Gadgetory

so it's the fall and the fall is usually when we at the verge do a huge fancy iPhone review video and we're gonna do one of those for the iPhone 10 but this video is about the iPhone 8 and the 8 plus and that's actually the film that millions of people are gonna get on their upgrade plan and it might be the phone that you get because you don't want to pay a thousand dollars to the iPhone 10 or you just don't want to wait for what seems like pretty limited availability and there's actually a lot to talk about with the iPhone it's basically the same internals as the iPhone 10 the 88 plus have the same processor as the iPhone 10 the plus has really similar dual cameras with portrait lighting mode they've all got wireless charging and look I know Android fans are gonna be in a comment saying Android phones have had these features for years and that's true feature for feature Android has out innovated the iPhone over the past few years but when Apple ships features on the iPhone so many people get those features and actually use them but the world around us tends to change so something that wireless charging it's been around since the windows days but now that the iPhone has it you're going to see wireless charging pads everywhere actually in use look let's not dance around it the iPhone 10 looms over this review like a shadow looms over the entire industry it's apples complete redesign of what the iPhone is it's got a huge edge to edge screen it's got the face idea fen occation system there's a huge amount of changes to have iOS works but that's not this one this phone is the fourth generation of the design it will even seen since 2014 base of the iPhone 6 with a glass back I don't think it's the nicest design Apple's ever made I think that's the iPhone 4 this is just the nicest version of Vista and for most people that's fine so little has changed besides the glass back that the 8 even fits in iPhone 7 cases perfectly the glass back makes the a noticeably heavier than the 7 but I like it the glass is way less slippery than aluminum and that combined with the increase in weight just makes the whole thing seem more solid and less likely to fly out of your hand like the 6 and the 7 Apple says it's reformulated to glass in the back to be stronger than ever but I've already slightly scratched the 8 plus we'll see what happens when millions of people around the world start dropping these things Apple gave me the gold and silver phones and the silver is pretty familiar but the gold is definitely a matter of personal taste the back isn't white it's a very 70s looking cream color of it I'm not relating to you but it's apparently very trendy and several people my office really liked it and you'll notice that doesn't say designed by Apple in California in the back or just I phone all the small print has been moved in the software or onto the paperwork and box which Apple said it had to get approval by regulatory agencies around the world to do it's variable okay but let's be real here the iPhone 8 is fundamentally the fourth generation of the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 is far from the most beautiful iPhone Apple has ever made we've been calling out the basic clunkiness of the 6 design since the 6 came out in 2014 this might be the first iPhone that's better in a case actually I think it's fair to say that they're not the world's most beautiful phones from a visual design perspective Samsung's definitely pulled ahead this generation there's no question that the 8 is by far the most polished and refined iteration of this design but compared to the Galaxy s8 the note 8 and other Android flagships like the LG v 30 it's all just starting to feel extremely dated yes there's the iPhone 10 but apple says the eight is also a flagship phone and by those standards these huge bezels just don't cut it anymore the s8 is just a tiny bit bigger than the regular iPhone eight but it has a bigger screen than the iPhone eight plus it doesn't have a camera bump and a general feels much nicer it'll hold in your hand now I'm not in love with Samsung's software but there's no question that the s8 is a nicer piece of hardware than the iPhone eight even startup shops like essential are pushing beyond Apple here all the other edge to edge phones on the market including the iPhone 10 use oled displays but the essential phone has an edge to edge LCD the same tech the iPhone 8 uses and yeah as big silly notch but my point is that Apple's put all of its design energy into the iPhone 10 and that means the eight suffers in comparison now none of this matters if you have no intention of switching away from iOS or you're just locked into hi message like me those other phones - well not even exist for you the thing to know is that spending money in an iPhone 8 doesn't get you the cutting edge of phone design for that you'll have to get an iPhone 10 as far as that LCD screen itself goes there's a couple new things the first is true tone which uses sensors on the front of the phone to measure the ambient light and calibrate the display to show accurate colors