IPhone 8 review: New guts inside
Apple stuck the same old iPhone 6/7 design and packed them with new guts. A subtle change — a new glass rear panel which helps integrate wireless charging, with an elegant look.
While the 8 features a 4.7-inch Retina display with 1334x750 pixels, the 8 Plus sports a larger 5.5inch a full HD 1920x1080 pixel Retina panel. Sunlight visibility is fair as the ambient sensor comes into play to brighten and distinguish the content easily. The display is enhanced with better contrast, higher brightness and night mode for better readability and crisper colours, reducing eyestrain.
Powering the two from within is a beastly new A11 Bionic chip, touted as currently the most powerful and smartest CPU ever on a smartphone — up to 70 per cent faster than A10. Together, the six cores can work simultaneously boost performance or coordinate to consume less power and save battery. You can throw in power-hungry 3D and AR games at the iPhones and they will smoothly play them with almost no efforts — thanks to the Bionic chip that helps manage the power and performance balance between the 6 processors.
These smartphones rock the mobile photography world with a single 12MP (f/1.8) sensor on the 8, and two 12MP sensors — wide-angle (f/1.8) + telephoto (f/2.8) with 2x optical zoom on the 8 Plus — both support OIS. The iPhone 8 Plus aces the two devices in the photography mode. Combined with the power of the A11 Bionic chip, advanced photographic techniques are made easy and automatic so that you as a user are wasting less time post-processing and more time shooting your subjects. The new feature on the 8 Plus uses the ISP and the two cameras to create stunning portrait shots with DPoF enables and spotlight effects. You can click your subject against a background and convert the same into a studio, contour, stage light and stage light mono modes directly on the phone itself and within seconds. You don’t need to head to your post processing software to do any of this. The camera handles colours well — photos churn out almost true-to-life and with HDR mode by default helps enhance the images with great colours, sharpness, and luminance.
What makes the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus better over its older siblings is the new A11 Bionic performance chip, camera performance, wireless charging, NFC and a glass rear panel. So if you are planning on buying the new iPhone 8 and are reluctant because of the similar iPhone 6/7like design, we would say ‘you won’t regret it.’
The iPhone 8 Plus is available in two variants in India, with prices starting at `73,000 for the 64GB variant and going up to `86,000 for the 256GB variant. The smaller iPhone 8 is priced at `64,000 for the 64GB variant and `77,000 for the 256GB variant.