iPhone 7 Plus Review: 5 Important Things to Know! By Erica Griffin

Hey everybody: this is Erica the technology nerd likes to film stuff, and I'm, currently filming on the iPhone 7 plus. This is the introduction to the iPhone, 7, plus review, and I'm actually doing this as a specialized review, where I will talk about five important topics that I think you guys should really know about this phone. So let's go ahead and check it out. So the first thing that I want to talk about in this review is the display. This is a 5.5 inch, IPS LCD it is 1080p, so it's not quite HD, and no it's not AMOLED either I know a lot of people are upset that we don't have a resolution boost and that also this is not AMOLED. I think that next year is when we're going to be seeing the AMOLED displays on the iPhone.

Supposedly, the technology is just not ready yet so that's something that we will see for the 10th anniversary hang tight for that. But as far as the 1080p resolution I'm not upset about it and here's why this is 5.5 inches and actually the resolution looks pretty good with 1080p, because this is not a gentile matrix phone you'll notice. If you have an AMOLED display like with my one plus 3, that's 1080p, it doesn't look very sharp and that's because it is missing a sub pixel per pixel. Every pixel has a red, green and blue sub pixel and together combined with all different intensities, you get all the different colors that you can see on the display, but with a gentile type matrix you only have 2 sub pixels per pixel, you'll have red and green, and then you'll have green and blue and because that sub pixel is missing. That's essentially what is making the resolution at 1080p? Not look so sharp, but this display has an RGB stripe matrix.

So you do have those full three sub pixels per pixel, and so it looks nice and sharp I. Really don't think that quad HD is going to be necessary that puts a toll in the battery life, and it also puts a strain on the GPU as well. So graphic performance would in question not be as good. So 1080p has been the sweet spot here for Apple on this larger display. I.

Do think, though, that when they switch over to AMOLED, that will probably have the quad HD AMOLED display, because of that missing sub-pixel having quad HD with AMOLED makes it look really nice and sharp. So if we see an AMOLED display next year, that's probably what we're going to see it won't be 1080p it'll, most likely be quad HD, we'll have to see how that all pans out if they do end up going with a 1080p AMOLED display at 5.5 inches, it's going to not look at sharp, not a sharp is this anyway! So if they're not using AMOLED and that's a frustration to people, some people feel like this is an antiquated technology. Actually LCD is great, but it's true that it's capping out at the potential of what it's able to do, at least on a mobile platform, but Apple has now created what is called wide color with their display p-3 standard. So this isn't like last year, where you only have the RGB range of colors. We now have a wider range of colors that this display can show.

So that is nice for all of you out there and feel like you want to have a broader range of colors that you can see on your display. Keep in mind, though, that the default color space for Apple's operating system is RGB. So when you compare it to the older iPhone, the iPhone six-plus, everything is going to look pretty much about the same around the interface and in applications. Unless developers decide to support wide color inside their application. Like oz kingdom, you do see a lot of aspects of wide color in here.

Apple doesn't want people to simply just over saturate the display for good reason, because it doesn't really help. It makes things look gaudy and not good, so they only want developers to incorporate bits of wide color where it's going to benefit the experience for the user, so I think over time, we'll have developers starting to increase the color saturations in places inside the applications, but don't expect the whole phone to look over saturated. That's just not going to happen. Apple likes to keep quality control. It's not going to be like AMOLED displays that you see out there that totally over saturate the interface- and it just looks wrong.

Also, Apple has incorporated actual color management in the operating system. This is what the first color managed mobile operating system. That doesn't surprise me actually I figured Apple would be the first to do it. So what do I mean color management? Well, this display supports display p3 color space. It's a really nice wide range of colors, but if you have an image that is still RGB with that smaller range of colors- and you view it on this- display it's going to map it properly.

If you don't map it properly, it'll take that smaller color space and just stretch it out to fit the display and everything will look saturated when it is mapped properly. It's going to take those colors and put them where they should, so you'll be able to view an RGB, smaller amount of colors on this wire to display, and it will still look right. I know this is complicated, but all this is to say that images should look right on this display because Apple is being careful managing things so being prefaced with all this. What is it I can say about this display? Well, I can say that this is probably the best calibrated LCD out there on a mobile phone. Apple has really paid attention to the details here for color accuracy.

They say that each individual phone was factory calibrated so that it looks right. I was able to run some measurements, and I was just incredibly impressed. It's got two different color spaces. You got the RGB one, and you've got display p3, that's the one that has the wide color and RGB just looks fantastic. The gamut meets that RGB color space.