you shouldn't notice it working when it's on since it adjusts the screen in real-time but if you click the buttons and settings you'll generally see things warm up a bit it's nice I think the iPhone LCD has long been the best phone display out there and true tone just makes it better you'll see if Apple can beat it with the OLED and the iPhone 10 the other thing to note about the hardware is that the new stereo speakers are actually great it's the same trick as on the iPhone 7 the earpiece just gets really loud to act as the other speaker but on my iPhone 8 it all gets up to 25 percent louder and it really makes a difference I cannot believe I'm saying this about speakers on a phone but I think it sounds terrific you can hear stereo separation it's pretty impressive and because it's me I'm just gonna point out there's no headphone jack which i think is a little more annoying than people are willing to admit did you know Apple's own headphone dongle is one of the lowest rated products in the Apple Store 1.5 stars I think that says something Apple's all-in on so the upgrade of Bluetooth 5 is nice it's lower power and it alone able smarter devices but there's not a ton of Bluetooth 5 devices out yet so we'll have to just test it out in the future I will say the Bluetooth settings screen in iOS 11 is still a mess managing all these wireless devices with an iPhone is no fun the glass back enables wireless charging which is based on the Qi standard Apple gave me one of the movies that we'll be selling in stores and we try to out with the cheap ads from Samsung as well and it all just worked as with all wireless charging systems so far you have to be careful to line up the phone just right before targets I didn't have any problems especially with the bigger iPhone 8 plus but some other video crew noticed they had to be a little bit more careful than they thought wireless charging is still pretty slow though in my test I saw the battery go up about 15% every 30 minutes which is especially slow when you consider that the phone has to be sitting on the pad and not in your hand the whole time and that the iPhone 8 also supports fast charging for quick tops it'll be nice at night on a bed stand and any wireless charging Lee especially useful in cars or you can just put the phone on the charger connect wirelessly to Bluetooth and be on your way without any cables at all we tried it in this Prius with a Qi charger and it worked fine although I will say I only got about 15% more charge in an hour and the phone got pretty warm but don't get too excited especially if you use car plug right now the only car in the market that supports both wireless charging and wireless carplay is the BMW 7-series every other carplay user is going to be plugging in until they get a new car Apple has made some big changes to how the camera works in the iPhone 8 and 8 plus and it's hard not to see them as responses to the galaxy s 8 and pixel pulling ahead of the iPhone 7 like Samsung images are more saturated by default although Apple says they're still aiming for realism instead of the extreme top of the s8 an HDR is just on all the time like the pixel you actually can't turn it all in a quick head-to-head test where we just took it all the phones out and shot an auto without messing with the settings I think the iPhone 8 seemed to produce the best overall images on average with less smoothing and better colors but we'll do a much deeper comparison test in the future after the pixel 2 comes out the big new feature is something called portrait lighting on the iPhone 8 plus which lets you mimic the complexity of all of this professional in software there's a few modes there's one called studio another one called contour and a very dramatic effect called stage which you can also do in black and white I asked the Verge's creative director to explain what's going on here and here's his take real studio lighting creates shape and definition by balancing the output of different lights in different positions around your subject Apple is using its software to try to do the same thing studio mode fills in the shadows the contour mode crunches those shadows and adds contrast and stage mode dramatically darkens the background to emphasize the face Oh which is pretty clever portrait lighting isn't perfect the system seems to just cut faces out of the background and apply filters to them and it's pretty easy to get some whacky results but portrait lighting is also in beta and it's not like most people have Studios like this available to play around in so it's a lot of fun and you should expect to see it on your Instagram a whole bunch just don't expect it to be perfect inside the iPhone eight and eight plus there's the new AAA 11 Bionic processor which is the same chip in the iPhone 10 why is it called Bionic Apple told me it realized it was losing a branding battle by having boring chip names like a7 and a8 and when I added the word fusion to the a-10 last year people started talking about it so hey 11 Bionic sure marketing speak aside it should be no surprise the a11 is lightning fast Apple is