Apple iPhone 12
Which one should you buy?
PRICE 64GB, £666 (£799 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk
Let’s put the iPhone 12 in context. Back in 2007, the first iPhone had a 3.5in 320 x 480 screen and a two-megapixel camera that, at the time, seemed a novelty more than a practical way of capturing memories. Today, the iPhone 12 is the only consumer device that can capture 10-bit Dolby Vision video footage.
This sort of progress is only made possible by continually taking small, steady steps. The iPhone 12 is another incremental advance. The most obvious change is the new look, with the iPhones of 2020 reprising the getup of the ten-year-old iPhone 4, but much else is new too. Apple’s A14 Bionic chipset for starters: this six-core system-on-a– chip (SoC) is notable not only for the fact
that it’s supposedly 50% faster than
the A12 Bionic, , but also that it’s the world’s first 5nm processor.
The iPhone 12 is smaller and lighter than its predecessor, and Apple claims more durable thanks to the new Ceramic Shield glass on the front and a tougher glass on the rear. Despite having the same size display (6.1in), it’s now sharper thanks to a higher resolution and Apple has switched to Super Retina XDR AMOLED tech.
The camera still consists of three lenses, but there’s a wider, brighter aperture and a new seven-element lens arrangement on the main camera, plus that ability to capture 10-bit Dolby Vision HDR video.
And the design isn’t the only thing Apple has resurrected with the iPhone 12. MagSafe also makes a return: wireless chargers and other accessories now have the ability to snap magnetically to the rear.
Perhaps the biggest news, though, is the addition of 5G support. Although coverage is still patchy ( see p130), this means the new iPhone 12 and its three siblings are future-proofed. You may not get 5G today, but if it’s switched on in your area, you know your iPhone 12 will be ready for it.
It’s just as well Apple has improved so much
this year because prices for the iPhone
12 have risen, , from a base £729 79 in 2019 9 to £799 in 2020. Disappointingly, that doesn’t buy you any more base storage: your options are still 64GB, 128GB or 256GB, with prices rising to £849 and £949 as you increase the amount. As always, you can’t do this yourself because there’s no way of expanding via microSD.
Slimmer by design
When I said the iPhone 12 takes inspiration from the iPhone 4, I wasn’t kidding. This is the first iPhone since then to have flat sides and glass at the front and back. I rather liked that edition of the iPhone and I like this one even more. The frame is finished in matte aluminium, while the Pro models are adorned with gleaming stainless steel.
The iPhone 4’s black forehead and chin bezels have long-since been banished in favour of an edge-to-edge screen, and the bezels that remain have been slimmed down. This results in a more elegant-looking handset and also one that’s smaller than the iPhone 11.
It’s surprisingly svelte and light, weighing 15% less than its predecessor at 164g. You can actually feel the difference in your pocket. The one area the phone doesn’t hold an advantage over last year’s model is in
“You may not need 5G today, but when you want to make the step in a year or so, you know your iPhone 12 will be ready for it”
the choice of colours. Instead of six, there are five to pick from here: blue, green, white, black and the healthcare-helping Product Red.
The buttons, speaker grille and Lightning connector all reside in their usual positions, as does the square camera bump, and the phone is still IP68 dust and water-resistant, which means it can be submerged in up to 6m of water for 30 minutes.
What you can’t see is that Apple has supposedly improved the toughness of the glass on the front and the rear of the iPhone 12. The front is protected by Corning’s Ceramic Shield glass, which, Apple claims, is four times more drop-resistant than before. The rear glass, which has a polished finish on the iPhone 12 (and the iPhone 12 mini), is less durable and only two times more drop-resistant. Given that most people will be slapping a case straight on their new pride and joy, however, I think that’s a fair trade-off.
The other invisible design improvement is MagSafe. Embedded magnets in the iPhone 12’s rear panel make it possible to attach accessories securely to the back of the phone. The main one at launch is the 15W wireless MagSafe Charger (£39), a puck that snaps onto the phone without any of the usual “is it/isn’t it charging?” of previous wireless chargers.
There’s also a magnetic credit card holder you can attach directly to the rear of the phone or through your case. And the really clever thing is that, along with a couple of extra sensors – a magnetometer and custom NFC chip – the phone can recognise what type of accessory is attached.
Screen boost
Apple has made a big change to the display. Although the size remains 6.1in, Apple has changed the panel type to AMOLED – now all iPhones are using this technology, not just the Pro models – and it has upped the resolution from 828 x 1,792 (326ppi) to 1,170 x 2,532 (460ppi).
You probably won’t see the difference in sharpness without pressing your nose up against the screen, but you’ll notice the panel’s inky black level and a claimed 1,200cd/m2 peak brightness in HDR playback. The iPhone 11, for reference, was only rated at 625cd/m2.
It supports all the standards you can think of, including HDR 10, HDR 10+, HLG and Dolby Vision. Naturally, that means it’s a wide-gamut display, capable of reproducing most of the P3 colour space.
In testing, the display performed at the iPhone’s usual excellent level, with a colour accuracy average Delta of 0.9 in the sRGB colour space. I measured a 1,090cd/m2 peak brightness level for highlights during HDR playback, so not quite meeting Apple’s claims but close enough.
