APPLE iPHONE XR

From £749 apple.com

Last year, Apple declared that the iPhone X’s design was the future. But it was also much more expensive than previous flagship iPhones. Now, the iPhone XR brings that design at a price more people will be willing to pay, but it’s still packed with flagshiplevel tech from the XS.

Still, starting at £749 instead of the £999 of the 5.8-inch iPhone XS means some savings had to be made by Apple. The biggest change is the screen: here, you get a 6.1-inch LCD screen (which is easier to use one-handed than the 6.5-inch screen of the iPhone XS Max) with a resolution of 828x1792. That’s nowhere near as detailed as the 1242x2688 display in the iPhone XS Max, and being LCD instead of OLED means you don’t get the same rich HDR depth, though the brightness is the same for both.

All that said, the screen in the iPhone XR is a million miles from being bad in any way – it’s still sharp enough, it’s vibrant, and the widecolour support is gorgeous. It also has the brilliant True Tone feature that makes it much easier on the eyes. All that said, it’s just not quite as lifelike as the XS’s screen. You can also get a higher-res OLED screen from the likes of the Huawei P20 Pro, which is now about £550.

Oddly, Apple hasn’t included 3D Touch in the screen, meaning iOS works a little differently to all its other iPhones. It’s not a massive deal, but if you’re used to it, it’s a shame to lose it.

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The camera is a single-lens wide-angle affair, and is one of the best in the industry right now, capturing so much light and detail.

You get Portrait mode here, but it’s different to other iPhones: it only works on people by default, and it frames differently, because it uses the wide-angle lens rather than the telephoto lens of the XS. This means it takes brighter photos with more detail in Portrait mode, but if you get a close-up of someone’s face, their features get bulbous from lens distortion. It’s still an excellent camera, but we prefer the more flexible dual-camera system on the XS.

Performance is best-in-class – it includes the most powerful phone chip on the planet, and is super fast. That includes the new generation of Face ID, which is impressively accurate.

Even better, the XR actually has the best battery life of any iPhone, lasting about a day and a half of average use. This is no cut-back iPhone. From build to speed, it’s the real deal.