The iPhone XR, Is It Really a PP Device?

Evren Elveren January 29, 2019 in iPhone Tagged apple, ios 12, iphone, iphone xr, iphone xr specs, iphone xs, iphone xs max, iphone xs specs, iphones xs max specs - 7 Minutes

Right now Apple is in a very tough spot with regards to their iPhones between the XS and XS Max being ridiculously expensive and sales actually going down. The iPhone XR, it’s in kind of a weird spot right now in between kind of like a troubled middle child. Overall sales for the company are falling but this is still their best selling iPhone and on the other honestly it’s a very misunderstood device it’s the cheapest of the 2018 iPhones but it’s still pretty darn expensive especially here in the Turkey where it starts at roughly 6 thousand liras ($1200) and you have the relatively low resolution IPS display compared to its siblings higher resolution OLED displays and then you have the fact that it only has a single rear camera compared to the dual rear setups that the XS and XS Max have.

I really like about the iPhone XR from an Android users perspective let’s start with the small things;

The Control Center

It’s awesome compared to Android’s quick settings menu. I actually like it a lot better it’s not as easy to customize but honestly for everyday use, everything you need is already right there by default and laid out very nicely at that including great music controls and native screen recording sure there are a lot of apps available in the Google Play Store and there are some Android phone brands that actually have included app but the iOS screen recording app by far is the best one I’ve used.

Face ID

I generally prefer a fast reliable rear-mounted fingerprint scanner as my choice of biometric security but face ID is actually pretty cool to admit it’s annoying at first but after a while this simply just becomes routine and the way it works after a while you don’t even notice it’s there using Apple pay or your banking apps face ID notifications in the lock screen they won’t even appear unless you show your face and allegedly as Apple claims they don’t get your facial data for their use as it stays locally on the device it gives you a little bit of assurance but yeah I don’t really know how to feel about it and that’s a different topic.

OS Updates

So again I use a pixel so I get Android updates very consistently and first all the time and this is really really important to me so I appreciate that the XR is no exception from Apple school system update rollouts.

iMessage, Airdrop, Airplay, The ecosystem

if you have friends or family who also have iPhones it’s just great it works very seamlessly now on to some bigger things design build quality wise.

Display

So unlike its bigger brothers the XR doesn’t have an OLED display it has a measly IPS display with a resolution of a 1792 X 828 that’s six point one inches big. Now this pretty much bothered everybody at launch when the specs came out but actually in day to day use honestly you won’t even notice the difference unless you’re deliberately pixel peeping but then our display doesn’t look bad at all I mean sure when you put it side-by-side with the XS or XS Max you might notice the difference but yeah it’s not a bother.

Camera

Camera of iPhone XR is good. There’s only a single rear camera but it’s actually the same sensor and lens as the XS and XS Max main wide camera so you’re pretty much getting the same quality. Portrait mode is affected by this since we don’t have two lenses but I think it’s still good. You also lose the telephoto lens but come on I don’t feel like I’m losing a lot since the XS and XS Max telephoto cameras aren’t as good as the main one with just one main sensor we get really clear and really vivid photos decent portrait mode 4k 60fps videos and up to 240 fps slow-motion at 1080P. Basically everything we need even in low-light the rear camera does really well whether we’re doing photos or videos video stabilization isn’t the smoothest and ever experienced in a smartphone but hey I think it’s pretty good and for selfies as well the front camera does its job really well I personally don’t really care much for the gimmicky things like an emoji or studio portrait lighting mode but the shots from the front camera are really clear detailed and bright capturing good skin tones and I like that it’s not overly processed it’s quite neutral and natural-looking compared to a lot of other phone brands especially the Chinese ones that tend to be super vivid and natural-looking selfies so that is camera

Performance

Now well it’s got the Apple’s 12 Bionic chip and three gigabytes of RAM or one gig less than the XS or XS Max but performance is still really great personally coming from a snapdragon 835 powered phone this is actually has more performance than I previously had. The A12 is an awesome chip and apple’s hardware software integration is so damn efficient you really can’t go wrong with an iphone.

Battery Life

The battery life of XR with regular daily use it just feels like it lasts forever with that low resolution screen. I mean, i guess this was always going to be the case. I’m able to go like a day and a half on one full charge even up to a full two days or more like waking up after the second night, it still has like 30% which is crazy. This is definitely the reason to get the iPhone XR or if you don’t want to spend like nine thousand liras ($1700) for a XS and add wireless charging to that and it’s just one hell of an iPhone when it comes to battery so as an Android user for most of my smartphone owning life has the iPhone XR converted me over to the Apple.

Conclusion

First of all that’s not the way I think and second of all no it hasn’t convinced me personally to get it as my daily driver but I can tell you it’s definitely our favorite iPhone out of the entire line up. The design is cool, the camera is good, but the battery life is great. So if you’re looking to buy a new iPhone we’d be a fool for not recommending the iPhone XR.