Welcome back everyone, I'm ThioJoe, and it is iPhone season.
I'm sure you already know that Apple released 3 models this year, the iPhone 8, the 8 Plus,
and the 10.
The one we're going over today is the 8 plus, which might not seem as exciting as the 10,
but in my opinion, I'd rather have this than the 10, simply because of the fingerprint
sensor, and I doubt I'm the only one.
But this is NOT a comparison video, we're going to just focus on the 8 Plus, and do
a ruthless review.
I'll tell you what I like, what I hate, and everything inbetween.
And if you're wondering, no I didn't get this for free, I had to shell out the cash for
it, so you know I'm not going to sugar coat anything.
Now as usual before we jump in I want to give a quick plug for my instagram account, I really
try to post only quality stuff over.
So if you want to check that out it's just @ThioJoe, and the link is also in the description.
So, let's first start off with the visuals of the phone.
The design is nearly identical to the iPhone 7 plus, with one notable exception I'll get
to in a bit.
On the front we've got the home button of course at the bottom, and at the top, theres
the camera, speaker, and proximity sensor.
On the sides there are the usual power buttom, sim card tray, volume buttons, and silent
switch.
As well as the speaker grills on the bottom and lightning port.
No surprises here.
On the back it's mostly the same story, you can see the dual camera lenses, one being
wide angle, the other telephoto, and next to it is the flash and a rear microphone.
We'll go into more detail about the camera later.
But the big difference is the back of the phone itself, which is now glass instead of
aluminum.
It does look pretty nice, and the advantage of this is it allows for wireless charging,
which I'm a big fan of, but we'll get to that later.
Oh and by the way, this is all water resistent with an IP67 rating, so it can be submerged
in water up to a meter.
Ok let's get back to the screen, which is a 5.5 inch IPS panel as usual, not OLED.
The resolution is 1920x1080, which for a flagship this size is actually pretty low.
And I think the only reason they keep putting these low res screens are to compensate for
the tiny batteries they always use.
That being said though, the pixel density is still good to the point where you can't
see individual pixels even up close.
And comparing it to a higher resolution screen like the original Pixel XL at 1440p, I couldn't
really tell a difference, so I actually would say it's acceptable as is.
With it being IPS, you also get a couple more advantages, including the ability to go brighter
than you normally would with OLED.
And it is indeed significantly brighter than the OLED on the Pixel XL.
The other advantage is you can get a lot better color accuracy with IPS, which is still the
gold standard in that case.
And I think this one does a great job handling low black levels too.
The other thing to mention is the new iphones have "true tone displays", which means it
will adjust not only the brightness of the screen depending on the environment, but also
the white balance.
This is pretty unique, and helps because normally, your brain might think it's looking at different
shades of white depending on the surround light sources.
So with all that I'm definitely satisfied with the screen.
Next, why don't we quickly go over the hardware you can't see, inside the phone.
The brain of the iPhone 8 Plus is the A11 bionic chip, which supposedly uses a "neural
engine", whatever that is.
Apple sure does love their meaningless buzz words.
For storage you have the option for either 64 or 256 Gigabytes, in this case I have 256.
And I gotta say, having this much storage feels AWESOME, because you literally don't
even have to think about running out of space, or taking too many photos, or high resolution
videos.
So big props to Apple for going the extra mile for storage, but I really don't know
why they made the only other choice 64 GB.
Such a big jump between the only two options seems a bit strange.
Anyway, other hardware includes the RAM, which Apple doesn't seem to list anywhere I saw,
but it apparently has 3 GB.
Again, come on Apple, you're the only one who skimps on the RAM. 3GB is definitely enough,
but for a phone that literally can cost $1000 after your price hike, that's BS.
Same goes for the battery capacity, which is also not listed anywhere, they just say
how many hours it lasts for different uses, which as we all know is completely useless
and never comparible to real life.
A bit of research determined it to be 2691 mAh, which is quite frankly, ridiculously
tiny.
Yes, I know iPhones are highly optimized so they can get away with lower specs, but come
on, if they added a normal sized battery, the battery life would be truly amazing.
