The First Glance
With a more appealing look, a more comprehensive approach to 5G, decent cameras, and a performance that is better than any android phone, Apple iPhone 12 is here with a bang. The market competition for smartphones is getting harder every day. Still, the iPhone presents itself as being the perfect phone for a lot of people.
This time Apple ha also released a smaller and cheaper model by the name of iPhone 12 mini. For those who are all about the telephoto zoom, Apple has released iPhone 12 Pro. All of the variants of iPhone 12 collectively have flipped the whole smartphone game.
Apple iPhone 12 Price & Availablity
The iPhone 12 can be bought from your nearest official Apple store or other carriers too. The unlocked device with 64GB of memory will cost you around 829 bucks but you can get it for 799 bucks through T-Mobile, AT&T, or Verizon, whatever suits you better. The price rises when you opt for more memory space, that being said, the iPhone 12 with 128GB will cost you around 879 bucks while the one with 256GB of storage has a price tag of 979 bucks. Moreover, if you have an old iPhone, you can easily trade it with the new iPhone 12. Of course, you will have to pay the difference of up to 230 bucks and also, make sure that your phone is eligible for a trade.
Let’s talk about the New Design!
We all know that the physical design of the iPhone gets altered very often by Apple. So, whenever the design gets altered even a little bit, it becomes highly noticeable by the public. This time, Apple has introduced the flat-edge design for the iPhone 12.
Sure, the smooth edges look good enough and provide a welcome break from the previous few years of rounded iPhones. Furthermore, they increase the iPhone 12’s reliability in tandem with Apple’s new Ceramic Shield material, while previous iPhones’ rounded frames simply make them more delicate.
Furthermore, The 6.1-inch iPhone 12 is a hair taller than it needs to be. We consider the 5.8-inch scale to be the ideal balance between monitor real estate and pocket-ability, but Apple has abandoned the form factor with the iPhone 12 model. Many looking for a more portable handset will now have to settle for the 5.4-inch iPhone 12 mini. And, while we applaud Apple for producing a compact flagship phone in the year of our lord 2020, We can’t help but think a 5.4-inch display is a little too little for modern consumers.
The iPhone 12 comes in 3 colors; black, white, and red. Although a mildly small notch would have looked so much better in our opinion we love that Apple finally shredded away from the bezels. What’s amazing is that there is no difference between the iPhone 12 and the iPhone pro in regards to the quality standards and luxury caliber. For instance, the water-resistance standard (IP68) is the same in both of the variants and the ceramic shield is too present in both models.
Is the Mag-safe gonna stay here or is it just a trend?
While the wonder of magnets continues to amaze the world’s best minds, Apple has incorporated them into the architecture of the iPhone 12. A centrally mounted magnetic ring on the back of the iPhone 12 enables Apple’s new MagSafe accessory ecosystem, ranging from wireless chargers to add-ons like snap cases and bag accessories. There’s nothing unique about Apple’s wireless charging brand here. The company’s $30 MagSafe charger uses the same Qi standard as every other wireless adapter in every other phone. It only has magnets. Your iPhone 12 will continue to work with any existing wireless charger or Qi adapter. However, to get the best 15-watt levels you will need a 1st or 3rd party solution that includes MagSafe.
The bad news is that MagSafe takes longer to charge than Apple’s 20W mobile charger. Far much slower. The iPhone 12 can be charged to a capacity of 50 percent in 28 minutes using the 20 W fast charger. On the other hand, it took one hour to charge with the 15 W MagSafe. That doesn’t rule out the MagSafe philosophy, which makes perfect sense. Magnets help in positioning an iPhone 12 on chargers and make accessories easier to get attached and detached. And it’s certainly easier to charge your phone by placing it on a surface that automatically aligns itself precisely instead of fiddling with a tiny Lightning connector on the bed.
We think further testing and third-party involvement will be required before MagSafe can achieve its full potential. For instance, let’s consider the leather wallet accessory. It’s a brilliant idea, and we are sure some iPhone owners will appreciate it. However, the magnets for the iPhone 12 are not sturdy enough to hold your wallet in place in all situations. The pressure of pulling the iPhone 12 out of your jeans pocket would be enough to pull the wallet out of the center several times.
Apple iPhone 12’s All-New Display
The iPhone 11s LCD touchscreen has undoubtedly been the Achilles heel of Apple’s beginner’s level premium iPhones for the past few years, but that’s no longer the case with the iPhone 12 thanks to a new OLED Super Retina display (6.1-inch XDR). This display has a resolution of 2532 x 1170, which greatly improves the clarity of the screen content compared to the 1792 x 898 screen on the iPhone 11s. It’s also HDR10 certified, so you can view videos captured with the device’s Dolby Vision-enabled rear camera as they should be viewed.
When we watched the trailer for the next Monster Hunter movie, we got struck by the fidelity of the black diablo’s scales, horns, and teeth that shimmered in the desert sun. The explosion also stands out from the otherwise bright daytime scene in a way that wouldn’t have looked quite as attractive on the iPhone 11s’ LCD screen, which cannot display true black color.