The saturation points look perfect. The grayscale looks very, very consistent and when you have a consistent grayscale, where you have a proper balance of red, green and blue, you don't get weird color casts or weird deviations in the colors. It also has a pretty darn nice contrast ratio as well over 1400 to 1. It's also now got a proper white point: they're trying to target d65 whites, meaning 6500 Kelvin for whites last year, the whites were actually just a little on the bluish side. So what people are saying is that the display on the iPhone 7s looks warmer and yes, yes, it does, because they're trying to target that proper d65 white point you will get used to it.

Trust me just don't be, comparing both displays back and forth, because your eyes won't be able to adjust to what white is, but once you have only one white, your eyes will adjust to it, and it will look correct to you and then, when you go back and actually look at your old display, you'll notice how blue it was also gamma is targeting 2.2. So I feel like shadows and all the colors just look good Apple did a great job, and, with this wide color thing, this display p3 or DCI p3 color space, I, went and actually tested that as well to see. Are they lying? Do those coordinates actually match? Is it really DCI p3? How many times do you see that claimed and actually yes, Apple did a fantastic job. It wasn't just marketing, it really does reach pretty much point. Four point four point accurate to the p3 color space.

This is the spec of what the color space should be. This is what I measured, and it's just astounding how close they've gotten it so no they're not messing around this is indeed I think the best calibrated LCD on the market. What I'm telling you guys with all this is: don't worry just because this isn't an AMOLED display. You are not being ripped off in any way. This is an absolutely beautiful, accurate display that has the ability to display wider range of colors in a sensible manner, so look out for more wide color support and applications over time.

I give it a sub up so now, I'd like to take a second to thank my sponsors at Braintree, so much for making content creation possible. What do /, Airbnb and GitHub have in common easy mobile payments thanks to Braintree is a major reason? You can press one button and pay for something there, a PayPal company that makes mobile payments so easy, fast and seamless that your business will be up and running in no time add a few lines of code to your app, and you're ready to accept Apple Pay, Android pay, PayPal, Venmo credit cards even Bitcoin. They offer a single integration across all platforms with superior fraud, protection, customer service and fast payouts, and if new ways to pay come along, Braintree will support those two brain trees, best-in-class mobile checkout experience means fewer abandoned car and more sales, so you'll always be ready. Whether you're earning your first dollar for your billions learn more at Braintree payments, comm, slash, Erica and now for your enjoyment. We've got a digital painting of grumpy cat dressed as Ariel, but in all seriousness here, looking at some specs, we've got to the Apple A10 fusion CPU.

So this is essentially a dual-core CPU. Yes, we have four cores, but only two cores are used in any given time, so you've got two higher powered cores and two lower powered cores and the system is going to decide which one to choose, depending on what would be appropriate for the task. So the higher powered cores are clocked at two point. Three, four gigahertz we've also got three gigabytes of RAM on the plus model, two gigabytes on the regular model and up to 256 gigabytes of internal storage, which is just awesome, I'm, enjoying 128 gigabytes right now, and I'm, not even close to filling up the storage, so I give Apple props for finally, finally, updating their storage numbers and there's no SD card slot, so it's essentially like having a phone that has 64 gigabytes of internal storage at also a 64 gigabyte SD card. So you can kind of think about it like that if you get the mid-range model, so in terms of improvement, apples claiming that you have 40% improvement with CPU and 50% improvement with the GPU, and we're seeing it that's pretty much accurate.

So here we have Geek bench 4 launched on my 1 plus 3, which is one of my highest performing android phones, it's not the highest one! That I have right now, and you can see just how much better the single core score is and then looking at the multi score performance, it's competitive! It's a little better here, but they've always pretty much blown it out of the water with single core being their thing. So to me, what this all means is that this phone flies I do see an improvement a little over last year in terms of responsiveness and just how quick it feels I feel like the interface is nice and smooth I feel like apps, open quickly, I'm, not seeing the frame drops. I was seeing from the 6s plus from last year when you would press the side here or also do the force touch to check out one of the widgets. Everything seems pretty nice and seen I'm also liking, that apps resumed nice and quickly and very smoothly as well no complaints and no problems here then, looking a little at how it's doing in the graphics department, we've got GFX benchmark pulled up here. Looking at the long-term performance with Manhattan 3.1 I've got a screenshot pulled up for my Galaxy Note: 7 as I no longer have it, but you can see that by the 20th iteration of doing this benchmark loop, that we've dropped significantly in performance, we've got 1887 frames and by the 20th we've got nine hundred and forty-three point five. So that's quite significant we're looking here on my iPhone.

