NEW IPHONE SE REVIEW
Today’s tech, powerful
Apple recently announced a brand new device – iPhone SE. It was a subdued launch, for a smaller, mid-cycle phone that looks exactly like a phone from 2013.
But don’t let its unspectacular rollout or its throwback design fool you: Apple knows exactly what it’s doing.
It’s a shiny little fishing lure for first-time iPhone buyers or people who feel overdue for an upgrade. Those people might be tempted by the many good Android phones that can be had for less than US$400, and Apple is taking them on more directly than it ever has before. Yes, the iPhone SE is a smaller phone, but it’s not a weak phone. It’s actually a much-improved, well-designed, small phone with great battery life.
It’s not the answer for people who have adjusted to larger phones. For people who like a small phone — and by the way, there’s nothing wrong with liking small phones. Or for people who have been holding onto their 4s or 5s phones, the iPhone SE will feel like a kickass little upgrade.
Design and looks
The SE looks exactly like the iPhone 5s. It has the same aluminum body as the iPhone 5s, the same four-inch Retina display, even the same placement of round volume buttons on the side. The edges are chamfered, a departure from the round edges of the iPhone 6s or a return to earlier iPhone designs, depending on how you look at it.
The only differences, aesthetically-speaking, between the iPhone 5s and the iPhone SE are the colors, the matte edges, and the fact that the shiny Apple logo on the back of the phone is color-matched stainless steel.
Features
It’s a little trite to describe the new phone as an “iPhone 6s in the body of an iPhone 5s,” because that’s not exactly true.
There are feature differences between Apple’s flagship phone and this one. For example, the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus support 3D Touch, which means content “pops out” on the screen when you press on it a certain way; the iPhone SE doesn’t have this feature. The iPhone 6s and 6s Plus also have better front-facing cameras, but the iPhone SE is stuck with a 1.2-megapixel sensor. The iPhone SE doesn’t have a barometer — if you care about elevation tracking.
And, technically, the flagship phones have a newer fingerprint sensor, though I didn’t notice any latency with the iPhone SE’s fingerprint sensor.
Speed
But the most important thing to know about the iPhone SE is how fast it is. Something about the pure speed of a phone in such a small body is just inherently impressive. Small, inexpensive phones used to mean compromise. The SE, as I heard one person refer to it, is a little pocket rocket. It’s corny, but it’s true. The old iPhone 5s had Apple’s A7 chip and one gigabyte of RAM. The new iPhone SE has Apple’s A9 chip, and a reported two gigabytes of RAM. It also supports modern WiFi standards, and faster LTE. It opens apps, loads web pages, and switches tasks quickly.
Let’s ignore specs for a second and put it this way: the only real hindrance to multitasking on the iPhone SE is its size, not its speed.
Battery life
This more efficient processor and new software also affects battery life, in a good way. Even though they’re the exact same size, the iPhone SE can get up to 50 percent better battery life than the iPhone 5s. Though it really takes a few weeks to get to know a new smartphone’s battery.
Camera
The new camera technology in the iPhone SE will also be a draw for people who are considering an upgrade from a 4s or 5s. The iPhone SE has the same 12-megapixel rear-camera technology as the iPhone 6s, plus it focuses and snaps photos more quickly than an older iPhone. The photos themselves, based on the dozen or so that I took with the iPhone SE, are on par with photos snapped with the iPhone 6s; colors look pretty true to life, and there’s enough detail captured in them to allow for some cropping and editing. Low-light photos taken without a flash had a fair amount of image noise. This is one area where the iPhone SE’s small size is absolutely worth bragging about, because what you end up with is a completely pocketable and powerful little consumer camera.
New features
There are other new features, too, like Apple Pay — which, despite the messiness of mobile payments in general, can be pretty useful. And you can shout “Hey, Siri” at the iPhone SE to wake up the virtual assistant, which was not useful at all.
Conclusion
New iPhones are now introduced with such fanfare, such ridiculous levels of expectation, that anything less seems, well, less. And this much at least is true: the iPhone SE is not a tiny little engine of innovation.
It’s today’s tech in yesterday’s phone body. As with anything, we should be wary of giving too much praise to something that’s just doing its job.
But it’s also a job that literally nobody else is doing: being a small phone without compromising too much. For people who want a smaller or less expensive iPhone, the iPhone SE is just enough iPhone.