at the forefront of chip design and performance and a11 has a new performance controller that manages six active cores two high-performance cores and for high efficiency cores early benchmarks suggests the iPhone eight is faster than a10 fusion in the iPad pro and even the Intel Core i7 powered 13 inch MacBook Pros but really it's what you do with all that power that matters and honestly I didn't notice some huge performance boost from the iPhone 7 when I did basic things like browsing the web watching videos and taking photos I played a few games everything seemed fast and fluid my opinion is that Apple sells iPhones for years after they're released the iPhone 6s is still in the lineup for example so all this extra power just feels like Headroom for the future and not something you immediately sense going from year to you where you do get a sense of the extra performance is when you try new apps that use Apple's AR kit and iOS 11 there aren't many out there yet but I got to try some early versions of a measuring app an app that teaches you about the human heart a stargazing app and of course an app that puts Thomas the Tank Engine in the room with you these early AR demos are really cool and they're fun to play with but the novelty was a fast especially since you're holding a phone out in front of you the whole time Apple's not making a huge deal about AR just yet but it's clearly in the lead right and it's exciting to think about what happens when AR goes beyond these early experiments can turns into just another tool developers can use to make their apps work better speaking of iOS 11 it's a pretty big update we'll do another video that dives deep into all the features but part of the fun of a new iPhone is using an updated version of iOS and iOS 11 is no different you'll notice chunkier fonts everywhere and redesigns of most major apps the App Store is much nicer now with big cards and even some blog like write-ups of interesting apps and games the new control center makes a ton more sense and offers a lot of customization options my favorite thing is that airplane mode is now sticky so you can have it leave Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on and just turn the cell radio on which is perfect for flights where you're wearing Bluetooth headphones and connected to the Wi-Fi notifications are also been redesigned slightly although Apple doesn't think you should actively manage them so you still kind of can't either these screen shots are really cool now they slide to the bottom of the screen and you can tap on them to annotate them instantly which I love and there's a new files app which lets you finally work with files and services like iCloud and Dropbox directly well they're still not getting real access to the actual file system of a phone Siri sounds a lot nicer as well my name is Siri although Siri is still Siri I don't understand and I didn't get any better answers to my various questions I'm afraid I don't know the answer to that but overall iOS 11 is a really solid update and if you have an iPhone 7 you might not miss any of the iPhone eights features once you have it oddly the iPhone 8 and 8 plus have slightly smaller batteries in the iPhone 7 and 7 plus an apple says both phones should last about the same on a charge as the older models though partially because the a 11 chip is more efficient than the intent both my iPhone 6s and iPhone 7 dropped battery life pretty quickly though so I have to see how the eights do over time but in these first few days of testing everything seems just about the same as before with just under a day of standard use on a charge the battery drained far more quickly I ran a our apps non-stop which makes sense and you can add the switch for low-power mode to control center now which is very convenient if you routinely need to save them out I said at the beginning of this video but the iPhone 10 looms over this review like a shadow and I think that's really true especially because the iPhone 8 is kind of expensive it's $50 more than the iPhone 7 was this time last year the regular iPhone 8 starts at six hundred ninety nine dollars the iPhone 8 plus with 256 gigs of storage it's all the way up at nine hundred and forty nine dollars that's just fifty dollars less than an iPhone 10 so big question who is this phone for and I think the answer is that it's for waves of upgraders if you have an iPhone 6 or 6s you're on an upgrade plan with your carrier you're on Apple's upgrade plan you're just gonna get this phone you've been paying for it up front this whole time and you're gonna be really happy it's a major upgrade to what you have today but if you have an iPhone 7 plus and you're thinking about spending nine hundred fifty dollars on an iPhone 8 plus don't do that wait for the iPhone 10 it's a much bigger upgrade than what you've had now I think all of this means the iPhone is just kind of a commodity this is the default phone for a lot of people and a default phone this good is actually pretty great but if you're the kind of person who wants the latest and greatest you should wait [Laughter]