iPhone 8 Plus in 2021 - Should You Still Buy It? By zollotech

Hi everyone Aaron here for Zollotech and the iPhone 8 plus, has been out for quite a few years now and is the last large phone to have touch ID on it, and so I wanted to help you decide if you should pick one up in 2021 now. The first thing is the design this design has been around for years. It's no longer the new design, with the iPhone 12 series, making the edges flat again like the iPhone 5, but it does have those nice curved edges that a lot of people really like, and it's made out of aluminum and the aluminum actually holds up pretty well. It depends on, if you have it in the case or not, but as you can see as we go around the outside edge, I do have a little of a nick there in the upper left and that's just due from normal wear, maybe bumping it into something and if you go around the outside, it seems to have held up really well, and it's got the same. Familiar layout with your power button, sleep, wake button on the right, your sim card tray, and then your speakers on the bottom, and they're symmetrical on the iPhone 8 plus, which is really nice with your speaker and your microphone, your lightning port, and then your volume buttons and silent switch on the left. Of course, then you have a speaker at the top, so you do get that stereo, sound I'll talk more about that in a moment.

Now, as far as the front and back they are glass, so you do have a substantial feel to the phone. It's heavy. It's a nice size and the glass on the back seems to hold up weld, but it does get a lot of fingerprints on it. So you do have that and then of course, your dual cameras and now, as far as touch ID, it's nice and fast, it works well and a lot of people still prefer touch ID. So that's great about this phone, and if you don't like face ID of course, if you're wearing a mask, this makes it very easy just take it out of your pocket pick it up.

Put your finger down it unlocks right away, it's really nice and fast. Also, this display seems to hold up really well to scratches, and you can see it does have some fingerprints on it. It does get fingerprints fairly easily, but it doesn't seem to have scratches over the years now. I have not used a screen protector on it and I did use this phone full time for quite some time and I really like it when it's not in use or when it is in use. I use a leather case.

It's an apple leather case. That's held up well and helped to prevent scratches, although it's never been dropped, but you can see the case is held up really well, and the phone in general is just a really solid phone. I think it's very durable works well and, of course, has a large display. The display is 5.5 inches, and it's 1080p. It's higher resolution.

As far as the overall resolution and pixel density of that of the iPhone 11 or 10r, for example, so you have a 1080p display with 401 pixels per inch, and you also get of course dark mode with iOS 14. But you get things like true tone if you enjoy using that, if you want to have whites to be more paper like, for example, I generally turn this off, as I want the whites to be as accurate and the colors to be as accurate as possible, but it does have that, and it is p3 compatible which is really nice. Now, with this display, you do have 1080p like I said, so that means you can watch 1080p YouTube videos, here's one of my videos, I'll rotate it here now. One thing you don't get is HDR, so you'll see it's playing, fine, we'll jump ahead, and if we take a look at the options here, you can see that you can go up to 1080p. I don't get the 4k option, although that would only give me a higher nitrate we're getting 1080p, which is the resolution of the display, and it looks great you can't see the pixels, because it's over 400 pixels per inch, for example, so that parts nice.

However, you don't get HDR as an option either. This is a HDR video that I recorded about the iPhone 12 or 12 pro rather, and you just don't- have the HDR option where you would have it on say the newer iPhones or an iPhone 11. For example, you get HDR where you don't with this. So that's one of the disadvantages of this display compared to the newer displays. However, there's a big reason to choose this display over, say the 12 pro max, for example, where it's an OLED display the OLED display.

While it's more vibrant and looks nice, one of the things is, it has PWM, and I've talked about this at length in the past. But what you have is the display on the 12 pro or any OLED display iPhone or many other OLED displays flicker their display to control brightness. It's just the way. The display works, the iPhone 8 plus is an lcd and doesn't need to do that to control brightness. So, as you bring the brightness up and down, it's actually making the screen flash faster and slower on an OLED where you have a constant backlight on the iPhone 8 plus, for example, and that helps reduce eye strain one in ten people, including myself, are susceptible to say, feeling nauseated or getting headaches just from the display blinking.

