Apple iPhone 7 Plus
It might look almost the same as its predecessors, but iPhone 7 Plus has a range of updates that make it Apple’s best handset to date.
Price
Storage has doubled this year, although it’s the base storage that most people will benefit from. This is now 32GB, but the bad news is that it’s £100 more than 2015’s cheapest model, which was £619. You can buy the 7 Plus for £719. If 32GB is too small for your needs, you’ll have to go for the 128GB model that costs £819. We can see few people paying a further £100 for 256GB, although this luxurious capacity means you can use those new cameras to your heart’s content without worrying about running out of space.
Design
You may mourn the fact that the 7 Plus still looks the same, but there’s no denying that this is a great-looking phone which is superbly built and feels great in the hand. If you’re used to smaller phones, the 7 Plus can feel giant, especially when you put it in a case. It’s not a one-handed phone.
You’ll also struggle to comfortably carry it in a trouser pocket. Whereas the iPhone 7 fits easily, you’ll find that the 7 Plus is better off in the inside pocket of a coat, or in a bag. The iPhone 7 (pictured left) is on top to show the scale. We prefer the black models as the others have a white front that highlights the offset camera and light sensor.
Around the back, the 7 Plus loses some of its antenna lines for a cleaner look. On the black models the lines that remain are almost invisible. Again, our preference is the black model because it doesn’t show up fingerprints and is much more forgiving when it picks up minor scratches and scuffs. The Jet Black finish looks amazing, but is hard to keep that way.
Camera bump
Breaking up this cleaner-looking back is the larger camera bump, which now packs in two lenses: one wide-angle and the other telephoto. This means there are two 12Mp sensors and, like the LG G5, you can flip between the two in the camera app almost instantly. Apple has also changed the selfie camera at the front from 5- to 7Mp.
Home button
The home button is no longer a physical push button. It looks the same as before, but has no moving parts. Instead, you get haptic feedback from the new, larger Taptic Engine and it’s possible to set three different levels depending on whether you prefer a weaker or stronger feeling when the button ‘clicks’. It works exactly the same way it always has, though bear in mind that in iOS 10 you now have to press the button to unlock the phone: there’s no more swiping.
Water resistance
One reason for the change is that it’s one less place for water to get in: the 7 Plus is now water-resistant, so you can immerse it up to 1m for up to 30 minutes. It’s worth pointing out that this applies only to fresh water and that you shouldn’t really use it for underwater photos and video in the sea or a swimming pool full of chemicals. It means that accidentally dropping your phone in the bath or spilling a glass of water over it shouldn’t harm it.
Headphone jack
The other major change is that there’s no headphone jack. Instead, the bundled headphones come with a Lightning connector, though if you prefer to use your existing headphones, there’s a Lightning-tominijack adaptor in the box as well.
These are cheap to replace if you lose them, but it’s a shame that they’re white: the adaptor sticks out like a sore thumb if you have a black phone and your headphones have a black wire and connector. Overall, it’s a minor inconvenience that becomes a real annoyance when you want to use wired headphones and charge the phone at the same time. You can buy another adaptor which gives you two Lightning ports, but this makes things even uglier and costs around £40.
Stereo speakers
As with the iPhone 7, the Plus also gets stereo speakers. One is in the usual place on the bottom edge and the other is in the earpiece. It means the iPhone finally has decent sound. It’s particularly good when watching videos, but it’s also a boon in some games that work in landscape mode (not all do, of course).
Display
Not a great deal has changed in the screen department. It’s still 5.5in diagonally, and still has a 1920x1080 resolution. It’s also still an IPS LCD panel, although Apple has increased colour gamut. The difference isn’t massive, but it does mean that the 7 Plus has one of the best full HD
screens on any phone. It’s bright, too, at 625cd/m2, and anyone thinking that Apple should have upped the pixel count to 2560x1440 should know that few people can see the difference at normal viewing distances. 401ppi is plenty.
Performance
The iPhone 6s Plus was a fast phone, but the 7 Plus is even quicker thanks to the new A10 Fusion processor. This is Apple’s first quad-core chip in an iPhone and works on a similar principle to many Android phones in that it has two power-sipping cores that are used for basic jobs and two high-performance cores (which aren’t as battery friendly) for the more demanding stuff such as certain games and editing 4K video.
In general use, it’s hard to notice the extra speed because the 6s Plus never so much as stuttered during our year with it. However, benchmarks clearly show the significant improvement, and this will surely help in years to come as new versions of iOS become more demanding and apps really take advantage of the extra speed. Some games are already using the extra graphical power and, although the screen is small, it’s clear you’re getting almost console-quality lighting effects and detail on the 7 Plus.
Apple says the new chip is 40 percent faster, but it depends which benchmark you use. In Geekbench 4 (multicore), the 7 Plus is just shy of the 40 percent, but in the JetStream browser test, it’s actually closer to 50 percent quicker. And as you can see above, it’s a lot quicker than Google’s Pixel XL.
