1. Introduction2. Design & Display3. Performance & Software4. Camera & Battery5. Closing Thoughts6. View All Pages

Camera

Here we present a gallery of different photos taken with the iPhone 8 Plus. They have not been edited at all – either on-phone or using Lightroom/Photoshop, so what you see is what you get.

The 12MP camera – or cameras, I should say – are clearly very capable. In fact, the 8 Plus probably has the best camera of any smartphone I have ever used – subjectively speaking, at least.

A new favourite feature of mine is Portrait mode. This actually uses both wide-angle and telephoto lenses to create a lovely depth-of-field effect while ensuring that your subject is absolutely razor-sharp. There are also different lighting modes to play about with here, including ‘natural', ‘contour' and ‘stage lighting', which enables you to change the whole tone of the photo. Your Instagram game is about to go up a level with this phone…

Battery

Unfortunately, there is no definitive benchmark for testing a phone's battery life, but after using the 8 Plus for over a week, I am confident its battery is definitely up to the task.

With phone brightness left on auto, ringer and speaker volumes set to 50%, I could not drain the battery life past 20% come 10pm when I would re-charge the phone. This was with me using it is my daily driver, too – answering calls, WhatsApping, checking Twitter, you name it.

As far as phones go, this is decent. I reckon the 8 Plus benefits from the 1080p – not 1440p – display, while the 6-core processor can choose between using two high-power cores (for gaming and the like) or 4 lower-power cores which obviously aids battery efficiency while performing menial tasks like emailing.

Lastly, a new feature of the iPhone is its support for wireless charging. In a move that may surprise you, Apple has actually incorporated support for Qi charging – rather than implementing their own proprietary standard – so that is a definite plus. I wasn't able to try this out myself, but the feature could be very useful for some.

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