iPhone SE camera feature tips and tricks
This is the new 2022 iPhone SE. Now, on paper, SE stands for the special edition, still, according to an old Phil Schiller quote, but the truth is this is the least special phone that Apple makes, so I propose a new name for this one, unofficially.
Let's just call it the simple edition 'cause that's what it is. The iPhone SE formula is and has been simple: the new chip, old body, low price, so the ingredients this year are the A15 Bionic, the same chip that's in the iPhone 13s, in the body of an iPhone 8, again, with its old design and home button and everything.
Now, last generation, this formula, I said it was a hit, right? But now, it's two years later, and the competition's sort of catching up a little bit more.
It's not as obvious of a huge winner as it's been in the past, mainly because the price did go up a little bit, but in a world of the budget phone with the high refresh rate display versus the budget phone with the big battery or the budget phone with a stylus or the one with quad cameras, this one has got something all the rest of them don't have, which is it's the budget phone that's an iPhone. Here's my take, though. This is and always has been a very unbalanced phone.
Like, this has got parts that would humiliate other phones, but then, another part that is starting to fall behind those phones. Like, putting an A15 Bionic in the iPhone SE means that this phone has a more powerful chip than the Galaxy S22 Ultra. Basically, it has the most powerful chip in any phone right now, alongside the flagship iPhone 13 and 13 Pro.
That is clearly more powerful than the typical iPhone SE buyer is gonna need, and it flies through iOS on a 720p display with no hiccups. That's no surprise. It feels like putting way too much engine in a tiny car. but the reason for doing this is the same as it always has been, which is it's got headroom for days.
This phone is gonna perform the same way it does today as it does in two years, as it does in four, five, maybe six years, and that is a priority for an iPhone SE buyer, which is the longevity, of the software updates. This is probably the longest-lasting phone, period, and then, of course, there are a bunch of other benefits to adding this newest chip.
This phone has 5G now, not millimeter wave, but sub-6 5G, which is the most common kind and probably will be for a couple years, and then, just better overall efficiency, although I'll get to this phone's battery life in a second, and it now also has the new image signal processor in the A15, so it can get a little more out of the exact same camera hardware, and by the way, there is one more gig of RAM in here than the last SE, so four gigs of RAM.
It's basically an iPhone 13 as far as performance goes, but then, let's talk about that camera on the back, right? 'Cause, that's the one other thing that is just, it's in a league of its own. It's miles ahead of other phones, so it's just a single camera on the back, 12 megapixels. As far as I can tell, it's the exact same camera hardware, again, as the iPhone 8 and the last SE, and the fact is it's just straight-up the best single camera in this range.
It's the most consistent. It's the best with color and noise management. It doesn't have as much natural background blur as the others with bigger sensors, but it also doesn't have as much fringing, and then, the A15 Bionic has given you Deep Fusion in medium dim lighting and smart HDR 4 in high dynamic range situations. You have the new photographic styles feature that builds the different looks straight into the image processing pipeline, so basically, if you thought the iPhone 8 photos were good, this will also be good.
Now, you know, when I'm shooting with it, yeah, I do miss not having an ultrawide sometimes, and there are some instances where a 2X button and just get a little bit of optical zoom going, but at the same time, I have to remember almost nobody getting this phone will have ever experienced that stuff in the past, so they won't really know what they're missing.
Oh, also, this is the best video camera in any phone, hands down. It bumps up to 4K60 this time, with great autofocus, all the same, great color and stuff I was talking about.
The one thing that's missing from this camera, is still: night mode. You would think, with an A15 Bionic, they could finally get night mode into an iPhone SE camera, but that's still not here, but the point is, you can see where I'm going with this, right? World-class chip with excellent performance and longevity and a fantastic camera, probably the best in any budget phone alongside the Pixel 5a, and then, everything else about this phone is from the iPhone 8. That phone came out in 2017, so it's looking a little long in the tooth, as they say.
Like, it's just not very balanced. Now, it's not that there are things that is bad about this phone. It's just that they're so locked into this formula, this exact formula, like, the newer iPhone 13 mini is smaller than this phone, but it has a 5.4-inch display, right? This iPhone 8 body is pretty small and trims by today's standards, but when you turn it around, you got those bezels and the chin, and you just crunch down to a much smaller 4.7-inch display, and that display is like I said, barely above 720p resolution. It's 60 hertz.
