This is the iPhone XS – pronounced ’10 -S ‘, not’ waste ‘as you might think. It looks identical to the 2017 iPhone X, and you might think that not much has changed – but here are the differences.
This is an odd situation to review; When we look at an ‘S’ variant of an iPhone, we usually ask the question is it better than the now cheaper model from last year.
In 2019, however, Apple decided to discontinue the iPhone XS to make way for the iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro (its direct successor), and iPhone 11 Pro Max. In 2020 the iPhone 12 models followed (of which there are) four),With the iPhone 12 Pro, it’s the newest addition to the iPhone XS lineup – but Apple’s 2018 flagship is still a powerful device that you can buy from third-party suppliers until 2021.
Thanks to software updates, the devices also change over time. The iPhone XSThe package is much more enticing now that iOS 14 is available out of the box. It brings many new features like widgets, dark mode, and a number of app speed boosts so you can get the most out of your iPhone experience.
Each of the three have new and improved specs over the 2018 iPhones, but the latter two are also more expensive.
Aside from announcing the iPhone 11 lineup, Apple confirmed that the iPhone XS is no longer being sold – it’s being dropped from the company’s lineup, but that doesn’t mean you can’t buy it. Retailers and freight forwarders will keep it in stock for a while. So if this rating makes you excited to own it, this is still a possibility.
In 2018, the iPhone XS was launched alongside the iPhone XR – it’s a cheaper handset than the iPhone XS, but it has many of the same features, making it more impressive in many ways. Plus, unlike the iPhone XS, it’s still on sale.
iPhone XS price and release date
- Started at $ 999 / £ 999 / AU $ 1,629
- Now at around £ 629 / $ 600 / AU $ 900
- The top model started at USD 1,349 / GBP 1,349 / AU $ 2,199
At launch, the iPhone XS was priced at $ 999 / £ 999 / AU $ 1,629. The 256GB iPhone XS was priced at $ 1,149 / £ 1,149 / AU $ 1,879 and the 512GB iPhone XS was priced at $ 1,349 / £ 1,349 / AU $ 2,199.
Now we have the iPhone 11 Pro and Apple is no longer selling the iPhone XS directly. That doesn’t mean you can’t buy it, although a lot of third-party sellers are still selling the device and we still have a huge variety of iPhone XS deals that you can find.
The good news is you may find the phone a little cheaper in stores like this. Price starts at around £ 629 / $ 600 / AU $ 900 now, and you may be able to find even better deals if you’re happy to contract.
It’s worth noting, however, that the newer iPhone 11 only starts at $ 699 / £ 729 / AU $ 1,199. However, this is more of a successor to the iPhone XR than the iPhone XS. So you don’t necessarily want to upgrade. For a clear upgrade from the XS, check out the iPhone 11 Pro, which starts at $ 999 / £ 1,049 / AU $ 1,749.
main features
- New gold color option
- Same design and features as the last generation
Ordinarily in this section we would be talking about all of the new features the phone has to offer – but in this case there really aren’t that many as Apple is determinedly sticking to its strategy of bringing an S phone to market with little changes other than speed to bring improvements and some other performance hit.
That’s not to say that there isn’t some impressive and useful new hardware in the iPhone XS, but most of the benefits are not immediately apparent to the average user.
One change that is easy to spot is the new color: the gold variant is more mocha than anything, with a touch of copper in the shade, and offers another option alongside the Space Gray and Silver options.
We can only guess that it was possible because the iPhone XS body is so similar to the iPhone X that changing the process of adding a new hue wasn’t expensive or time consuming.
A12 bionic chipset
- Lots of power
- Neural Engine brings improvements
- Particularly more powerful AR functions
Apple is proud to introduce its new chipset, and for good reason: it’s one of the most powerful on a smartphone made using a 7nm process.
That might not mean much to most people, but it essentially means more transistors can be cocked onto this hexa-core CPU with two power cores and four more optimized for efficiency.
However, even those slower cores are still more powerful than all in the iPhone 6, a handset only four years old that shows how fast smartphone technology is advancing in terms of performance and efficiency.
One might wonder if that much power is really being used – and sure, if all you’re doing is browsing the internet and messaging it’s completely wasted.
However, if you want to explore the world of augmented reality, these additional transistors are available to you.
There’s also a new ‘Neural Engine’ in the mix which will allow your phone to get smarter and learn how to use it.
It adds a “smart layer” to the process that allows the handset to see things on the screen, whether you’re attaching an animoji to your head in real time during a FaceTime call or figuring out what to do to improve quality a photo is required take it.
It’s difficult to really quantify the usefulness of this improved chipset except by numbers. Running the iPhone XS through the Geekbench CPU testing process showed that they are the best performing phones we’ve ever used: 11,481 points is over 1,000 higher than last year’s iPhone X and better than any phone we tested .
This speed improvement is easy to feel in the phone as the iPhone XS is one of the fastest phones we’ve ever used.
It’s hard to tell how much of this is due to the hardware and how much is due to the improved iOS 12 software – but either way, it’s a very, very quick experience.
The A12 chipset also boosts graphical performance – gaming is getting closer and closer to console-level graphics, and we had the opportunity to test out some AR titles as well.
That said, we’re still not entirely convinced of the benefits of AR games – it’s a bit distracting for a while, but many titles still seem to lack the overall polish that more typical iPhone games like Elder Scrolls: Blades have incredible ones Game skills mixed with high-level effects.
For example, we played ElemenTao and not only was it missing a tutorial, but it was a bit clunky when we tried to play it on a desk. That’s not really the game’s fault, but rarely do we have a large table with nothing on it to play solo titles or with friends.
Yes, there will be moments when it’s cool, but they’ll be as rare as deciding to play board games one night – so it depends on whether you care.
It’s worth noting that this is no longer Apple’s latest mobile chipset, improved on from the A13 Bionic in the iPhone 11 range, but it still outperforms most of its competitors.
Source link : https://www.techradar.com/reviews/iphone-xs-review/
