- A portion of this video is sponsored by Woven.
There's much more to a smartphone than its camera,
but these days the camera is usually the component that
changes the most between generations.
So when I plucked the latest iPhone out of its curiously
thin box on Saturday, the first thing I wanted to test
was that updated camera and the same duo of David's
who helped me test the LG Wing were down to clown
in another town.
So join me for a weekend in the City of Brotherly love,
seen almost entirely through the lens of the iPhone 12 Pro.
Now this video will mostly be sample footage
from the iPhone 12 Pro, which I'll indicate
with this call out here, but first, a very biased,
initial impression of the hardware.
Biased, because my favorite iPhone of all time
was the iPhone 4, whose slab-sided combination
of aluminum and glass was like no other phone back in 2010.
When Apple pivoted to the palm-friendly curves
of the iPhone 6, it made sense from
an ergonomic perspective, yes, but I always missed
those assertive angles from the four and the five.
So I'm very glad Apple has resurrected that feel
all these years later.
My pacific blue device packs more personality
than the graphite or silver options, but if you really want
to make a statement, you'll want to go for my man,
David Cogan's, pick because this gold pops.
More impressions to come, but I'm eager to get goin'.
So let's serve 'em up on the road to Philadelphia.
(upbeat music)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Cogan, what's the plan in one word?
- Cheese steak.
- [Reviewer] That's the plan in one word.
(upbeat music)
So Cogan very properly recommended we go
to a cheese steak place, which I'm really jazzed about.
I just didn't know the one he picked
would be next to a mac and cheese place.
Now I'm sad.
- We can get both.
Appetizer! - Very good.
- Oh yeah. - Now that's a classic.
- Highly average.
- [Reviewer] Highly average, he says.
Well, for some reason, I think I'm gonna have more luck.
Better, right?
- Oh yeah.
- Spicy though.
- But you can't taste the steak at all. (laughs)
- Yeah, who needs steak when you got spicy.
- Yeah, agreed.
- When you stop to remember that these clips came
from a smartphone, this is very impressive stuff.
And it's a good reminder of why I've carried
an iPhone 11 Pro alongside my other phones
for the past year.
For quick and dirty run and gun B roll,
it's hard to beat the iPhone.
Now I do wish the telephoto offered more
proper magnification than just 2X.
And as you'll see, the wide angle continues to suffer
in low light, but together with the primary sensor,
they offer enough tools to accommodate
most common shooting situations.
Now this footage could look even better if you were watching
in Dolby Vision HDR, but I'm not set up to edit in HDR,
partly because Apple's own Final Cut Pro doesn't yet
support it in Dolby vision.
Sadly, I failed to notice that on the 12 Pro,
Apple defaults the camera to HDR.
Thanks to Renee Richey and Jonathan Morrison for teaching me
how to convert the resulting footage using iMovie
so I could edit it, but that's still added a very tedious
six hours to the process of building this video.
So if you're planning on doing any editing
with your iPhone video in the near term,
to save yourself a lot of trouble,
remember to toggle HDR off.
Okay, back to Philly.
(upbeat music)
Brief moment of panic after filming what I took to be 4,700
reels of film, low battery, 20% warning, right before five.
So I started the day at 10, 20% left at five.
If you take a lot of pictures and videos, watch out.
Phone's on the battery pack.
I'm 20% of the way through digesting that cheese steak,
so I guess it's time for dinner, isn't it?
Cocktails first.
Selfie camera, audio, and video, low light.
We'll see.
(gentle music)
(upbeat music)
Well, the city shut down, but there's a place
that's promisin' to sell us $7 margaritas,
and I ain't gonna say no.
We'll let ya know if it works out.
Thank you, Philadelphia.
- Strawberry.
- Mango margarita.
I did have another phone with me on this trip,
Google's Pixel 5.
So I took some stills side by side with the iPhone 12 Pro
and as expected, the phones go punch for punch,
but occasionally a subject like Philadelphia's
historic City Hall will showcase the differences
in approach, with the iPhone bringing more light,
and in this case, a warmer tone.
While the pixel really leans into the dynamic range
and sharpening to show every corner
of the building's detailing.
Punch out to wide angle and it's the iPhone that
carries the day with its wider field of view,
trouncing the comparatively narrow 107 degree lens
on the Pixel, to say nothing of the much nicer colors
from the Apple product.