The display screen in the iPhone 12 is not entirely perfect, and the reason is plain to all of us who have used the latest Galaxy, Pixel, or OnePlus handset for some amount of time. Following months of rumors to the contrary, Apple opted to forego excessive refresh-rate LCDs in all of the new iPhone 12 models. Over the past year, high refresh rate displays have become very common among the flagship smartphone space.
As a result, the animations aren’t as smooth, and touches and scrolls don’t react with the same immediacy on the new Apple phones as they do on the 90Hz Pixel 5 or 120Hz Galaxy S20. Although the iPhone 12 is indeed more powerful than those models, this is something Apple will have to address when the iPhone 13 is out.
Talking about the display brightness, upon placing the phone under the light meter, the top intensity of the display light was recorded up to 569 nits. This score is less than the previously estimated 625 nits. Upon rendering the RGB color space the iPhone 12 was able to render out 114.5%. This certainly indicates that the display has no oversaturation and the natural hues are restrained too.
In the Delta-E color fidelity test, the iPhone 12 received a score of 0.29, which is surprisingly lower than the 0.22 obtained by the iPhone 11. (Higher numbers suggest more precise hues.) Nonetheless, the colors looked fitting to the eyes, and the transition to OLED alone made this a huge jump forward from the previous generation of displays.
Click – Click, the night shots have gotten better!
From the outside, it seems that not much has changed in the iPhone 12 camera unit. The dual-lens back cameras are arranged similarly to the ones like last year, and both the wide and ultra-wide lenses are assisted by 12-megapixel sensors.
However, don’t let your eyes fool you; because improvements have been made. The main camera, in particular, now has a new 7-element architecture with a /1.6 aperture, the highest in an iPhone to date. Both of these improvements result in a 27 percent increase in low-light efficiency, which, when combined with advances in Smart HDR and Deep Fusion, can lead to more detail in even the most challenging lighting environments.
Upon taking some night shots from iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 12, we noticed that each of the images captured dramatic, breathtaking night scenes, but the iPhone 12 rendition is marginally cleaner overall. Nonetheless, the iPhone 11 Pro outperforms the newer device by a small margin.
Having said that, Apple has some work to do. In comparison, Google seems to have more decent results at night shots, based on how the iPhone 12’s best results correspond to the Pixel 5’s. Although Apple’s software emphasizes object borders, giving all in the frame a little more depth and contrast, Google’s algorithms produce a universally more noticeable outcome with much less total noise. There’s some unsightly vignetting along the edges of the iPhone 12 night shot that isn’t present in the Pixel’s night shot.
While taking some daytime shots, the iPhone 12’s rear camera gives fabulous results. The color treatment is way more sharp and realistic than the Samsung Note 20. Whether it is the deep blue noon sky or the orange and yellow dusk time sky, the color saturation is flawless, leaving behind the Samsung, which always gets left behind due to the post-processing of the pictures.
We used the iPhone 12 and Pixel 5 to capture a shot of a painting on canvas to test the capability of Apple’s Deep-Fusion mode, which prefers scenes with granular information in a medium-light environment. Deep-Fusion is programmed to combine multiple exposures of varying lengths for optimum sharpness, but we were shocked to see that Google’s smartphone produced the most accurate image quality here, generating the canvas’s hatch-work surface with a crispness that the iPhone 12 wasn’t able to come equal to. However, we believe iPhone’s overall color treatment and the warmth effect gives out to the reds, whites, and neutral-toned backdrop rendered a more appealing shot.
All in all, the iPhone 12 ranks at the top of its price range in terms of camera output, but it isn’t the greatest in some situations. As far as the night shots are concerned, we’d prefer the Pixel, which can capture the same difficult image with a lot of less noise.
Apple iPhone 12 Performance Review
Equipped with the 5-nm processor, the iPhone 12 gives out a top-notch performance that never disappoints. We all know that the A13 Bionic chip that came inside the iPhone 11 was way faster and efficient than the Qualcomm 2020 chipsets, Snapdragon 865 Plus chipsets. Surprisingly, the A14 Bionic chip in the iPhone 12 is again about to give a lead to Apple.
Most smartphones take a minute or more to complete the video encoding test, which involves transcoding a brief 4K video to 1080p with the help of Adobe’s Premiere Rush software. The iPhone 11 Pro took 46 seconds to complete this encoding test, while the Galaxy S21 Ultra took 1 minute and 2 seconds. Wondering what about the iPhone 12? Well, Just 26 seconds!
The Geek-bench 5 test, which tests overall cellphone’s speed, reveals that Apple’s newest CPU has a similar benefit. iPhone 12 easily gave an amazing result in this category, scoring 3,859 in the multi-core section of the benchmark. However, Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra received 3,440 points.
Apple claims that the GPU in the A14 Bionic is 50 percent quicker than the one that came in the A13. Although the most recent smartphone games do not often take full advantage of handset manufacturers’ rapid creativity, we can tell that Asphalt 9 Legends, a game that can sometimes be sloppy on certain higher-end Android phones, felt smooth and sharp on the iPhone 12.
