iPhone SE 2020 In-Depth Review [$399 Flagship Killer?] By Mike O'Brien

When you're, looking at here, is the iPhone s-e-c 2020, the SE, to call it whatever you want apples just calling it the iPhone SE, and essentially what it is, is an iPhone 11 internals crammed into an iPhone 8 body sold at 399, which is a fascinating combination and can be very promising honestly having something so powerful and so capable crammed into kind of older design so that it can be sold at a much more affordable price, which means that so many more people that wanted to get an iPhone no longer have to settle for a more outdated version. Instead, you can get the newest iPhone right here for $400 now that is very exciting, but there's still a lot to talk about in this video, and I've seen a lot of other reviews that say it's just like the iPhone 8 except, and they point out some differences in this video I'm going to kind of omit those and instead just give this a full review. So this is a full in-depth review of the iPhone SE, not making any assumptions about what you know with the iPhone 8. So if you've never had an iPhone 8, they never held it. This should be a great review for you. Hopefully we'll be testing out the cameras.

The microphones we'll be testing out the screen brightness in different environments and just giving an overall review of the brand-new iPhone SE. So starting off with a physical tour, I want to start off on the back of the phone, and we see that first, the Apple logo is now in the center here. So it matches the other iPhones that Apple has been releasing. There are three different colors, there's white, there's black and there's red and as you'll see on the front, all three of them do have a black bezel. Before we saw a white bezel or different colored bezels, now they're, all black, regardless of whatever the color you chose for the back now on the top you'll see we have a single camera right there.

It is a 12 megapixel, shooter and I will be testing that out later on in the video. Next, to that, we have our microphone and our flash there as well, and that's pretty much everything to talk about with the back now on the right side, we have our SIM tray. We have our power button, has a pretty good tactile feel, and it's just a perfect location, I. Think for where you naturally hold this. Your thumb will be pressing that button pretty easily, and I will across the top.

We see pretty much nothing on the left side. We have our classic Apple switch right there to turn on silent mode. Furthermore, we have the volume up and the volume down buttons and then down on the bottom you'll see that we do have the Apple Lightning port right there, unfortunately, no headphone jack on this for under phone here, but you do have speakers on either side of that, and I'll be testing those out as well. Getting to the front of the phone you'll see the earpiece speaker on the top right next to the seven megapixel selfie camera, which again I'll test out in just a minute, and then the 4.7-inch screen right here and unlike some newer flagship phones, you'll see that this one does not have rounded corners. It is kind of nice to go back and just have a nice rectangular screen.

You don't have all the know the rounds on the corners there, but this screen is, of course, not going to compete with the flagship level screens out there being that it's 720p, and it's not quite as bright or as vibrant, as we see in like the galaxy s 20 and the 1 plus phones and a lot of the other very expensive phones out there. Now, with that in mind, of course, this phone screen does still look pretty good. It's not that large, so 720p doesn't necessarily look bad on here, especially with the size, and it does have apples true tone display on there. So if you are in different lighting environments, the colors will change, and it is looking pretty consistent, no matter where you are it's overall, it's a pretty decent screen. Now, that's pretty much everything to look at physically with this phone.

It is ip67 water-resistant, which means that you shouldn't have to worry about dropping this in your kitchen sink, or you know getting it wet in the rain. You know for most uses. You don't have to worry about this. Getting water damaged. Now, of course, I.

Don't recommend swimming with this, but it is nice to have a water rating on your phone right here. So the next thing I want to do is get into a test of the camera on this phone, and so what we have is we don't know exactly what the sensor is. Apple doesn't always tell us what the internal specs look like, but we know that it's a 12 megapixel sensor, so it could be the iPhone 8 sensor. It could be something a little more improved in that, but we do know that it is a significantly more powerful chip, which means that the processing should be better than the original iPhone 8. So let's test it out right now and see how this actually performs all right.

So this is the selfie camera kind of in a blog mode. Right now this is recording at 1080p at 30 frames per second, it looks like it can be a little shaky if I shake my hand like that, not really great stabilization here, but otherwise let me know how this looks and sounds I'm using the onboard microphone. So let me know in the comments down below what you guys think of this: okay, so using the rear camera. Now this shoots 4k 60, but you're. Looking at 4k, 30 right here, so overall I would say it looks pretty good.

It seems to be a bit more stable than the selfie camera, but otherwise it captures color very well, I. Think the video on this is really going to be really hard to beat for this price points. And, of course, we have the microphone right there as well, so if I am in front of it, if I'm the subject, this is what it would sound like. So looking at the photos, then, with the rear, camera you'll see that it captures color very well. It's very detailed, and the white balance looks pretty good on this camera.

It's pretty standard for an iPhone camera and as we zoom in it still captures a lot of detail. You'll see that the smaller aperture means that stuff farther away is less blurry and then, of course, you can also see that the colors really preserve very well. Overall, it's a very standard, iPhone camera. Even when you zoom in you can tell it's 12 megapixels, but the photos still look pretty good iPhone does the classic HDR effect with photos and the skin tone looks pretty standard for me. I always look a little redder with iPhone photos, but otherwise I would say it looks pretty good.

The only thing is in the dark situations. It doesn't have night photos, so you will have with the smaller aperture, either a more blurry or more grainy photos when we flip around to the front camera you'll tell that it's very obviously 7 megapixels the photos, look, ok, they're, definitely not great, and it doesn't have nearly the same HDR capabilities that the rear camera has now I. Personally, almost never use portrait mode, but I'll test it out for you guys in this video, as you can see there, there is some unwanted blurring of my hair and there is occasionally some unwanted clarity under like an armpit or something like that, but otherwise it looks pretty good. Of course, the rear camera is also very capable of shooting slow-motion videos, as you can see right here. Something else to note with this phone is because it doesn't have the necessary Hardware on the front.