When we can see things like faster frame rates or the frame refresh rate being faster. It's just something that seems to bother about one in ten people, and it's definitely nice to use an iPhone, 8 plus with less eye strain. It's just something that I personally like better about it. Unfortunately, we don't have the LCD option on the newer ones, but we do have it on the eight plus, and that may be a reason to get this phone along with the touch ID now as far as price with this phone well, this phone can be had for about 299 dollars for the 256 gigabyte variant refurbished new. You can find it around 549 dollars, but Apple does not sell this new anymore, so you could pick one up for 299, for example, and I think that's a decent deal for what it is.

You can find those on different websites from time to time. Different third-party websites sometimes used things like that around that price, and I think it makes it a perfect value for what it is with that amount of storage. Now, as far as the speakers go, let me go back to that YouTube. Video I'll turn it up. So you can hear it briefly.

Let me move my microphone, so here's one of my YouTube comparison. Videos. Let me go ahead and hit play the overall speaker. Quality is quite good, as you could hear. It goes nice and loud, and you have a nice even stereo, sound from the top speaker to the bottom speaker.

For example, it is nice and clear as well, except for at the very highest volumes where you want to back it off just a little to clear things up now. As far as the overall speed, it's nice and fast, and if you go into apps like music, for example, you'll see it stutters there just a little, but that's because it just loaded but generally using this going between different applications. Even though it only has three gigs of ram, it doesn't seem to have an issue with ram management most of the time. So if we go into an app like Minecraft, for example, we'll give it a second to load. The a11 bionic, that's inside the 8 plus, is the same processor that we have with the iPhone 10, for example, so I'll load, this game and generally games, and things like that are going to be nice and fast.

You really won't see too much of a difference between this and say a newer phone with loading games or playing games. They should be nice and smooth, whether it be Minecraft or among us or Call of Duty, for example, Call of Duty mobile you'll, see it's loaded, and then frame rates are nice and smooth. You've got up to 60 frames per second, and the gameplay will work. Just fine, no issues here whatsoever, so you'll see it's nice and smooth it loaded. Well, you can play this without an issue and then go back out, maybe go into say YouTube, and it didn't reload for example.

So it's working really well as far as that goes, and it will get updates for about three years or more. At this point, I think, based off what we've seen with iOS 14 and iPhone 6s plus, for example, so I would expect up to say iOS 17, maybe iOS 18, with the iPhone 8 plus. So we should be getting updates with this for years now. It does feel a little slower, like I said, with certain tasks compared to the iPhone 12 Pro max. So if you're scrolling from time to time, you may see some smoothness differences, you may see some speed differences when going into different applications and going out, but mostly the experience is quite fast in general, so I wouldn't really have any issue recommending this to someone as far as the speed when it comes to the cameras.

This is where they fall a little short compared to the newer phones. So if we spin this around, and we've got the forward-facing camera, for example- and we go to video, we have HD 30, and we've got basically HD and 30 frames per second, you don't have 4k on the forward-facing camera. If I hit record, you can hear the microphone from the 8 plus, and this gives you an idea of what the video is like it's just not as good as what we get with the HDR video capabilities of the newer phones, and so the camera is decent. But it's not amazing. As far as the selfie camera, the rear facing camera does do 4k 60, and if we go to the upper right here we can change the options to 4k, 60, nice and fast 24 30, and then, if I bring in the case, and maybe the iPhone 12 Pro max you'll see the video is nice and clear.

So it looks pretty good. It's not incredible, but it's quite good. It just doesn't have the HDR capability of the newer phones. Photos are decent. I think, if you're happy with having a little older phone you'll be happy with the photos and in general, the camera is more than good enough.

You also have the zoom camera as well, so you have the option to go to 2x, although I wouldn't say that's a reason to pick this phone up.2X is decent, but it's not amazing. So here's a quick sample of what the iPhone 8 plus is capable of with both photo and video. Now, of course, a major concern with a phone. That's a little older is what the battery life is like, even with the newest iOS 14 updates, for example, and battery life in general is going to get you about five to six hours of screen on time, depending on how you use your phone, this phone is a few years old, and it's got 97 of its battery health left after two years of regular service. You can expect this to be down to around eighty percent, where you might need to replace the battery for about fifty to seventy dollars.