3DMark’s WildLife graphics benchmark, which gives out tasks to the cellphones that require rendering of complicated, demanding scenes in real-time, is a stronger indicator of iPhone 12’s efficiency. In this test, the Galaxy S21 Ultra achieves a peak frame rate of 34 frames per second. In our testing, iPhone 12 achieved a whopping 39 frames per second.
Apple iPhone 12 Review: Battery Life & Charging
Apple never discloses battery capacity estimates for its smartphones, making it difficult to derive any insights on reliability from a spec sheet. According to the latest teardown, the iPhone-12 might be powered by a 2,815-mAh battery, which is about 200-mAh less than the iPhone 11 Pro.
Nonetheless, larger-screen iPhones usually tend to perform well in our custom battery test, in which smartphones continuously browse the web via cellular data at a screen brightness of 150-nits.
To make you understand a bit better, here’s a bit of some good old perspective. The iPhone 11 lasted 11 hours and 16 minutes, and we consider anything more than 11 hours to be really good. The iPhone 12, on the other hand, averaged 8 hours and 25 minutes in the same survey, which seems to be a noticeable decrease.
There is, though, a deeper narrative at work here. Apple claims that the iPhone 12 with an equivalent 17 hours of video playback and 65 hours of audio playback as the iPhone 11. The iPhone 11 did not, though, have to deal with 5G. And when we repeated our test with 5G turned off in favor of LTE, the iPhone 12 did noticeably better — significantly better.
On 4G, the iPhone 12 lasted 10 hours and 23 minutes — two hours longer than on 5G. If we had to speculate, the culprit could be that 5G absorbs more power than 4G, or that the narrow range of 5G networks makes it impossible for the iPhone 12 to sustain a stable 5G link, causing it to swap between 5G and 4G. It may be a mixture of both variables since we found some juggling in our research, but it’s much too early to tell for sure.
The battery situation worsens as we get closer to the elephant in the room: Apple’s decision to no longer have a charging brick and wired headphones for every iPhone going forward.
During our testing, the latest 20-watt adapter charged the iPhone 12 from 0 to 57% in 30 minutes. That exceeds Apple’s own 50% prediction, but you won’t see this much speed if you charge your new smartphone with your old 5-watt brick from previous iPhones. The iPhone 12 will now also charge wirelessly at a top speed of 15W, which is ultimately faster than Apple’s previous 7.5W requirement.
You can say whatever on how all of this should be attributed to Cupertino’s sustainability campaign, but the truth remains that prospective iPhone customers would be left without the fastest-charging option for the iPhone 12 unless they pay an extra $20 for Apple’s 20W USB-C adapter. To make matters worse, the Lightning to USB-C cable that Apple included with the iPhone 12 will not fit with older chargers and will be useless until you purchase a new brick.
The All-New IOS 14
The iPhone 12 launches with iOS 14 — Apple’s newest upgrade to its long-running smartphone platform, which introduces some very interesting and long-awaited functionality such as true widget support, a new scheme for system organization, picture-in-picture recording, simple privacy enhancements, and more.
What is arguably stronger than iOS 14 is Apple’s determination to keep existing iPhones updated with the new updates for far more years than its Android equivalents ever see. Google’s new Pixel devices are just guaranteed 3 significant software updates; in contrast, the iPhone 6S, which debuted in 2015, got iOS 14 alongside the iPhone 11 lineup just last month.
Apple iPhone 12 vs Samsung Galaxy S21
If you’re torn between iOS and Android, the Samsung Galaxy S21 is a worthy competitor to the iPhone 12. It has a finer 120Hz monitor and a stronger video zoom of 3x dual optical and 30x digital. The S21 is almost the same price as the iPhone 12 at $799.
The iPhone 12 does, however, have certain benefits, such as faster performance and excellent picture and video quality. Besides, unlike Galaxy S21, iPhone 12 has a glass back rather than a plastic one.
Final Verdict
We are somewhat undecided about the iPhone 12 right now. There is no doubt that this is a fantastic phone in general, and all of the improvements Apple has made to the most famous iPhone have been for the best. Even if it lacks a high refresh rate, the new Super Retina XDR panel is a huge improvement over previous models’ disappointing LCD panels at this price. iPhone 12 also gets high marks for its latest architecture, MagSafe system, and outstanding dual-camera system.
However, Apple’s resilience to transition in key areas remains frustrating. About every big phone manufacturer has avoided being stingy about base storage. It’s borderline criminal that the iPhone 12 only comes with 64GB of storage. Additionally, Apple has started to avoid including a battery charger.
Some will still choose to wait for iPhone 13, which is set to be released this fall and promises even faster performance and 120-Hz displays. However, the iPhone 12 is still very much worth purchasing.
The Apple iPhone 12 comes with a stunning new look, absolute 5G support, excellent cameras, and even better performance. However, the lack of a battery in the package and the small base storage space are disadvantages.
What We Like
- Impressive dual cameras
- Fastest performance in a phone
- Solid battery life
- Attractive new design with MagSafe
- Comprehensive 5G coverage
What We Don’t Like
- Only 64GB of base storage
- 60Hz display
- No charger or headphones inbox
- Digital zoom could still use work
