iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus ditches headphone jack, are waterproof and cost from US$649 and US$769
Straight from the halls of Cupertino, Tim Cook revealed Apple’s latest iPhone in the form of the new iPhone 7 and its larger sibling the iPhone 7 Plus. Both phones are rated IP67 water resistant and come in five different colours – silver, gold, rose gold, a shiny Jet Black variant and a sandblasted matte black version.
Under the hood, the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus uses what they call a new A10 Fusion chip which is a 64-bit quad-core processor with two high performance cores that are 40% faster than the A9 chip and twice as fast than the A8 chip in the iPhone 6. On paper, it’s 120 times faster than the original first gen iPhone. Another two cores handle the grunt work and and run at 1/5th the power of the other two cores for basic tasks like checking email and the like.
The biggest feature on the iPhone 7 and the iPhone 7 Plus – it’s rear cameras – offered quite a few pleasant surprises. The iPhone 7 only has a single 12-MP camera sensor with optical image stabilisation, an f/1.8 aperture, a six-element lens, a four-LED True Tone flash and an Apple-designed image signal processor that offers a wide colour gamut. The iPhone 7 Plus beefs that up with another 12-MP camera in tandem much like the Huawei P9 though the second camera is a telephoto lens with 2X optical zoom. The iPhone 7 Plus also has a maximum zoom, including digital zoom up to 10x. There’s also a flicker sensor that helps to compensate for the flickering from artificial lights to render better shots. The front facing camera is a 7-MP camera with OIS for FaceTime duties.
One of the most bandied about rumours about the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus is true – it loses the age-old 3.5mm audio jack. Instead, the phones will come with EarPods that end with a Lightning connector that interfaces directly with the phone’s Lightning port and for those who have vintage headphones, both devices will bundle in a vintage 3.5mm audio jack to Lightning port adaptor for free with each iPhone. Another quibble with the average iPhone, the lack of battery life, has a better battery that offers an hour more battery life over the iPhone 6S Plus. The home button has been improved as well with improved haptic feedback and another interesting feature is the addition of two front facing stereo speakers though this was pioneered early on by HTC’s BoomSound speaker tech on their One series phones.
In line with them aiming to cut the cord, they also took the wraps off a pair of wireless headphones called the Apple AirPod. They look like normal headphones but end where you’d expect cables to extend out. They both integrate what Apple’s designates as a W1 chip for accurate and reliable audio information while sensors in the headphone and accelerometers let you take calls with a double tap. The AirPod has five hours of battery life while a wireless charging case that the AirPod nestles into has 24 hours of battery life. The AirPod will retail for US$159.
The iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus will come in 32GB, 128GB and 256GB sizes though only the Jet Black finish will come in 128GB and 256GB denominations. The iPhone 7 will ship starting from US$649 for the 32GB model while the iPhone 7 Plus will have prices starting from US$769 and up.
Both phones will have preorders starting on September 9 globally with orders shipping on September 18 in 30 countries for the first wave of orders.