I think it's pretty ironic that Apple isn't afraid to make their phones bigger every year
with enourmous bezels, but god forbid they make it a bit thicker to fit in a bigger battery
and better hardware.
Does anyone really care if their phone is an extra millimeter thick?
Anyway, let's move on.
Finally on the inside I want to mention the new support for Bluetooth 5, which is a lot
better than the previous version.
For example, it has twice the range and twice the bandwidth.
Now that is only if both devices are using Bluetooth 5, but that will soon be used in
a lot more accessories, and that is something to look forward to.
Alright let's move on to performance, starting with my favorite part of any phone, the camera.
Now I know it got the "highest DXO Mark rating of any phone", or at least until the Pixel
2 was announced, but I just wanted to tell you guys that you should not judge cameras
based on this score.
The scoring is mostly arbitrary, and is good for a rough guess at best.
As always, the best way to determine camera quality is look at the sample photos yourself.
So, the back camera as I mentioned before has dual lenses, both with optical image stabilization.
Apple doesn't give the details on the image sensors, but it's estimated that the equivalent
focal lengths are somewhere around 50 mm for the "telephoto", and around 28 mm for the
wide angle.
Now as for the pictures this thing takes, you don't need some rating to see that it
takes really awesome photos.
Autofocus is lightning fast thanks to the phase detection autofocus, which they call
"focus pixels".
Here you can see a couple example photos I took, this one was just after sunset, so it
was relatively low light, but I really like the way it turn out.
You can tell it's night but also the area around the trees are really lit up.
I also took the same picture at the same time with my Pixel XL, and you can see there's
a big difference in the way these phones created this image.
The Pixel's photo was much more subdued in terms of saturation, and was definitely more
accurate to how it actually looked.
And while they both do have some noise as you'd expect, I do think the Pixel's noise
reduction wins out in this particular case, retaining more detail if you zoom in all the
way.
Here's another example, where I just took a picture with lots of light, it's literally
just the sky, but we can see that around the edges and especially in the corners, it was
able to hold onto a surprising amount of detail, and has minimal distortion.
And with any lens, the resolution and sharpness is going to decrease the further from the
center, so this is impressive.
On the video side, the camera can also do 4K resolution at a whopping 60fps, which is
pretty crazy.
And for slow motion, it can do 1080p at 240 fps.
Take a look at this mechanical watch before, and after I slow it down all the way.
It's pretty neat, maybe you never saw something like this before, you can actually see it
actually rotating and then going back and forth. Awesome that you can see it with this phone.
Another thing I haven't mentioned yet with the camera is the new file formats you can
choose.
For images, you can now use HEIF, or High Efficiency Image Format, and for video, the
h.265 codec.
These formats allow images and video to be stored with higher quality and lower file
sizes.
So you might be surprised that the 4K60fps video is only 50 mbps.
I still think they should have increased the bitrate, but at least 50mbps gets you a lot
further with this codec than the regular one.
Just keep in mind that these codecs are relatively new, and not all devices might support them
yet, but I'm sure they will soon if not already.
And quickly before we move on of course, I should mention the front facing camera, which
is definitely among the best I've used, at least from the Android phones I've used in
the past.
One thing I noticed is it has a slightly longer focal length than the Google Pixel, so it's
a bit more zoomed in, but with selfies you want that.
That's because with wide angle lenses, to fill the frame more, you need to move it closer,
which causes big time distortion on your face.
To combat this, you'd ideally hold your phone as far away as possible then crop it.
But with the longer focal length, there's less need for that here.
Oh, and the pictures are pretty sharp too of course.
Ok so now onto battery performance.
I was really happy with how well the battery lasted on the 8 Plus, and I would consider
myself a moderate phone user.
I don't really play any graphics intensive games or anything, but I do check my email
or other accounts, and read stuff pretty regularly throughout the day.
I know I was really harsh about the battery size, but again, this thing is obviously optimized
very well, so it can pull it off.
In the time I've been using it, I've pretty much finished every day with at least 30-40%
battery left.
And I don't know if this is just me, but it seems like the first few percentages of battery
take a LOT longer to use than the rest, but I could be wrong.