Battery
Can you have better performance and better battery life without making a thicker phone? Well, it turns out that you can, especially if there’s a bit of extra room where the headphone jack used to be.
The 7 Plus has a 2900mAh battery, up from 2750mAh in the 6s Plus (but down from 2915mAh in the 6 Plus – for those with longer memories). The iPhone’s own trusty calculator says this is 5.4 percent more capacity than the 6s Plus, so it’s not a great deal of difference.
And yet, in our testing the 7 Plus lasted for a mighty 10 hours and eight minutes, showing that it’s relatively meaningless to compare phones and batteries simply on their stated capacity. We never had any complaints with our iPhone 6s Plus, but retesting it now (a year old) it lasted just over seven hours in the same Geekbench 4 battery test. It’s an unfair comparison, of course, but it certainly feels like the 7 Plus has better battery life.
If you’re using it normally, you should easily get through a complete day and a morning of the next before thinking about charging it.
Cameras
The dual-cameras consist of one wide-angle 28mm equivalent lens (the same as on the iPhone 7) and one telephoto (56mm equivalent lens). When you switch to the latter it’s the same as a 2x optical zoom (28x2 = 56). There’s also digital zoom from 2x up to x10, but this is no different from cropping the image – you’re not getting any extra detail. What’s interesting is that you can drag the slider between 1x and 2x, imitating a real zoom lens and the result is a combination of optical and digital zoom.
The new cameras remain at 12Mp, but have new sensors that now support the same wider colour gamut as the screen and new lenses with an f/1.8 aperture. There’s also optical image stabilisation for photos and videos. That’s not all: the True Tone flash now has four LEDs which produce 50 percent more light and have a larger reach.
On the front of the 7 Plus is a 7Mp FaceTime HD camera, which includes wide colour capture and image stabilisation.
Apple’s custom image processor, the cameras and screen are all calibrated to work with each other, so you see the truest possible colours on screen.
Clearly, the telephoto lens is the big news here: you’re not going to notice much difference when comparing photos from the wide-angle one with those from the 6s Plus. That’s not a criticism, though. Both phones take excellent photos, and you definitely notice the benefit of the new f/1.8 lens in low light. Sure, you still need your subject to stay still to avoid blur, but when it does, you can capture some remarkably sharp and detailed images, such as this.
The telephoto lens is also usable in low light, although it has a slower f/2.8 aperture. Where it excels is outdoors in good light, delivering sharp pictures. It’s also very handy for macro photos, allowing you to
Apple’s custom image processor, the cameras and screen are all calibrated to work with each other, so you see the truest possible colours on screen
get in even closer than you can with the wide-angle camera. And we thought that was good for close-up photography (see bottom image).
Video specs are the same as for the iPhone 6s Plus, which means you’ve got a choice of 1080p at 30- or 60fps, or 4K at 30fps. It’s still a pain to switch modes because instead of having them in the camera app where they should be, they’re in the settings app. The good news is that you can flip between the cameras while recording video. And if you don’t like the jarring change when you tap the zoom button, you can instead press it and drag smoothly to 2x (or beyond if you want to use digital zoom).
Video is great quality, as ever, and the optical stabilisation lends footage a more professional look. If you want better stabilisation, consider DJI’s Osmo Mobile.
There’s also improvement at the front, with the 7Mp camera offering a little more detail than its 5Mp predecessor. And like before, you have the option of a flash: the screen momentarily overdrives to give a ‘True Tone’ flash and light you up. It’s best avoided if you can, though, just like any flash, but if light is limited, it does a good job of delivering relatively naturallooking skin tones.
Software
In this reviewer’s opinion, iOS is still the best mobile OS, and the latest version makes it even better. As well as the app updates that owners of older iPhones also get, the 7 Plus has a couple of extras. One is all the haptic feedback you get when using different controls, such as time and date selectors and even swiping to delete emails.
You’ll also get that with an iPhone 7, but exclusive to the 7 Plus is the new Portrait photo mode in iOS 10.1. This will be released shortly (it’s currently in beta), and allow you to get DSLR-style blurred backgrounds when you take photos. It uses the two cameras to understand which objects are closer and which are farther away. It uses this information to create a ‘depth’ map, which it uses to decide what to blur and what to keep in focus.
It’s intended for photos of people, and won’t take a picture unless your subject is far enough from the camera. The good thing is you see the effect in real-time, so you’ll know before you press the shutter button if it’s going to look good or not.
Verdict
The iPhone 7 Plus is an excellent phone. It’s Apple’s best yet, but it is also its most expensive yet, with a huge starting price. In some respects, the upgrades seem to justify this, but at the same time some features are arguably only catching up with what the competition has been offering for a while now – water-resistance for one. Taken as a whole, the performance, battery life, camera quality and stereo speakers are all compelling reasons to upgrade. But our advice remains much the same as for the iPhone 7: if you already own the previous generation, there’s not enough here to justify ditching a 6s Plus, especially if you’re halfway through a two-year contract. Those just coming out of contract on the iPhone 6 or 6 Plus would do well to grab a 7 Plus. Jim Martin