You see that yeah we do drop pretty much immediately, but it stays pretty consistent at 1500 frames. So thermal throttling doesn't seem to be a huge issue. You're going to have really nice gameplay, but I have to tell you that this thing gets super, super hot. At least my unit does, let me know your experience is in the comments section below. If you have any, this gets to be quite toasty and yes on this unit, I certainly do hear that processor whining noise, it's actually quite loud I- can hear even when it's charging it's just sitting on the couch charging and I can hear the thing whining away.

My gold model that I had actually beenn't as bad as this, and indeed I, do hear it. Also in video when I talk about the camera, I will show you a sample of what that sounds like, so I will be exchanging this one in hopes of getting acquire unit. So, let's move on to talking about battery life, we've got a two thousand nine hundred million power battery inside this were from last year. I believe it was two thousand seven hundred and fifteen million hours, so we got a larger battery and from what I'm seeing this is lasting me all day long. It's got fantastic battery life so, so happy with it.

Just looking at the usage, you can see. I'm down to two percent got usage of eight hours and 38 minutes now. This includes on screen time, but not only other processes that keep the phone awake. For example, downloading apps, updating time zones receiving push notifications that type of thing all that's going to factor into your usage, but still that's great for most people, that's two full days of usage without having to charge your phone for me as I have really heavy user. This is all day long without having to worry about charging.

This thing I'm going to be going on my anniversary honeymoon very soon- and this is the phone I'm going to be taking with me, because it's got really reliable battery life. The frustrating thing, though, is that this thing takes forever to charge: there's no fast charging, and they only give you a little one amp brick in the box, so you know you're looking at what three hours or something to charge just plug it in overnight you guys, because if you're wanting to top it off during the day, the topping off thing doesn't really work very well I'm coming from Android phones, something like the one plus three and even the Galaxy Note seven, you plug those things in for just a small period of time, and they're at over 60% and a half hour or less so that's been difficult, but you can get yourself an iPad charger, and it's going to charge it and like half the time. So that's pretty much. The solution is just to get an iPad charger, but that's another thing that you have to buy, but if you're fully ingrained in Apple's ecosystem, maybe you already have one more power to you. Use that now down at the bottom, we've got the charging port and there's no earphone jack.

So you've got one port to do everything on this phone and for a lot of people. That's probably going to be ok, it's probably going to take some time to adapt. For me, this has been extremely frustrating. I can't even tell you. There are those people who like to plug in their phone at night.

The phone is down to I, don't know two percent, maybe or something, and they want to put their earphones in and listen. Some people will ask well what type of people would want to do that well in the past week, or so that has ended up being me because I've started having a ringing in my ears, this tinnitus problem. Hopefully it goes away, and I've discovered that at nighttime, I want to listen to some masking music and that music can go all night long for 10 hours, and that means that I can't charge my phone and listen to my music at the same time. So that has been incredibly frustrating then there's also the times when I go when I sit at my computer and I. Have my earphones from here and I want to plug it into the computer and, of course it's a lightning port.

It doesn't fit in the earphone, jack and I forgot where my adapter went, so Apple has created an infinitely frustrating situation for some people here, not a fan, not a fan at all. There's no wireless charging, so you're going to have to charge your phone, and you will also have to charge your wireless earphones if you don't want to deal with the wired thing, so that's just more things to charge more things to worry about so hopefully Apple and the next one you'll get rid of this I'm not buying the whole. This is the evolution and the revolution of the future. This just sucks okey-dokey. So now, let's move on to talking about the water resistance of this phone I know people had sworn that last year there was some water resistance that Apple secretly had put in here and just didn't say anything about it.

But now we finally have iPhones that do have a water resistance rating, so now Apple people can join in on the fun. So this is ip67 the six saying that this is completely dustproof, so dust can't get into the phone dirt can't get into the phone, and then water is at a seven rating. So it can go down to one meter of water for thirty minutes, and you don't want to expose it any longer than that. I honestly feel that, even though we have this rating is probably the best just to not expose it to water, because Apple will not replace your phone for you, they make that very, very clear and obvious. So if your phone gets wet, and it gets damaged, that is all on you.

So if you drop it in the toilet, okay, you're protected. That's a good thing! If you're splashing through the water at the beach, it happens to be in your pocket, you forget it that it's in there. You should be okay too, if you accidentally forget your phone's in your pocket, while you're in the pool for that matter. That should be alright. You just want to make sure that you dry it off quickly, wash it off, because having chlorine or anything other than fresh water can erode certain things so pay attention to that fresh water.

Only so spills splashes, if you're at Disneyland, and you're on Splash Mountain, it should be just fine, don't have to worry about it, but don't think that this is a free to go and just use this. As your underwater camera I know, some people are doing that they're having great success at doing that, but still I would not dare to do that. I did test this out myself, and it was just in one foot of water. It did just fine. Just was in there for a few minutes ran a camera sample, and it worked really well.

