PRODUCT OF THE MONTH
Apple iPhone 8 Plus
With all the fuss surrounding the forthcoming iPhone X, the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus must feel like a bride and groom at a wedding where all anyone can talk about is the best man’s speech. Still, one benefit is that a starting price of £699 for the iPhone 8, and £799 for the Plus, suddenly seems quite reasonable. We give the Plus a thorough test to see whether it’s worth buying now rather than waiting for the sexier X – or plumping for the excellent Samsung Galaxy Note 8 ( see p60).
PRICE 64GB, £666 (£799 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk
Remember the good old days when Apple revamped the design of its smartphones every two years, boosting the specifications in between? Recently it has stepped outside that tick-tock development cycle. The Apple iPhone 8 Plus might be the latest, greatest iPhone (at least until the iPhone X comes along; see p58), but the design template it’s based on is now entering its fourth year.
There are tweaks – it has a new glass back, wireless charging and a dual-camera setup on the rear – but the iPhone 8 Plus looks the same as the iPhone 6 Plus did way back in 2014. The iPhone 8 Plus is, then, pretty easy to summarise. It’s the phone you buy if you’re a dyed-in-the-wool Apple fan but can’t afford the leap to the £999 iPhone X.
Vive la difference
As with most of the smartphone industry, Apple has raised its prices in 2017, making the iPhone 8 Plus more expensive than its predecessor. The cheapest iPhone 8 Plus is £799, compared to the iPhone 7 Plus’ launch price of £719 (it’s now £629). At least you get 64GB of storage in the base model versus 32GB for the 7 Plus. If you want the 256GB iPhone 8 Plus, you’ll be paying £949.
From the front, it’s impossible to see what you’re paying the extra for. The iPhone 8 Plus is so similar to the 7 Plus that you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart if the two phones were side by side, facing upwards.
The buttons, camera lenses, flash and nano-SIM card tray are in precisely the same locations as before. It’s still dust- and water-resistant to IP67 certification, it still has a Force Touch fingerprint-sensor home button beneath the screen, and there’s still no 3.5mm headphone jack.
Flip the phone over, however, and the differences become obvious. The biggie, of course, is the glass back, which looks and feels lovely. I was sent the iPhone 8 Plus in Gold, which looks a little beige in the flesh – Space Grey and Silver both look more attractive to my eyes.
The glass back is flat across most of its glossy expanse, but does curve up slightly at the edges, so there’s no sharp chamfer to dig into your palm. It’s easy to keep free of fingerprints, too. One wipe on your jeans and, bang, the smudges are gone.
It’s far too early to say how robust, scratch-resistant and shatterproof the
glass is; Apple says it’s tough, of course, but there’s no Gorilla Glass branding here to back up that claim. I’d buy a case to protect my £799 purchase, just to be on the safe side.
One of the immediately positive implications of the glass back, however, is that the iPhone 8 Plus is no longer afflicted by those ugly plastic antenna strips. You can see them on the edges at the top and bottom of the phone, but they don’t wrap around like they used to, so they’re far less obtrusive.
Other than this, and the fact that you now get wireless charging to the Qi standard (another benefit of a glass rear), the biggest physical change is that the iPhone Plus is now noticeably heavier. It weighs 205g, which is positively elephantine, even with the current trend towards bigger handsets.
Confident display
To look at the figures, you’d think Apple hadn’t changed anything about the IPS display at all. With all automatic adaptations disabled, the iPhone 8 Plus turned in a near-identical set of figures to the iPhone 7 Plus in our tests. Peak brightness reached 553cd/m2 with a full white screen in the browser, the contrast ratio is 1,365:1 (the iPhone 7 Plus achieved 520cd/m2 and 1,350:1), and colour accuracy is spot on. It’s as you’d expect from any Apple product, but no better or worse than its predecessor.
It’s certainly no better than the Samsung Galaxy S8 or Note 8 displays, all of which reach much higher peak brightness levels, use AMOLED panels and smash the iPhone 8 Plus out of the park when it comes to contrast.
Instead, the big development here is True Tone, which started out as an iPad-only feature. With True Tone enabled, the phone uses its sensors to gauge the colour temperature of the ambient light, matching the white balance of the colours onscreen.
The idea is that your brain doesn’t have to keep readjusting its perception of colour when you look away from the screen and back again,