It's not able to use face, ID face, unlock or otherwise use an emoji, or anything like that. One great benefit about using the iPhone 8 body is that you can also use all the old iPhone 8 accessories, including the cases, ok. So to do a quick test on the speakers and on the screen. I'm just going to play a YouTube video. The volume is maxed.

The brightness is max right now, so we'll see what this looks like and what it sounds like to go somewhere and then come back so getting into the internal components of this phone. I did mention before that. It has the a13 Bionic chip. That's very exciting, that's exactly the same processor that we see on the Apple iPhone 11, Pro, 11, Pro Macs, and it's really one of the best processors on the market to put in a phone at all. So this is better than so.

Many other phones out there, and it's coming in at such a low cost that it's really impressive. Now, there's a couple good benefits to having this processor and on here one it's going to be very fast, which is nice, the other one. It is going to be very efficient with battery, and I'll talk about battery in just a second, but the third thing, and probably the biggest one, is that it will be getting updates for probably the next four or five years pretty consistently from Apple. So you don't have to worry about buying this and having it outdated in just like 2 years. So that's something perfect about having that processor.

As far as RAM goes, we think it's probably about 3 gigabytes in there I don't know the exact number and Apple doesn't really disclose that. But you were you shouldn't, have any problem with having a lot of apps open. You know, as far as battery goes with this, it does have a fairly small battery onboard. We don't know the exact size, but it's somewhere on the order of over 2,000 William hours, and so it's not going to be. You would think, not a very long battery, but because this has a 720p display, it's only 60 Hertz refresh rate, it's not incredibly bright, and we have the new efficient, a 13 chip on there.

It actually is able to last a fairly long time, so I'm able to say that you can probably last about one and a half days, really no problem with this phone with really light you, so you could probably get through two days no problem, so I think as far as phones go. It's definitely going to perform very well with the battery, and speaking of that, it does have 18 watt fast charging. So that's very nice by charging with a wire on the bottom and on the back, something I didn't mention what the physical tour is. Actually, this does have wireless charging capabilities. So if you have a wireless charger, you can plop it on there.

So, let's get into the pros and cons now to see if this phone is actually worth the price that they're selling it for now starting off the biggest Pro is the 13 chip in there. So it's going to last a long time like I said, and you really won't find a processor that powerful in a phone at this price, pretty much anywhere else, even the OnePlus phones that are selling for like five or six hundred dollars and have a Snapdragon 800 series. It won't compete with this at this price point. It's something very impressive that Apple's doing. Secondly, you have really the best longevity for a $400 phone kind of ties into what I said just a second ago, so you can buy this, knowing that you'll have updates for a very long time, whereas maybe an Android phone, you could expect to get two or three years out of it before it stops really getting updates.

This one is definitely going to be supported for significantly longer. Wireless charging is a great thing to see at this price point as well and of course, one of the biggest ones here is that you get the iPhone software. So if you are looking to enter the Apple ecosystem, you want to get an Apple Watch. You want to get air pods, or maybe you just want to be having the Apple software here, so you can have not only the integration with all those other devices, but also just with other people, so having iMessage having face time having the Apple security on here, you get a lot of real big benefits by using iOS that you otherwise maybe would struggle to get with Android I'll talk about this in the future. Comparing this to the two, for example, the Pixel 3a or the Pixel 4a, you want to see that make sure you go down and click the subscribe button, but otherwise having the Apple ecosystem for just $400 without having to compromise the age of your phone I.

Think it's a huge Pro here as well. Also, the true tone display is a big Pro that you know it's not the best-looking display here, but the colors are fairly accurate, and I really like how they have the true tone on their getting into the cons. Now it does have a couple drawbacks here. The first one I think the screen quality. Yes, it does have true tone and yes, it is pretty good with the battery, but it is only 720p, so that's going to be significantly lower than a lot of other phones on the market.

At this price point. This also does not have a headphone jack, which leaves you with three options. One of them is to use the included Apple earbuds, that plug in by the Lightning port on the bottom. The second one is to buy a dongle, and the third option is to get wireless earbuds, so air pods, or maybe like Joe Bros, or something like that. Another con is that you can't tap to wake.

So it's something that I always forget how much I actually do until I. Just like double tap the screen, it doesn't work for some reason. It seems like it'd, be really easy to implement that, but they didn't for some reason. So that's one small drawback here and then the last drawback I think maybe is more of an aesthetic thing, so it does have fairly large bezels on the top and bottom of this. It's not really going to be something that I think a lot of people care about.

I, think people that are looking for a $400 phone are looking for something very functional: they're, not really worried about, like the tightest bezels and the brightest screens, and like that big technical specs, that a lot of us techs, reviewers are really interested in I. Think a lot of people that are looking for this phone are going to find that this is really the perfect device. It's a good size. It fits in your pocket. Furthermore, it's a really nice lightweight here, and you end up in the Apple ecosystem.

Furthermore, it's very robust, very easy to use and all at a perfect price. Honestly. So I think that overall, this phone gets an excellent rating. I think it's going to be one of the top sellers as far as phones go this year, and maybe even for years to come as well. I think that it's very exciting- and you know if you guys- do as well comment down below and let me know what you think about the new iPhone SE 2020.

If you enjoyed this review, please remember to Like and subscribe down below, as always guys, thanks for watching I'll see you next time. You.

Source : Mike O'Brien