Of course, although I was a little annoyed to hear that I can hear the buzzing of the processor, while it's underneath the water that nice hiss gate thing everyone's talking about, once I took it out of the water, the speaker's did sound garbled for a few minutes, so I, really let it dry out, played some loud music to try to push and disperse all that water. And then it was just fine. The audio returned to normal, so I don't see any issues whatsoever. I did have a chance to see Zach's video of jury-rigged everything where you took the iPhone apart to explain what makes it water, resistant, and I found that to be interesting. So basically, you've got some double-sided adhesive, sticky tape, that's waterproof! The display is the biggest point of entry for water, so obviously they have to hold that down nice and tight and also seal that.

So they did that then. Otherwise, you have several other places, such as the speakers and those are protected with mesh that water can't go through unless it's under heavy water pressure. So that includes the earphone piece and also the speaker and microphone at the bottom. Then we've got rubber gaskets, so the only port that we have on here we've got a little rubber ring. That's going to keep water out same thing with the SIM tray, so getting rid of that earphone port has really helped Apple bring down costs, especially in terms of waterproofing they've, made it easier on themselves, fewer points of entry.

The point that I worry about most, though, are these buttons, because it looks like there's not much here to keep the water out. So if you go down deep enough or if you have water jet spraying against this, it's probably going to be game over for you. So don't say that I didn't warn. You think it's awesome that we have some waterproofing, but this is not waterproof. In most cases, it should be fine in just everyday life, but use some sense people.

So the last thing that I want to talk about in this review are the cameras and the camera experience or how this dual camera setup works. Also, I wanted to mention that when we take images, they can be displayed in wide color on this display. So not only can we see wide color in applications, but we're also able to take pictures and have those pictures viewed in wide color. Normally, when we take pictures, the displays are RGB, so it's going to just display the RGB image, but the sensor can capture more than just that RGB range of color, so now we're able to at least view more colors. Here your pictures should look more vibrant, especially in the Reds and in the greens.

So that's something that a lot of people I'm sure will enjoy. Now. Some people have asked me this question a few times. What happens when you view these wide color photos on a computer display, for example? Well, if your operating system is color managed or your program you're viewing the photos in is color managed it should just remap to RGB, and it will look okay, but if you're viewing it on a smartphone screen, like my one plus three that doesn't have any color management at all you're, going to end up having a washed-out. Looking photo when you have a wider color space than a display can show its only going to show a small percentage of the colors, so it cannot display all the saturations, and therefore it will tend to look washed out.

So keep that in mind wide color photos will probably look best on your iPhone screen or in a color managed operating system. So now, let's talk about the specs of these cameras, so these are two separate cameras: they're both 12 megapixel, the first one is a wide-angle 28 millimeter lens F, 1.8, aperture and also optical image, stabilization, where the telephoto one is 56 millimeters, equivalent with no optical image stabilization and an F 2.8 aperture lens, so no optical image, stabilization and quite a small aperture. So I can already tell that this telephoto lens isn't going to be very good in anything else than in good lighting, and I'm. Sure photographers will really sneer at this ?, because 56 millimeters, equivalent is not telephoto, 70 or more would be considered. Telephoto.

So I think this one is going to be good in good lighting and also for portraits, because if you have a wide-angle lens, you can kind of get some distortion in the image. So my thoughts are that this is kind of a cool gimmick, but nonetheless a gimmick to me, although I think that Apple is handling it pretty well with the software. So here's the thing when you go underneath your camera application, they tell you that you have two times optical zoom and ten times digital zoom. Well, the two times optical zoom is executed when you press here, so that should in theory switch to the other lens and then of course, once you zoom in this is going to be your digital zoom. But the thing that became very obvious to me is that it's not always using that second camera.

When you hit times to Apple software, actually has to make a choice and there are two different scenarios. So if you're in good lighting- and you hit two, you should be able to use that second lens without a problem. But as soon as you move up close to a subject, for instance, what it's going to do is switch to the wide-angle camera that has optical image stabilization, and it's going to crop it. Let me show you what I mean so here is my cute. Little Jasper dinosaur, incidentally, named Jasper and I put him on the desk to take a macro photo.

So this is with the wide-angle lens and if, for instance, if you hit two to zoom in and if it used that telephoto lens, this would be the result, it just simply can't focus. This close I was able to do this with the pro camera app where you can choose in force which lens you want to use. So you can see that using the telephoto lens for macro shots is going to be pointless. Obviously, so what Apple does when you hit ? when you're up close to something, is that it goes to the wide-angle lens and crops like that? It does just that. So that makes sense to me, you're, essentially just doing digital zoom instead of optical zoom, simply because the lens can't handle taking a macro shot.

