After months of rumours and leaks of Apple’s latest slew of iPhones, iPhone XS and XS Max are here, and they’re beyond impressive. The phones come with a design that takes after the iPhone X, a new colour and a bigger ‘Plus’ sized Max variant.
There’s a lot more to the XS and the XS Max than is immediately obvious from the announcements, and here’s our first look at the devices.
Design & Build Quality
Both phones, when held, have the familiar iPhone X vibe, which is closer to a piece of expensive jewellery than the industrial design of most smartphones.
Both phones have improved IP68 water resistance that’s supposed to allow up to two-meters of deep-water submersion for about 30 minutes.
The glass is supposed to be more durable – we’ve not performed drop tests – but nothing about the design is new enough to force a switch from last year’s model.
Display – It Gets Bigger
If you were seeking a bigger display than last year’s X, the XS Max is here to cover that.
Unless you hold the XS and the XS Max next to each other, it’s difficult to tell one from the other, but once you hold it in your hand, XS Max is way more ‘plus-sized’ than any iPhone so far, and in a good way (which explains the Max moniker!)
With a massive 6.5-inch display, this is the biggest screen Apple has used on a smartphone. But although the phone is quite a big one to hold (much like the 7 Plus/8 Plus form factor), it’s surprisingly light. Crazy, impressive stuff.
The bigger screen affords more details on the screen, including the landscape orientation app layouts that Plus users have enjoyed over the years. Games look great too. With triple-A games like ‘Fortnite’ and ‘The Elder Scrolls Blades’ hitting the App Store and more AR games in the pipeline, the XS Max will be a spectacular gaming device.
The new HDR OLED screens are noticeably more vibrant than the outgoing X and you don’t lose any pixel density if you pick up the Max (2436 x 1125 pixels on the XS and 2688 x 1242 pixels on the Max, both 458ppi).
And hey, have to give the dual speakers credit too – if I was able to hear movie dialogue in a demo area swarming with people, that says it all.
Hardware – Upgraded with A12
Both the phones have identical specs aside from their screens – a welcome change from the time when you had to buy the bigger model if you wanted the best feature set.
Both use Apple’s new A12 Bionic processor, which Apple claims is 15 percent faster than the A11, but anyone reporting tech will remind you this is the first 7-nanometer chip available in the market, which allows for lower power consumption and better battery life.
The A12 Bionic ships with a 4-core GPU and a 6-core CPU along with an 8-core Neural Engine, which handles machine learning and other AI tasks such as helping recognise your face and processing your photos faster. In the demos I saw, it’s as snappy as it gets, but we’ll focus our full review on how the performance pans out in daily use.
Camera – Flagship-Level
While it may not be a new trick in the smartphone space, the XS and Max dual cameras now allow you to select the amount of bokeh after the shot, so that you can get the right amount of blur for your photos.
There are improvements across the board – larger pixels on the wide-angle lens, a wider aperture on the telephoto lens and a faster selfie camera as well – but I’ll reserve my judgements on camera quality until I take the XS duo out for a spin.
With the imminent 28 September India launch date, I expect that answer will be sooner rather than later.
(Tushar Kanwar is a technology columnist and commentator and has been contributing for the past 15 years to India’s leading newspapers and magazines. He can be reached at @2shar.)
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