Apple iPhone 12 full review

[Music] hey what's up guys will here for gsm arena the new iphones have arrived and we'll start off with a regular iphone 12. it brings some solid upgrades over last year's model which is pretty exciting for a brand that usually spins incremental changes as a big deal so what's new let's find out in our full review [Music] usually you'd assume the vanilla iphone is a bit more bland and less exciting than the other models but the iphone 12 turns that thinking upside down with this new design and upgraded screen plus quite a few other new features apple is going in a bit of a different direction with the design of the new iphones of course you still get the square camera bump on the glossy glass back with the prominent apple logo but the iphone 12 has a flat aluminum frame with a sharp edge rather than the rounded ones we're used to seeing everywhere else apple has also really stepped up its durability game here the iphone 12 has a special front glass from corning called ceramic shield the back panel doesn't use this new material though scratch and drop tests online have shown the ceramic shield to be significantly better in shatter resistance and just a little bit improved in scratch resistance this year's iphone also has better water protection than last year's model now it can handle being submerged up to six meters rather than two water damage is still not covered by the manufacturer's warranty though and there's a brand new feature they call magsafe you can attach various accessories magnetically to the back of the phone and among the first ones available is the magsafe wireless charger but it's the screen which is probably the nicest upgrade you'll find here rather than an lcd like on the iphone 11 you get a 6.1 inch super retina xdr oled and it has a higher pixel density of 460 ppi as well as thinner bezels this display has just a standard 60hz refresh rate and you still get that wide notch up at the top for the selfie cam and 3d scanner hopefully apple catches up to the latest trends before long besides that though this screen is pretty awesome blacks are deep and color accuracy is excellent there's also true tone white balance adjustment based on the ambient lighting we measured a respectable 640 knits of maximum brightness here and we had no problem using the iphone 12 outdoors in the sun as far as audio goes the iphone 12 is well equipped with this pair of stereo speakers there's one speaker at the bottom and the earpiece acts as the second one just like all recent iphones these speakers scored a very good mark on our loudness test and the audio quality here is superb some of the best we've heard yet you get great mid-tones well-presented highs and even some decent bays [Music] [Music] as you might expect from an iphone these days you'll need to use a dongle if you want to plug in traditional headphones and of course you don't get one in the box speaking of what comes in the box you don't even get a charger this year just a usb cable this supposedly has a benefit for the environment but you better have a charger ready when you get back home with your shiny new iphone and storage isn't expandable either you can choose a model with 64 128 or 256 gigs of storage built in just like last year the iphone 12 doesn't use a fingerprint scanner for biometrics you'll be relying on face id recognition to wake up and unlock the phone it is super fast reliable and secure thanks to the advanced 3d scanner however in these pandemic times the magic of face id quickly fades away when you're wearing a mask so you're likely to be entering your pin instead all of the new iphones come with the latest ios 14.1 pre-installed and besides some cosmetic changes it also offers some new features over ios 13. one of them is widget support on the home screen and you can place widgets into a stack which you can set to rotate automatically or you can swipe through them there's also a new leftmost panel called today which is a space you can specifically fill with widgets ios 14 brings a new option for organizing your apps called the app library it's apple's version of an app drawer and it sorts the apps into categories for you picture in picture mode is a very welcome new feature it minimizes a supported app into a floating window over the ui or other apps pretty handy for multitasking there are also plenty of other new features which we covered in our ios 14 review which you can find in the link in the description otherwise it's the ios you know and love swiping from the left horn or the notch will summon the notification center and swiping from the right horn calls up the control center which has customizable toggles you can also use haptic touch to access additional controls and the navigation gestures are the same as they have been since the iphone 10. all in all a breezy and responsive experience the snappiness of the interface is thanks in part to the iphone 12's awesome hardware it's running on apple's brand new a14 bionic chipset which is built on a 5 nanometer process it's supposed to offer 50 increased cpu performance over the previous a13 chip which already was no slouch in benchmark scores indeed the iphone 12 aces the charts with its peak performance and is probably the fastest smartphone on the planet right now gpu scores aren't as huge of an improvement over last year but the a14 still heads the leaderboards and games run flawlessly here at maximum settings plus the a14 has a qualcomm 5g modem on board so you get 5g network connectivity too it's sub 65g in most places except for the states where the phone also supports millimeter wave 5g powering the iphone 12 is a 2 800 milliamp hour battery smaller than last year's and despite the power efficiency of the new chipset the