If you have it done at apple, however, the overall battery life is going to vary from person to person. I asked a few people to send me their battery life. So let's take a look here and if we go to the battery life, you'll see here's someone that's been using the eight plus full time, and they're down to 87 percent of their battery health. If we go over to what their battery life is like they're getting about 10 hours and 25 minutes of screen on time, when charging it you'll see they charged it an hour ago based off this photo, so maybe charging it throughout the day they're getting about five hours of screen on time. The next person here is getting about five hours and 57 minutes of screen on time.

It's going to vary greatly and thanks to Ravi and minor for sending these in. I really appreciate it, and so you can see about five to six hours of screen on time, with regular use now with the iPhone 8 plus, because it has a glass back. This is when apple introduced wireless charging, and you can even use the latest MagSafe charger. You won't get the magnetic adherence to it, although it does stick a little because there are metal coils in there it does charge, it will charge at about 7.5 watts, and you do get fast charging if you have the right power brick to do that, you'll get about 50 percent of your battery in about 30 minutes or so it's a decent battery. It charges fairly quickly if you're, using fast charging devices or fast charging plugs, but if you're not, of course, it will charge a little slower, and it's not too big of a deal if you put it on a charger at night, for example, now, as you can see, I have full bars here and reception on the iPhone.8 plus is actually quite good. With my iPhone 12 Pro max.

I don't get full signal in my office where I'm at now, and I do with this device- it's also great with Wi-Fi, for example, but you don't have 5g. So, as you can see, it just went down a little. I switched over to LTE and overall speeds are decent with 4g.4G speeds are what you would expect. It depends, of course, greatly where you're located, but let's go ahead and run this quickly, we'll just wait for it to connect it'll, take just a moment, and you'll get the overall idea of 4g speeds, we're hitting over 68 megabits per second we're over 70 megabits. So that's quite good with 4g, so it just depends on where you're located, but the reception overall on an iPhone 8 plus is generally quite good compared to even an iPhone 10.

For some reason, I'm not sure if it's the stainless steel versus the aluminum frame of the eight plus that makes the difference, but this frame seems to handle reception quite well, and I've never had an issue with it. You'll see I'm getting about eight megabits per second up, so averaging 52 down eight and a half or so up. That's quite good for LTE. Of course, it doesn't have the latest Wi-Fi standards either, but in general that's not a concern for most people. It's plenty fast in most situations where you shouldn't have to worry about that.

As far as that goes, I never had any issues, switching between 4g and Wi-Fi with the 8, plus it's a solid phone as far as reception goes now. That leads me to should you still pick up an iPhone 8 plus in 2021, and I would say, if touch ID is something you still really value, and you prefer it over face ID, and you want a larger display. Well then, absolutely the display is great. It's 401 pixels per inch and of course it doesn't have PWM like I mentioned earlier, so you won't have the flickering display and if that's something that bother your bothers your eyes, you'll have the benefit of that along with touch ID. So those two things alone.

I know a lot of people really appreciate and will pick one of these up. Just for that reason, of course, if you want face ID well, then you'll have to go to an iPhone 11 if you need an lcd, but this is probably the best touch I'd phone out there. That's large at this point you do have the iPhone SE second generation, but that's a smaller phone. So if you want the latest processor and want updates for the next five years, then of course you could go that route as well. The major disadvantage that you get with this phone other than what I've already mentioned would be that its battery is just not what you get with say: a 12 pro max, where you're going to get 10 to 12 hours of screen on time, as opposed to five or six with the eight plus.

So that's a big difference between both phones but the price you could buy three or four of these for the price of a 12 pro max, so you could buy an eight plus with a battery pack to extend that battery life. If that was the issue, if you don't mind not having the top of the line phone, and you want something that will get you by for the next few years with updates and, of course battery, isn't a concern, then I definitely recommend the 8 plus to anyone looking for a phone with touch ID. This is a great value, especially now, and I think it's fairly durable and a great way to go. But let me know your thoughts about it in the comments below, if you'd like to get your hands on this wallpaper, of course, I'll link it in the description like I normally do and if you haven't subscribed already please subscribe and if you enjoyed the video please give it a like, as always thanks for watching this is Aaron I'll, see you next time.

Source : zollotech