PICTURE PERFECT

iPhone Xs and iPhone Xs

USUALLY the latest iPhone would get top billing in any round up of new Apple devices – but this year I think it’s been overshadowed by the watch.

That’s not to say the new iPhone Xs and iPhone Xs Max are duds. They are the best iPhones ever made.

This is an ‘s’ year, which usually means incremental speed bumps here and there, inside the same case as last year’s model. That might look like the situation here, but we have a more to talk about with the Xs models, especially with regard to its all new camera.

Before we get to that, let’s talk about how the phones look, and the first thing to say is the Xs looks and feels just like an iPhone X. The Xs Max (as the name suggests) is bigger – a 6.5in screen as opposed to the 5.8in of the Xs.

The screens are OLED panels, offering true black and high-contrast. They look great.

The two-camera systems on the back are all new. The sensors, one behind a wide lens, the other behind a telephoto lens, boast the same number of pixels (12MP), but they are bigger and deeper allowing better light capture and better low-light images.

The new A12 Bionic chip inside these phones runs a Neural Engine – the brain behind Apple’s machine learning system. It helps the phone understand what it is seeing and make decisions on how best to treat it.

Really incredible on-the-fly HDR image capture is one of the Xs’s party tricks. Essentially it takes several images and stitches them together so that all areas are nicely exposed.

The camera can also capture depth info, and apply a special effect which blurs the background just like a DSLR (digital single-lens reflex). New to the Xs is the ability to control that blur and edit it after the photo is taken.

So – the best iPhone ever made, with the best camera in any smartphone. There are other refinements I have not even touched on – four mics to capture real stereo audio while filming, better wireless charging, better water resistance, and a faster graphics chip among them.

If you buy one of these phones, you will not regret it.

The iPhone Xs costs £999 for a 64GB version, up to £1,349 for a 512GB. The Xs Max costs £1,099 for 64GB, up to £1,449 for the 512GB version. They come in silver, space grey, and gold. See apple.com/uk/iphone-xs