PROS
- Beautiful screen
- Unique camera
- Solid battery life
- Class-leading performance
- Potent speakers
CONS
- Expensive
- No headphone jack
- Largely unchanged design
KEY FEATURES
- 5.5-inch Full HD screen with wide colour gamut
- A10 Fusion processor with 3GB RAM
- Water-resistant IP67
- 12-megapixel telephoto camera
- 7-megapixel selfie camera
- 32, 128 & 256GB storage options
- 2900mAh battery
- Manufacturer: Apple
- Review Price: £719.00
WHAT IS THE IPHONE 7 PLUS?
Apple’s latest phablet takes the familiar iPhone formula and tweaks it once again to create a pocket powerhouse.
It’s not going to wow you with a new design or massive innovations, but the iPhone 7 Plus is a great phone. It offers everything the iPhone 7 does – speedy performance, water resistance, loud speakers, great cameras – but adds some clever features that are delightful.
On the other hand, the 7 Plus costs a small fortune. The weakened pound means this is the most expensive iPhone we’ve ever seen released in the UK. If you’re dead set on an iPhone, though, this is the one I’d recommend, not least because the iPhone 7 Plus’s battery life is excellent.
IPHONE 7 PLUS – DESIGN
The shape and feel of the iPhone 7 Plus is very much like that of the two versions before it. It's big – properly big – especially when you add a case to it.
Yes, it has an expansive screen, but it's the iPhone 7 Plus’s height that makes it a handful.
If you haven't used a phablet before, it's worth testing out first. I found it takes about a week to get accustomed to a larger phone, but I wouldn’t go back. There's just so much more you can do with a screen this size, but some will struggle to use it easily.
In other respects the design has been refined a little. The antenna bands that strapped the back now curve across the top and bottom edges of the phone. On the back there's a far more pronounced camera bump.
There are two brand-new iPhone 7 Plus colours to choose from and both feel very different. The first is Jet Black, which has a slick, almost ceramic, feel to it. It looks fantastic, it's grippy and it's the colour I’d choose. There are a couple of catches, though: you'll need to polish it regularly to get fingerprint marks off it, but more worryingly it marks with fine scratches a little too easily. If you do choose it, you'll need to treat it with kid gloves to keep it looking its best.
The new Black version looks like a darker version of Space Grey. Oddly, though, it doesn't have the same grippy texture as other iPhone colours, which means it's a bit slippery. I wouldn’t use it without a case, but when you’ve seen as many smashed screens as me, you’d use a case for any phone.
Those alterations are all cosmetic, though. There are three really important changes of which you should be aware when it comes to the 7 Plus. The first is that it's water resistant to an IP67 rating. That means you can submerge it in up to 1m of water for up to 30 minutes. It's a great addition to the iPhone – especially if, like me, you've accidentally dunked phones and ruined them in the past.
The second is a change to the iPhone 7 Plus’s home button. Gone is the iconic click to which we've become so accustomed. It's not a button at all now, but rather it's a capacitive pad. It recognises your fingers in much the same way as the touchscreen does, so that means you don't actually depress it. Instead the clever boffins at Apple have used the rumble provided by an upgraded Haptic engine to make it feel as if it's been pressed.
It works, too. It took me minutes to get used to the new feel, and now I prefer it – if only because it's a lot less likely to go wrong now that it's no longer mechanical. Of course, it still comes with the excellent Touch ID fingerprint scanner built in.
The third big change will likely affect you the most. It’s the now infamous removal of the traditional 3.5mm headphone jack. Yes, it’s an annoying omission, but it hasn’t bothered me as much as I thought it would.
The 7 Plus comes with a small cable adapter that is now permanently attached to my Sennheiser Momentum 2.0 headphones, and you also get a pair of Lightning EarPods for good measure. What Apple is really trying to do here, though, is move us all towards wireless headphones. I’m a convert to them simply for their convenience, and there are now plenty of excellent wireless headphones to choose from.
udging from Apple's launch of the iPhone 7 Plus, another reason for removing the headphone jack was to accommodate the new Haptic engine. It does add a new element to using the phone – vibrations are now a lot more nuanced, so you can tell what type of notification you’re getting without having the sound on, or looking at the screen.
