Gadget Review: All you wanted to know about iPhone11

Apple’s iPhone Xr was the best-selling smartphone around the world past year, and its successor, iPhone 11, has been the one more users have been asking around than the iPhone 11 Pro and Pro Max, so it isn’t a surprise that the company has made some meaningful additions to the device.

Let’s try and see if the new iPhone 11 is worth that price tag and your upgrade or not.

Apart from having the most sensible iPhone name in the past two years, the iPhone 11 also comes with some of the better colours from Apple - Black, (our unit), White, Purple, Red, Yellow, and Green. The phone is made of anodised aluminium with glass on top of the screen and back of the body, similar to last year’s iPhone Xr, but with a slightly stronger glass.

The front is all black with the 6.1-inch LCD surrounded by thin (but thicker than the 11 (Pro) bezels along with the familiar notch above the screen housing front camera, infrared camera, dot projector for FaceID. The SIM card tray sits on the lower right side, power/lock button in the upper half; while the separated volume buttons and ring switcher are placed on the left near the top.

The frame around the body is all grey-ish and carries 4 antenna lines near the corners. Similar to the frame, camera region, placed on the back, is also grey. The back houses the double camera system on the left side corner, Apple logo bang in the

middle this time and there’s no “iPhone” written anywhere.

The camera protrudes from the body, and not many people may like that camera system looks. Maybe an all vertical or horizontal pattern may have given it a more subtle look, similar to what the likes of Samsung and Huawei have been doing. The bottom side sports the lightning port in the middle, with speaker on the right and mic on its left.

The phone, 8.3mm thick, does feel a little heavy (195 grams) and isn’t small by any means. Its glass is quite a fingerprint magnet, but I have seen phones that catch every fingerprint and smudges on the body quicker than this.

The 6.1-inch 1792x828 LCD is the same as last year’s. This time the screen seems slightly brighter than before, but there’s not much else that is different here.

Some may complain, and probably fairly so, it’s not exactly a full HD display (like the 11 Pro), but it does the job well enough in other areas a modern smartphone display needs to. Colours and outdoor visibility is maintained, not much to complain there, and there’s DCI-P3 wide colour support, so you don’t exactly miss out much there.

Images look good and mostly sharp, but you can only view videos in HD (though it will downscale a full HD video if you play one). With Touch Tone enabled, the display goes slightly warmer when using indoors, something that was the case last time, too, but the degree is a little lower this time.

The Battery

The device sports a 3,110 mAh battery unit, which lasted nearly a day most of the time. With moderate use on 40% brightness, the battery was around 10-15% at night. It’s definitely a bit better than the Xr mainly due to the size bump. But if you plan to play games on stretch, there’s obviously a hit and you would have to charge again during the day. While the 11 Pro users get a beefier 18 watt charger, the iPhone 11 comes with the same old little 5 watt charger, which takes way too long to charge the phone. You should spend a little more and get a bigger fast charger from Apple or any other decent maker and not use the bundled one.

The audio output on the iPhone 11 seems to be loud and clear, with the stereo output between the bottom-facing speakers and ear speakers on the notch seem to do something Apple call Spatial Audio. The phone supports Dolby Atmos. The loudspeaker on this thing is seriously good for a phone in case you plan to use them for YouTube or games. You don’t get any lightning to 3.5mm audio adapter and only get the lightning earpods in the box, which sound strictly okay.

The new iPhone 11 is powered by A13 “Bionic” chipset with 6 cores along with 6 GB of RAM. The device also brings along the new iOS 13, currently running on iOS 13.1.2. The chipset from Apple is the best performer if you’re concerned about benchmarks, especially for Single-threaded processes, but importantly in real-world usage, the phone performs really well.

If you are planning to play games like Call Of Duty or Fortnite, the phone handles it without breaking a sweat. Switching between apps and animations around the OS is fluid, phone boots in 10 seconds and webpages in Safari also load with no unexpected delays. Also, the apps install just a little more quickly than before.

The new iteration of iOS seems to have gotten to a bumpy start, but with a couple of quick (and uncharacteristic) updates from Apple, most of those bugs seem to have been fixed.

Among the major additions to the OS, is the new dark mode, which applies a dark look to the whole OS and also to every app supporting it system-wide. The default keyboard now supports swiping for input, about time, too.

Better support for Devanagari

Another little change is better support for Devanagari script (Hindi) native to the OS. There’s new Memoji, which is like your virtual avatar using emoji and your personal style, if you’re into it. You can now also download files from Safari, which can be later accessed using the Files app; a welcome addition.

Apple also introduced “Sign-in with Apple’ with iOS 13, but I couldn’t really try it for now since hardly any app or service has adopted it. This basically gives you another option to sign into a service, similar to to sign-in with Google and sign-in with Facebook, with Apple being vocal about providing better privacy for users compared to other players in the industry.

Coming to the new dual camera system, the device sports a 12 MP main camera and a secondary ultra wide camera. This is likely the biggest change from last year’s iPhone Xr.

The viewfinder, while taking photos also shows you what the ultrawide camera would capture if you would like to try that. The photos from the iPhone 11 seem less noisy and sharper from its successor.

Night Mode

Apple has also added a Night Mode, which automatically kicks in when using the camera in low-light. The output seems much nicer than what they have done earlier, even Smart HDR mode seems much improved and less oversaturated; just make sure tone is kept steady while taking shots using either of these modes.

The videos can now shoot 4K in 60FPS and appear a little more stabilised (less shaky) than before, safe to say Apple has got the lead when it comes to video recording on a smartphone for now. The camera app can now also take slow-moving videos from the front-facing 12 MP camera, called slo-fies, if you’re into it.

Concluding the review, the iPhone 11 seems a safe bet from Apple -- not changing much for its best selling phone -- but making several meaningful additions with battery, chipset, and of course the cameras.

The introductory price this time is a little lower than before at ₹ 64,990, and if you are looking for an upgrade within the same ecosystem, this seems like a good option for most iOS users.