As for charging, as I mentioned there IS wireless charging which is awesome, and even better
it's the Qi wireless charging standard, so you can basically use any wireless charging
pad out there.
Of course it's slower than plugging it in, but it's ideal for at night when you dont
need it to charge fast, or just plopping it down on the table.
If you DO need to charge quickly, the new iphones do actually support fast charging,
finally.
But the catch is, you need one of the higher what USB-C chargers that apple sells, such
as the 29W one, and they cost at least $50.
AND you need a USB-C to lightning cable, which is another $25.
But, with that, you're able to charge from 0 to 50% within around 30 minutes.
The only thing is, it doesn't seem to give you any indication that you are actually fast
charging, which is a bit annoying.
Alright, now let's get to one of the most important things, user experience.
Such as, how fast is this phone?
Well as you'd expect, this thing is snappy and responsive as any other flagship.
No issues with stuttering at all, everything seems to always run completely smooth.
Another thing I want to say is how much I like the haptic home button.
It's not an actual button, but rather just a solid state indendation basically, with
the fingerprint sensor built in.
But Apple was able to use haptic feedback to actually make this thing feel like you're
pressing a real button, it's pretty crazy.
The haptic feedback is not new to the 8 Plus, but I still wanted to mention it.
Another returning feature is 3D plus, where you press into the screen a bit harder, and
it will perform certain functions such as opening a context menu for shortcuts.
Again, it kinda makes it seem like you're really clicking into the screen.
All that being said, there are some software things that I find pretty annoying, but I
guess this would be on any iPhone running the same version of iOS.
Coming from android, the first thing I noticed is how STUPID the notifications system is.
And yes I'm gonna get a bit heated with this one.
Why on earth does iOS not group notifications?
If you're in a group chat, there is no reason why you need to see literally every single
message listed on your lock screen, because it pushes all your other notifications down
out of view.
Also, apparently you can't put more than 4 icons at the bottom of the home screen, when
there is CLEARLY room for another one.
Why not give people the option to?
You've got to be kidding me Apple.
So let me try and wrap this up.
Some things I especially like about the iPhone 8 Plus are the large storage capacity at 256GB,
wireless charging finally, even the pixel phones don't have that, and also the great
camera quality.
Some things I have mixed feelings about are the battery, because yes it has great battery
life, but I know it could be truly outstanding if Apple would just put in a normal sized
one.
Also, I like that there is fast charging, but it's ridiculous you have to spend an extra
$75 to be able to do it.
And the things I outright hate are of course the stupid cumbersome notifications system,
and limitations on customization, such as how many icons you can have at the bottom,
or changing default apps.
But of course, those are software based and there's a glimmer of hope that Apple could
change it.
So overall, this is what I think.
The iPhone 8 Plus is definitely a good phone, and even though it might not seem as flashy
as the iPhone 10, it has pretty much all the features I'd expect in a top end phone.
So if you've been considering switching to iPhone from Android, I honestly think this
is a great one to start on.
Now on the other hand, if you have the 7 Plus or something, which I haven't used by the
way, well obviously the upgrades for this phone might not be that important to you.
Especially considering Apple raised the price of their phones by about $50.
The 8 costs 700 and the 8 plus costs 800 for the smaller storage sizes.
It's definitely an incremental update, so I don't know if I'd recommend this to someone,
even an android user, unless they have a phone that's more than a year old.
Though I guess most people just get a contract deal through their carriers anyway, so the
price might not be as big a deal to you for that.
I'm gonna finish this off by saying even as someone who is used to Android, I'm definitely
happy with this phone, with those few exceptions of course.
Is it necessarily better than Android?
I'm not sure, there are advantages to both which would take another video to cover.
But if you do end up getting this phone, I don't think you'll be disappointed.
So that's it, hopefully you guys found this video helpful, you can let me know what you
think down in the comments.
And by the way, I did buy a Pixel 2 as well, so I will be comparing the 8 Plus to that
later on, be sure to subscribe for that.
And consider enabling notifications by clicking the bell, or YouTube might literally not show
you any of my videos anyway.
If you want to keep watching you can click these videos over here on the right side.
So again, I'm looking forward to hearing from you, thanks for watching I'll see you next
time, have a good one.