The iPhone 7 Plus looks good, but it’s not groundbreaking. This is still essentially the same design we saw with the first Plus two years ago. Unless you go for the Jet Black option, owning an iPhone is no longer the design statement it once was. The big question is whether the water resistance and better Haptics are enough of trade-off for the lack of a headphone jack. I’d like the 7 Plus to have it all.
IPHONE 7 PLUS – SCREEN AND SPEAKERS
Full HD resolution sounds old hat now. Plenty of phones from Samsung, LG and others have packed ultra-sharp quad-HD screens for years. The iPhone 7 Plus doesn’t follow suit and keeps to what Apple designates as a "Retina" display. This just means you can’t really see the pixels, but the pixel density isn't as high as on, for example, the Samsung Galaxy S7.
I don’t care one jot. This is my favourite display on any phone, regardless of resolution.
Full HD is still plenty sharp for everything barring virtual reality, where the screen sits an inch from your eyes and is amplified by lenses.
The iPhone 7 Plus’s screen might not have the highest resolution, but it has the widest colour gamut. It uses something called DCI P3, a range of colours used by movie makers that encompasses a larger spectrum, allowing for more realistic and diverse tones.
It looks superb, with the extra area afforded by the bigger screen making it even better than on the 4.7-inch display of the smaller iPhone 7.
The colours are great, but it’s also bright, so it can be viewed even in strong sunlight. It helps that it’s not very reflective either.
Bingeing on Netflix is a joy, particularly if you use the tremendous built-in speakers. These are excellent – for a phone. For starters, they’re very loud – loud enough that I was easily able to hear over the cacophony of a busy kitchen with the kettle boiling and frying pan sizzling. They're not particularly refined, however. At the top volume the iPhone 7 Plus can sound a little harsh, and there’s very little bass. Still, they’re top-notch for a phone.
IPHONE 7 PLUS – PERFORMANCE
Much was made of Apple’s new A10 Fusion processor when it was announced. It uses two low-power cores that are for doing everything not particularly taxing, such as texting. Two other, more powerful, cores take care of all the heavy lifting – 3D games and other apps that need a lot of processing chops.
It’s not a new invention. Android phones have been using this system to good effect for years, but it’s nice to see Apple taking it up now, since it tends to lead to improved battery life.
It’s not just about efficiency, though. The 7 Plus is a stonkingly fast phone – the most powerful we’ve ever tested on SmartWorld when it comes to our standard range of benchmarks.
While the iPhone 7 Plus has 3GB of RAM – 1GB more than the iPhone 7 – this doesn’t affect the results. It’s on a par with the standard iPhone 7 and faster than any of the competition. It's currently the most powerful phone you can get.
In practice this all means that it's butter-smooth in day-to-day use. I’ve never experienced any lag or apps opening lazily. This should be a phone that performs to the highest standard for a few years to come.
IPHONE 7 PLUS – IOS 10 AND SOFTWARE
Part of the speedy feel comes from the new iOS 10 operating system, which is a little snappier than before.
It’s not wildly different to previous versions, but as always Apple has refined all the most important areas to make a more comprehensive, but still easy-to-use, interface.
Some of the biggest improvements have come to Apple’s core apps. iMessage is now full of clever features and has its very own mini App Store. You can draw pictures to send to your friends, search for funny GIFs or even send people the track you’re listening to on Apple Music.
Talking of Apple Music, the streaming service is also a lot more refined. It’s catching up fast with the competition, thanks to this latest update.
Photos has replicated a lot of the excellent Google Photos functionality and cleverly groups people and locations together for easy searching.
Some of the best changes have happened to the previously under-utilised lockscreen, Control Centre and Notifications. You can now directly respond to notifications from the lockscreen, and the Control Centre now has three “pages” you can swipe through for additional options such as Apple Music controls or to directly manage Homekit-compatible smart home products. Unfortunately, there’s still no shortcut to Settings.
There's plenty more to discuss about iOS 10, from updates to Siri to the ability to, at last, get rid of those bloatware apps we had a special folder for. Yes, that’s right, you can finally delete the Stocks app.
If you want to find out everything about iOS 10, and how to use all the features to the max then read our iOS 10 review and guide.
Before I move on to the iPhone 7 Plus’s camera, though, I’d like to cover 3D Touch a little...