Heading across town to the sad, rusting hulk
of the SS United States, we see those colors again,
amplified much more prominently on the I-phone's wide angle.
While the zoom shots are nearly identical.
That's notable because the Pixel 5 doesn't even have
a telephoto camera.
It's accomplishing this with
intelligence software enhancement of a digital crop.
And finally, in night mode,
the results continue to be quite similar.
Once again, while the iPhone continues to dominate
when it comes to video, on the still side,
the Pixel and iPhone are very, very close.
Hey, it's hard to choose a device.
Am I right?
Some final first impressions, including my first experience
with something called scrapple, after a quick word
from today's sponsor.
Back and forth emails about meeting time,
dueling work and personal schedules,
checking availability for a quick call.
It's never a quick call.
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but I feel like the master of my fate is my calendar.
So why not make that calendar better?
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Thanks to Woven for sponsoring this portion
of today's video.
Scrapple, also known by the Pennsylvania Dutch name,
Pannhaas, or pan rabbit is traditionally a mush
of pork scraps and trimmings combined with cornmeal
and wheat flour, often buckwheat flour and spices.
The mush is formed into a semi-solid congealed loaf,
and slices of the scrapple are then
pan fried before serving.
Scraps of meat leftover from butchering,
not used or sold elsewhere, were made into scrapple
to avoid waste.
- Welcome to obesity.
- In Delaware, it is sometimes described as containing
everything but the oink.
What have we done to ourselves?
- [Man] What does that mean?
- On the whole, despite that battery not quite living up
to what I expected, my first weekend with the iPhone 12 Pro
was a positive one.
The new widget, Paradigm, is a welcome breath of fresh air.
Apps, like Evernote, continue to get design refreshes
ahead of their Android counterparts.
And other apps, like Dark Sky, have seen themselves
ripped out of the Google play store so their features
can be baked into Apple's own weather app.
As well, thoughtful features like the indicator
that tells you when your camera is on or the phone's mic
is listening, secure Apple's reputation
for getting the little things right.
But you know, I'm a little concerned about the new iOS.
More often than ever before, I've seen things like
app lockups and crashes, particularly in the search feature,
which seems straight up broken.
Users coming from an Android phone may resent having
to teach the news app what stories you actually care about.
Hint, Apple, for me, it's not these.
As compared to an Android phone,
which just knows what you like, because Google.
In an era of masks, having to deal with face ID instead
of a fingerprint scanner means you're stuck putting in
your pin a lot more often, which is a bummer.
And as always, Siri is just terrible.
Navigate to SS United States.
We're going to Sudan, boys.
I'll explore more of the good and bad as I head into my
proper review of the iPhone 12 Pro,
but I'm real glad to have had the opportunity to explore
its camera in a city like Philadelphia,
whose historic roots inspire a civic mindset
that reminds me to remind you, fellow Americans,
to please vote this election season.
For more on the iPhone 12 Pro, stay tuned to this channel
for that iPhone 12 Pro review, and to see this trip
from a different perspective, check out David Cogan's
real-world test over at the Unlocker, which I'll link below.
Finally, I'm not covering the non-pro iPhone 12,
but the other David is.
David Emel's coverage is due later this month
at Android Authority.
This video was produced with a retail iPhone 12 Pro unit,
purchased from Apple, which, as always,
offered no compensation for this review
and was given no copy approval or early look either.
The opinions contained herein are mine and mine alone.
Please subscribe to the MrMobile on YouTube if you'd like
to see more videos made by me, Michael Fisher.
Until next time, thanks for watching.
And if you're like us and can't stay home all the time,
at least remember to keep it safe and mask up
while you stay mobile, my friends.
- Oh God. - Oh really?
- The word congeal is so accurate.
- We should never have read that Wikipedia article.
- It's like a sauce inside of a-
- It is. - What?
I used to believe that this is meat.
- I thought I was gonna hate it, but it's kind of like
a French fry that's maybe an hour past
when you should've eaten it, but then they reheated it.
- And deep fried it? - And deep fried it again.
Yeah, I could eat scrap fresh.
I get that with this and I don't want that loaf.
I don't need any part of that loaf.
- To me, it tastes like you deep fried a liquid
and then it turned into a solid.
- [Reviewer] I think that's probably what it-
- 'Cause you bite it and then it's like gushing inside.
- [Reviewer] Right.
- That's not, meat should not gush.
- Gushing is not a good way to describe things.
- [Man] It is.