Like this makes perfect sense, our other scenario where Apple software has to make a choice, is in low lighting. So here I hit the zoom button underneath the normal camera application and was able to come up with two different scenarios. This one is where it actually decided to use the telephoto lens. You can see that it looks pretty sharp. They did add a lot of sharps into it.

Then I tried the same thing again, and it decided that it wanted to use the wide-angle lens and crop it. It's a lot fuzzier. You can really tell the difference in the crop, so it doesn't mean that in every low light situation that it's simply going to use the wide-angle lens, it could very well decide to use the telephoto one, such as when any type of really bright lighting source shows up, think of really bright street signs or something then I tried a different indoor, low-light scenario. Where I pointed my camera at the Model piece and each time it refused to use the telephoto lens. Instead, it wanted to use the wide-angle one and crop that way.

We could get a better photo and I understand this, because with the alternative, this is what happened, and I actually had to force this with that application. That I showed you that Pro photo application. You can see that it's really, really grainy, because the ISO had to be boosted really high, and the shutter speed was very quick. So you have a lot of chroma noise in here, and it just looks awful I, wouldn't even call this usable, honestly. So Apple makes the choice to use the wide-angle lens with optical image, stabilization and crop, and it looks better.

That does not mean, though, that the telephoto lens is completely useless. If you have any photography skills or if you know anything about cameras and if you have a tripod or extremely steady hand, I was actually able to get an even better photo myself using the telephoto lens. So, instead of being cropped and not at full resolution, this is at a full 12, megapixels and essentially all I had to do was knock down the ISO as low as I could get it and also open the shutter for as long as I could and when I stayed very. Very still, we have a nice result. So what I'm telling you is feel very free to use the pro camera application.

If you use that you have some photography skills, you can very well miss around with the shutter speed and the ISO yourself, so I'm able to turn something that feels more like a gimmick into something that can be a bit more useful as long as I have a tripod or a very steady hand, but for people who are just in indoor scenarios, and they're flashing photos of their friends at some party or something they're not going to be wanting to think about all those photography based things. They simply just want to point and shoot, so Apple tries to make the best choice, and you are the wide-angle lens and digital zoom instead of having a really dark green photo. So it all makes sense to me, I just really wish that they would have had a larger aperture with this telephoto lens and that they would have included optical image stabilization, because in video, when you zoom in this lens, becomes completely useless, very, very shaky after playing around with this, and also because we don't have that cool book. A software update that we're supposed to get soon I think the people with the iPhone 7 without this second camera will be more than happy. This is cool, but it's really not all that functional unless you really know what you're doing otherwise in terms of photo and video quality.

I think that this is a pretty nice little camera I think that even with wide color that most images look pretty natural, they don't look terribly over saturated to me. I do see that it kind of has some issues with skin tones, sometimes, and especially with highlights. Sometimes I noticed that it really burns my husband handsome face, so it doesn't capture all those highlights quite nicely, and I notice that to be a pretty constant thing, you can see what I mean here on Mr. sludgy. It just feels like it makes the choice to sometimes over expose images, otherwise beautiful, colors, good detail.

This will be a nice little point and shoot that many people will enjoy does have difficulty with reds. This is where you're going to want to take a raw image, and actually you have the ability to take RAW images. If you use that Pro app, that I showed you, so you can go and try to restore all those colors they're, really, really pretty I, like the nice shallow depth of field that I can get, even without that software that they're going to be adding. So it is capable of some really beautiful photos. This isn't so much as a picture quality review as talking about the mechanics of how this works.

That would probably have to be its own dedicated video and have a chance to compare it to some other phones as well check that out beautiful. So this is really all that I want to say for now. I hope that I was able to inform you of some important things with this phone. Hopefully I've been able to answer some questions about what Apple has been doing with this, so this has been Erica the technology nerd likes to film stuff. Please rate comment and subscribe.

What I specifically like about this phone is the waterproofing and most certainly this display and that battery life really great the cameras to me, and they're nice, but I've, seen better honestly, and I find this blend set up to be a bit gimmicky, but overall I've been pretty darned happy with this, and this is going to be the phone that I carry around with me, alongside whatever Android phone of choice, because it's just all reliable with great battery life in a perfect display. So again, this is the air cut the technology nerd likes to film stuff. Let me know if you have any questions, I'm going to be making an update video specifically about this jet black finish and how it's been smudging and scratching over time. So stay tuned. For that ask your questions and good night.

Source : Erica Griffin