3D Touch was a feature first demoed on the iPhone 6S, which opens additional options when you press the screen harder. I thought it was a great idea then, but it never quite lived up to its potential. It just didn’t do very much. It does now.
For example, you can hard-press the Torch icon to offer three levels of brightness, or get travel times to your favourite locations on the third-party Google Maps. 3D Touch has finally grown up and is a unique feature you can’t get from any other company.
IPHONE 7 PLUS – CAMERA
The iPhone 7 Plus comes with two cameras on the back, but acting as one. We’ve seen dual cameras before on the LG G5 and Huawei P9, but Apple hasn’t added a wide-angle lens like on the G5, or a black-and-white one like the P9. Instead, the iPhone 7 Plus uses its second camera to provide zoom without sacrificing quality.
You can, of course, digitally zoom while taking a photo on any phone. Digital zoom essentially crops the same image you’d take normally so that it brings an area closer to you. It's like pinching into a photo in your gallery – yes, what you’re trying to look at becomes bigger, but it doesn’t get any clearer. Unless you’re in CSI.
The telephoto lens brings things closer without losing detail
The iPhone 7 Plus is different. By switching from the 28mm wide-angle lens to the 56mm telephoto one, it brings things twice as close while keeping detail high, like using optical zoom. Up until now the only phones available with optical zoom have been the Samsung Galaxy Zoom range and Asus ZenPhone Zoom. Neither have taken the world by storm, mainly because they were thick and awkward. The 7 Plus isn’t.
The two cameras Apple has packed on the back of the 7 Plus may work closely together, but they aren’t equal. The 56mm telephoto camera has a smaller f/2.8 aperture and this means that using the zoom in low light doesn’t work anywhere near as well as using the the camera unzoomed, so don’t expect great zoomed-in pictures of your favourite band at a dark gig. When there’s not enough light, photos are surprisingly noisy. Still, in well-lit conditions it works brilliantly and brings you closer to your subject.
It comes with another neat trick, and that’s the creamy soft-focus background effect you can usually only get with a large-sensor camera and a lens with a wide aperture. Apple calls it Portrait Mode, but it's known as "bokeh" in photography circles. It lends a professional quality to pictures that phones just couldn’t replicate well until now.
Portrait mode offers shallow depth of field done well
There are limits. For the results to look good, the 7 Plus needs a reasonable amount of light and you have to be around 2m away from the subject. Follow the rules and the results look great – much better than phones that have tried this before have managed. This iPhone 7 Plus is a lot more refined than those efforts.
These are all the photography smarts that the 7 Plus brings to the table over and above the smaller iPhone 7. They’re cool and slick, but most of the time all you want is a good camera that can capture the moment. The iPhone 7 Plus, just like the smaller iPhone, does this brilliantly.
The 7 Plus has better dynamic range than the 6S Plus
The main rear camera is fast and now has a wider f/1.8 aperture as well as the optical image stabilisation we’ve become used to on Plus iPhones. These help with photos taken in low light, and they work well here. Photos are brighter and more detailed than on the 6S Plus before it. You’ll also be able to get decent shots in the mood-lit restaurants and bars, but if it’s too dark you can always fall back on the True Tone flash. It’s blinding – twice as bright as before – but it also means you can get a good photo of a group of friends that you wouldn’t be able to otherwise.
With 12 megapixels to play with, photos are detailed. There’s lots of nuance and colours look bright and accurate. If there’s one complaint I have about the iPhone 7 Plus’s camera, it’s that it’s not always consistent. Photos taken one after another can look quite different – the exposure seems to vary more than I’m used to on an iPhone.
The 7 Plus's camera packs in the colours
Video is as good as it’s ever been. The iPhone 7 Plus can shoot in 4K, if you want the highest fidelity, but also at higher frame rates on lower resolutions. The Slo-mo option is a joy to use and can capture footage that looks almost professional, effortlessly.
On the front, Apple has given the 7 Plus a minor upgrade. The selfie camera is now 7-megapixel – up from 5 on the 6S Plus – and does a decent job of taking snaps. There’s no traditional flash on the front, but the 7 Plus uses last year’s trick to brighten the screen above its normal levels to light up faces that are close enough.
Minor quibbles aside, the 7 Plus is my favourite camera phone right now.
Thanks for reading.
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