prominently on the I-phone's wide angle.

While the zoom shots are nearly identical. That's notable because the Pixel 5 doesn't even have a telephoto camera. It's accomplishing this with intelligence software enhancement of a digital crop. And finally, in night mode, the results continue to be quite similar. Once again, while the iPhone continues to dominate when it comes to video, on the still side, the Pixel and iPhone are very, very close.

Hey, it's hard to choose a device. Am I right? Some final first impressions, including my first experience with something called scrapple, after a quick word from today's sponsor. Back and forth emails about meeting time, dueling work and personal schedules, checking availability for a quick call. It's never a quick call. I may be the captain of my soul, but I feel like the master of my fate is my calendar.

So why not make that calendar better? This video is sponsored by Woven, the calendar that helps you spend time on what matters most. Woven lets you bring all your Google and Microsoft calendars under one roof, which gives you a 360 degree view of your time. It integrates with Zoom, so you can schedule and join video calls directly from your calendar, and you can even make one-off scheduling links so you can tailor your event timing and availability to a specific person and situation. Don't let your calendar run or ruin your life. Get Woven at the link below for free and reclaim your time today.

Thanks to Woven for sponsoring this portion of today's video. Scrapple, also known by the Pennsylvania Dutch name, Pannhaas, or pan rabbit is traditionally a mush of pork scraps and trimmings combined with cornmeal and wheat flour, often buckwheat flour and spices. The mush is formed into a semi-solid congealed loaf, and slices of the scrapple are then pan fried before serving. Scraps of meat leftover from butchering, not used or sold elsewhere, were made into scrapple to avoid waste. - Welcome to obesity.

- In Delaware, it is sometimes described as containing everything but the oink. What have we done to ourselves? - What does that mean? - On the whole, despite that battery not quite living up to what I expected, my first weekend with the iPhone 12 Pro was a positive one. The new widget, Paradigm, is a welcome breath of fresh air. Apps, like Evernote, continue to get design refreshes ahead of their Android counterparts. And other apps, like Dark Sky, have seen themselves ripped out of the Google play store so their features can be baked into Apple's own weather app.

As well, thoughtful features like the indicator that tells you when your camera is on or the phone's mic is listening, secure Apple's reputation for getting the little things right. But you know, I'm a little concerned about the new iOS. More often than ever before, I've seen things like app lockups and crashes, particularly in the search feature, which seems straight up broken. Users coming from an Android phone may resent having to teach the news app what stories you actually care about. Hint, Apple, for me, it's not these.

As compared to an Android phone, which just knows what you like, because Google. In an era of masks, having to deal with face ID instead of a fingerprint scanner means you're stuck putting in your pin a lot more often, which is a bummer. And as always, Siri is just terrible. Navigate to SS United States. We're going to Sudan, boys.

I'll explore more of the good and bad as I head into my proper review of the iPhone 12 Pro, but I'm real glad to have had the opportunity to explore its camera in a city like Philadelphia, whose historic roots inspire a civic mindset that reminds me to remind you, fellow Americans, to please vote this election season. For more on the iPhone 12 Pro, stay tuned to this channel for that iPhone 12 Pro review, and to see this trip from a different perspective, check out David Cogan's real-world test over at the Unlocker, which I'll link below. Finally, I'm not covering the non-pro iPhone 12, but the other David is. David Emel's coverage is due later this month at Android Authority. This video was produced with a retail iPhone 12 Pro unit, purchased from Apple, which, as always, offered no compensation for this review and was given no copy approval or early look either.

The opinions contained herein are mine and mine alone. Please subscribe to the MrMobile on YouTube if you'd like to see more videos made by me, Michael Fisher. Until next time, thanks for watching. And if you're like us and can't stay home all the time, at least remember to keep it safe and mask up while you stay mobile, my friends. - Oh God.

- Oh really? - The word congeal is so accurate. - We should never have read that Wikipedia article. - It's like a sauce inside of a- - It is. - What? I used to believe that this is meat. - I thought I was gonna hate it, but it's kind of like a French fry that's maybe an hour past when you should've eaten it, but then they reheated it.

- And deep fried it? - And deep fried it again. Yeah, I could eat scrap fresh. I get that with this and I don't want that loaf. I don't need any part of that loaf. - To me, it tastes like you deep fried a liquid and then it turned into a solid.

- I think that's probably what it- - 'Cause you bite it and then it's like gushing inside. - Right. - That's not, meat should not gush. - Gushing is not a good way to describe things. - It is.

Source : MrMobile [Michael Fisher]