It maxes out at a not-very-bright 600 nits, so the whole front of this phone just feels so incredibly outdated. You know, you look at the other phones now, and they're all trying to give you much larger displays, thinner bezels. Lots of them are doing 90 or 120-hertz refresh rates now, no problem, but hey, that's not Apple's formula. They stick with the iPhone 8 body, exactly, and what can fit in this body, exactly? You know, almost all of the competitive phones at this price have multiple cameras, at least an ultrawide, right?
That's not the iPhone SE's formula. The iPhone 8 had one camera. The last iPhone SE had one camera, so yeah, this one also is gonna have one camera, and on top of that, lots of competitive budget phones are jamming impressively massive batteries in there: 4,000, 4,500, literally 5,000 milliamp hours plus sometimes, and the single biggest concern with the last iPhone SE was battery life, proper? So Apple did hear that a little bit. They did take improved battery chemistry and fit a slightly higher-capacity battery in this same body, but generally, it still behaves pretty much the same way,
so we know A15 Bionic is a very efficient chip. It did great in this phone with standby time, and those efficiency cores really go to work when you're doing that lightweight stuff: the web browsing, messaging, reading, the stuff most iPhone SE users do plenty of, but if you do fire up a high-brightness navigation app, or if you jump into a game or just use the phone a lot, then this is, it's still a flagship chip.
You can still burn through the battery really quickly with all that power, so I could get to the end of the day knowing what I was doing, but I still did notice, like, when I fired this up and navigated to work, 30-minute drive with Waze on, 10% battery gone.
Like, if I just used, if I was in a game like Asphalt for a little while, I could notice it churning down the battery, and I killed this phone more than once by 9:00 p.m., and then, because of this formula, this phone still maxes out at 20 watts of fast charging, so it'll fill up 0 to 100 in like an hour, and it still only has 7 1/2 watts max of wireless charging.
I would actually recommend leaving on smart data mode on this phone, which will automatically turn off 5G when you don't need it because that can help save a little bit of juice, but overall, yeah, this phone's battery life is still not great.
It's barely average, so yeah, world-class is the chip, the camera, and the haptics, and then, below average is everything else, (chuckles) so it's very similar to the last year, or the 2020 iPhone SE, which, by the way, held up next to this phone, you can barely tell the difference other than a slightly different color.
We got a bit of a deeper red this year, and then, also, instead of black and white, it's Starlight and Midnight this time, but basically, the number-one thing I found myself wondering when using this phone is what if they weren't so locked into this formula? Like, this phone starts at 429 bucks.
I'm guessing the price is a little higher because of 5G, extra gives you 128 gigs of storage 'cause this only starts at 64, and we know that they can make a phone this cheap because they're using this exact same body that they have been able to mass-produce for so long that the price has gone down, but if they wanted to change something about it, like adding a camera hole or changing something about it, that would mean new research, new tooling, new manufacturing processes spinning up, and that would bump up the price, but by how much? 'Cause I kinda still wanna see it.
Like, I would argue that a crappy 120-hertz display, which you see in all kinds of other budget phones, would make this iPhone feel faster for the life of the phone, but they're not gonna do that 'cause they've still got this panel that they've gotten since the beginning of time, and we also know that those obnoxiously thick 4, 5,000 milliamp hour batteries would obviously make this phone last much longer, but you'd have to make the phone thicker, and that would increase the price, but by how much? Like, clearly, they could use more battery, or even toss in an ultrawide just because every other phone seems to have that ultrawide camera.
I missed it. I think other people who are shopping with other phones will notice this doesn't have one, but that would mean cutting another camera hole, and that's a whole new design that costs more money, but how much more? Maybe you could still do it, but really, I'm just gonna have to wonder that forever because this seems to be the only way Apple knows how to make a cheaper phone.
It's boring. It's predictable, but it's simple, and you know exactly what you're getting and not getting because basically, it's happened before. Now, all of that being said, this is still, actually, a very easy iPhone to recommend because it's the cheapest new iPhone, and it's gonna get the software updates for the longest time.
The natural consideration that kept coming up, we talked about this at the studio is what about iPhone 11, right? An iPhone 11, it won't have 5G, but it will have a bigger display, thinner bezels, Face ID, better battery life, and it'll be about 100 bucks more, and there is also iPhone 13 mini, which is gonna be a bigger display, thinner bezels, Face ID, better battery life, and has 5G and the newest chip, but it's like more, but neither of those has something this phone has, which is the home button,
and (chuckles) that sounds crazy, and it might be a surprise, but a lotta people still really just want a home button. Never underestimate the power of the home button, so at the end of the day, I'm glad the iPhone SE just got any update at all 'cause that's better for people getting this phone now into the future. Old dog. New trick.
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