battery life score has gone down a bit the iphone 12 scored an endurance rating of 84 hours in our proprietary tests now onto charging which is a bit of a sword topic since there's no charger included we purchased apple's 20 watt charger for this test and we were able to charge the iphone 12 from zero to 58 percent in half an hour there is support for wireless charging too and with a magsafe charger it's supposed to be fast we weren't too impressed though from a dead battery it charged to only 30 percent in half an hour now on to the iphone 12's dual cameras it's a similar setup to the iphone 11s with a 12 megapixel main camera with ois and a 12 megapixel fixed focus ultrawide cam but this year you get a slightly wider aperture on the main cam and the ultrawide has night mode daylight photos from the main camera are very good there's a nice amount of detail low noise balance sharpness accurate colors and above average dynamic range however if you look too closely you will see that fine and intricate details like foliage often come out smeared this camera system may be getting a bit long in the tooth already with larger sensors taking the lead these days portraits are shot with the main camera and they are excellent sharp and rich in detail with true to life colors and superb contrast the subject separation is quite competent and will rarely make a mistake photos from the ultrawide camera are good these are among the widest photos we've captured and the distortion correction is very proficient plus you get good contrast and true to life colors however the level of detail is just average here and again the camera struggles with fine detail like foliage if you're shooting in low light the night mode will kick in automatically it's among the fastest night modes we've used taking only a one or two second exposure and saving the photo immediately these images are flagship worthy they're sharp and pretty detailed with great contrast low noise and natural looking color saturation highlights and shadows are well preserved and the exposure looks more true to life than many other night modes we've seen night mode can do more of a difference if you can hold still for even longer in those cases even pitch black scenes can come to life you can disable the night mode and in these scenes sharpness and contrast took a hit there's a bit more noise too but otherwise these shots are still good unlike last year the ultrawide camera now offers night mode too these photos are quite usable they have a balanced exposure preserved highlights a decent amount of detail and true to life colors they are still noisy and soft though ultra wide shots without night mode aren't good they have very low detail plenty of noise and everything looks super soft and smeared from up close now on to selfies from the 12 megapixel front facing cam you have a choice between two different framing modes a 12 megapixel wide mode or a cropped in 7 megapixel one these selfies are excellent with great detail and contrast superb colors and well handled noise the hdr is well balanced too giving a natural look thanks to the front-facing 3d camera selfie portraits are great these are in the 7 megapixel cropped mode and you get incredible subject separation and a nice looking defocus background night mode is available on the selfie camera too and it brightens the whole photo and exposes more detail the images are still soft and noisy yet rather usable you can shoot selfie videos in 4k resolution and these are excellent with very good detail now onto video capture with the rear cameras starting with the main one the quality of 4k video here is stellar you get true to life colors excellent contrast low noise and impressive dynamic range fine dto is a little lacking but it's not a big deal 4k footage from the ultra wide has excellent contrast colors and dynamic range the resolve detail is mediocre though in low light the iphone 12's 4k videos are very good among the better we've seen there's enough detail good colors and reasonably low noise and there's electronic stabilization available on all cameras and all resolutions it's fantastic as you'd expect from an iphone there's a new feature this year now you can capture hdr videos straight into the dolby vision dynamic hdr video format the color boosting information is saved separately so the video will look normal on a non-hdr player or screen so that's the iphone 12. it's got a lot going for it with this excellent oled screen great quality stereo speakers an elegant durable and water resistant design good camera quality a next-gen lightning-fast chipset with 5g and of course the latest ios with plenty of software support down the road now there are some things apple could have done better here though the biggest one being the lack of a charger in the box come on also the battery life is a step back and you don't get a smooth high refresh rate on this display and these days you'll have to get used to typing your pin code when you're out in public since face id doesn't work with a mask on so not having a fingerprint reader kind of hurts but even despite all these shortcomings the iphone 12 remains an excellent phone that deserves our full recommendation this year it avoids the role of the dumb down model and provides all of the core new features introduced with the iphone 12 series just keep in mind that in some markets like the us you can upgrade to the 12 pro for something like an extra 100 bucks and that's worth considering too anyway thanks for watching guys stay safe and see you on the next one [Music]

Channel: GSMArena Official

Views: 644,882

Keywords: review, preview, demo, video, unboxing

Id: 7h0CXQgPqN0

Length: 12min 22sec (742 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 30 2020