Review Iphone 7 and Iphone 7plus

This whole thing might sound like a gimmick, and it sort of feels like one for a few minutes. After that, the "what do I do with this?" factor falls away and the optical zoom just becomes a handy trick to have at your disposal. The photos turned out great too, though you might notice some differences in the colors and exposure if you take comparison shots with both of the iPhone 7 Plus's cameras. The secondary telephoto camera still shoots 12-megapixel photos, but it has a slightly wider f/2.8 aperture. Basically, it doesn't let as much light in, so the photos come out a little different. Avid photographers might take issue with these minute changes; everyone else need not worry. For now, this is the only trick the 7 Plus has that the smaller 7 doesn't, but that'll change soon. Apple's going to update it with a feature that lets you play with depth of field when you're shooting portraits, so you can get a little more bokeh going on.



Mashable Senior Tech Correspondent Raymond Wong has a separate review of iOS 10, but so much of the experience of using the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus is tied to the update that I can't ignore it here. First of all, slide-to-unlock is gone. Instead, iOS 10 asks you to press the non-moving Touch ID button. From the lock screen, sliding the screen to the left opens the camera. It took me a while to get used to this. Register your fingerprint with the phone and you’ll never have to think about this again; just put your finger on the Touch ID button, press once and the iPhone 7 or 7 Plus will unlock. If you slide your home screen to the right, you’ll see the new widget screen with Spotlight search at the top. Notifications, which pop up on screen and can be revealed with a swipe down from the top, also get this new, richer treatment. At first, I didn’t like this. I missed iOS 9’s more concise look. Eventually, I came to appreciate the extra detail and, sometimes, level of interaction I got from some app notifications. Twitter, for instance, shows me a new follower notification and offers me the ability to “say hello” in Twitter without even opening the app. Photos also got a bunch of updates, including the new Memories, which is already hard at work giving me collections of my best photos in attractive slideshows that even include music. Memories employs computer vision to analyze each photo to identify the people and objects in them as well as the places where I took them. Most of the choices Memories makes are good, but some are silly. It should know better than to include screenshots in slideshows. I suspect it needs to learn more about my photo habits before I trust it to refine my photo presentations. One of the other big iOS 10 highlights is the new Messages. Digital Touch, which was first introduced on the Apple Watch, has made its way to the iPhone. Now I can quickly add photos, videos, heartbeats, taps and even doodles to my messages. Many of the animations, though, are lost when I send them to someone not yet on iOS 10 or on an Android phone. The heartbeat I sent to my wife’s iPhone 5S showed up as still image of a blurry heart. I’m sure this will be a lot more fun when everyone upgrades.



Another year, another high-powered A-series chip to play with. The iPhone 7 and 7 Plus both run the company's new A10 Fusion, a quad-core chipset that pairs two speedy CPU cores with two longer-lasting ones that use 20 percent of the power the others do. It's easily the fastest chip Apple has ever stuck in a mobile device, beating out even the 9.7-inch iPad Pro's A9X processor. More important, there's basically zero difference in performance between the 7 and 7 Plus, even though the smaller version has 2GB of RAM, versus 3GB on the Plus.

Let’s briefly address the elephant in the room: the removal of the headphone jack. After a weekend using the 7 Plus as my primary phone, I can’t help but feel that Apple jumped the gun on ditching support for our collection of headphones that we’re used to working easily with everything. We might not miss it in a couple of years as wireless headphones become more common, but the world isn’t quite ready yet.

Without question, Apple’s FaceTime HD camera produces better, more realistic (which may or may not be a good thing) and sharper selfies than I got on the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus, and on the Samsung Galaxy S7. The Retina flash is still there, too, and does a decent job of brightening low-light selfies, but natural light will always look better.

The attempt at a major leap is on the iPhone 7 Plus. Instead of a single lens and sensor, the 7 Plus has two: the same f/1.8 28mm wide-angle lens as the iPhone 7, and an f/2.8 56mm telephoto lens. These cameras operate simultaneously; they’re always working together. Right now, what this means is that you can switch to a true 2x zoom by tapping on a button, which is very nice. You can also digitally zoom the 1x lens to 2x, where the telephoto takes over, and then digitally zoom the 2x lens to 10x. Digital zoom is still digital zoom; anything past 4x definitely looks like what you’d expect from grainy digital zoom.

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