One drawback worth noting is that the iPhone’s display doesn’t have the 90 Hz or 120Hz refresh rates of ri val phones such as the
Go ogle Pixel 5 ( see p62) and On ePlus 8T ( see p63). If you do buy an iPhone 12, don’t use a friend’s 90Hz or 120Hz Android phone or you’ll end up envying their smooth scrolling experience.
Camera collection
There’s no change to the number, type or resolution of the three cameras in the iPhone 12, but Apple has made improvements across the board. At the rear is a pair of cameras: one wideangle, one ultrawide, which are both capable of capturing 12-megapixel images. The main camera has a brighter f/1.6 aperture and a seven-element lens. The ultrawide is the same as last year (f/2.4, 120° field of view) – as is the front camera (12-megapixel, f/2.2).
“On the front is Corning’s Ceramic Shield glass, which, Apple claims, is four times more drop-resistant than before”
“The iPhone 12 is more than a collection of benchmark numbers, however – it’s the product of 13 years of development and it shows”
Most of the improvements come courtesy of the iPhone 12’s A14 Bionic SoC. Apple’s “Night mode” is now available across all three lenses, where previously it was only available on the main camera, and Deep Fusion – where the camera takes several different shots, including one with a longer exposure, and combines them to produce the “best” version – is available across all three too.
The iPhone 12 doesn’t have the radical new sensor-shift optical image stabilisation (OIS) of the iPhone 12 Pro Max but it does have regular lens-based OIS on the main camera and delivers fully stabilised 4K video recording at 60fps.
The headline feature, of course, is that 10-bit Dolby Vision video recording. This doesn’t kick in unless you record in 4K at 30fps; you only get extended dynamic range video recording at 60fps. The UI doesn’t make this obvious, but in the right circumstances it can produce stunning results.
That said, last year’s iPhone was also great at capturing video and you won’t see a huge difference – even when viewing the clips on a Dolby Vision-enabled display. Footage looked ever-so-slightly brighter and cleaner in 4K 30fps Dolby Vision shot on the iPhone 12 versus the iPhone 11, but the difference isn’t night and day.
The same goes for the main camera. You’ll mostly see the benefits of the brighter aperture in dim conditions, where there’s a slight boost in colour fidelity and less noise in the iPhone 12’s shots. Otherwise, both this year and last year’s iPhones perform near identically.
Conversely, while the other cameras are the same as last year, the difference in having Night mode and Deep Fusion available to both of the other cameras makes the world of difference. The photos I captured in the early morning light showed that applying Night mode to the wide-angle camera brightens and cleans things up no end.
The big question is: can the new iPhone camera compete with the likes of the Pixel 5 and Google’s stupendous computational photography nous? For portraits, Google does things better. The iPhone 12 still struggles, even in good light, to gain the perfectly clipped look to portraits that the Pixel phones pull off. In particular, it can still look fuzzy around edges.
The iPhone 12 has issues with lens flare as well. I attempted to capture photographs with a low setting sun just out of the frame to the right, but simply couldn’t avoid the phone capturing a distracting crescent of light across the left half of the shot. At dusk, streetlights and car headlights can also cause weird, floating reflections to appear across the frame.
It’s these flaws that stop the iPhone 12’s camera from being truly great, especially compared to Android rivals.
Speed trap
Performance is also a mixed bag. While the 5nm A14 Bionic SoC stretches Apple’s lead over its Android competition, and does so by a healthy margin, it still isn’t the leap I expected. Make no mistake, the iPhone 12 is a ludicrously quick phone, especially for single-core tasks (as shown by its Geekbench 5 single-core result in the graph to the right), but you aren’t going to notice any difference day to day versus, for instance, the OnePlus 8T. In fact, the OnePlus will feel smoother thanks to its 120Hz display.
More tellingly, the iPhone still can’t compete with the best phones around when it comes to battery life. In our video-rundown test, with the screen set to a brightness level of 170cd/m2 and Flight mode engaged, the iPhone 12 lasted 16hrs 30mins. For a phone with bleeding-edge 5nm silicon residing under the hood, that’s disappointing (and behind last year’s iPhone 11).
Charging speed is reasonably rapid, with a 20W Apple charger bringing up 50% charge in 30 minutes. This is a long way behind the quickest competition, though. Again, the OnePlus 8T can charge up to 100% in 39 minutes. And, as has been well publicised, Apple is no longer including the charger in the box, so if you don’t own a 20W Apple charger already that charging time could be even slower.
The iPhone 12 is more than just a collection of benchmark numbers, however – it’s the product of 13 years of development and it shows. While the iPhone 12 Pro and Pro Max offer tasty extra features, I expect that the cheaper and still feature-laden iPhone 12 will be the most popular smartphone Apple sells this year and into next.
Nevertheless, smartphone agnostics looking for the best all-rounder have many more alternatives. None have the incredible video-capture quality of the iPhone 12 and its siblings, but our favourite mid-range Android phones – including the Google Pixel 5 and OnePlus 8T reviewed this month– can compete on stills photography, features and design, and come in at prices that significantly undercut the iPhone 12.
SPECIFICATIONS
6-core 3.1GHz/1.8GHz Apple A14 Bionic processor 4GB RAM 4-core Apple graphics 6.1in AMOLED screen, 1,170 x 2,532 resolution 5G 64GB storage IP68 rating dual 12megapixel rear camera 12-megapixel front camera Wi-Fi 6 Bluetooth 5 NFC
Lightning connector 2,815mAh battery iOS 14.1 72 x 7.4 x 147mm 164g 1yr warranty