Apple is one of the tech brands that symbolize status, perfection, and class. It made its place in the smartphone segment with solid grounds. Usually, the approach of Apple is very bold and unorthodox. With the introduction of the capacitive display to eliminating headphone jack, name it, and you can find such bold moves by Apple. Like all other brands, every year, Apple launches a new variant of its iPhone. More recently, we have seen a more versatile approach. An entire line up is introduced and available to consumers.
The target audience for Apple this year has been high end and budget consumers as well. We witnessed such a move last year with iPhone XR. Before that, in the form of iPhone 5c. a cheaper and low-end variant offered the essential specifications with the same Apple-like feel and experience. So far, this has proven an effective business strategy. This year Apple came up with some interesting variants. It tried to cut the least corners yet get a budget-friendly device as well. In October of 2020, Apple launched the Apple iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro max. Alongside these variants, Apple also announced the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 mini. The focus of this blog is the latter two variants. The tiny and nifty iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 mini pack many features, and performance is very impressive. In the market of giant screens and phablets, these moderate and handy sizes are very welcoming. The era of large smartphones has led us away from one-handed smaller flagships, which are no longer to be found, unless now.
Unboxing Experience:
This year we have the smaller and sleek boxes for the entire iPhone line up. The boxes alone are a huge part of Apple’s iPhone 12, a controversial story that we shall detail later in the article. The box is about half the height of the original box and feels very sleek. Once opened, the clamshell reveals the iPhone 12 right away wrapped in thin transparent plastic film to protect it from fingerprints and smudges. The footprint is basically the whole box with a little bit of padding. The plastic peal covers the screen with a white opaque film. Beneath that, we have our lightning cable neatly tucked and the smaller and much-reduced paperwork and user’s manual in a square format. That’s all, and yes, we didn’t miss on the charging brick. This year, Apple has made a strange yet bold move on totally omitting the inclusion of a charging brick altogether. That makes the iPhone 12 so controversial and the box so sleek. That all for the unboxing experience. The overall feel is very upmarket and posh; by no means the consumers get a cheaper feel or a non-flagship vibe. Apple has a great experience in delivering the best of unboxing experiences out there.
Product Description:
Available to consumers at around the end of October 2020, Apple iPhone 12 is Apple’s take on capturing the high segment of the mid-range smartphones. Primarily it comes with a metal and glass building. With metal rails running around, sandwiched between glasses, we have almost no bezels upfront. Which allows Apple to squeeze a much larger screen in a smaller footprint. Packing within, we have a 6.1 inches OLED panel upfront. With a very decent 86% body to screen ratio, we have an impressive 460 pixels per inch density that are very appreciated when considering the competitors. Apple names the display technology as a super retina XDR OLED panel. The fancy term just narrates Apple’s new OLED displays, which are very impressive. Still, the OLED panels produced by Samsung are even better. Being OLED panel, the color spectrum is broad and accurate. The displays portray a pitch and inky blacks, and very saturated colors. The overall saturation at nominal and color representation are somewhat close to natural. The display is awe-inspiring and performs above average. Though we must add that the Samsung displays outperform that of Apple’s. It comes loaded with some added features as well. It is enabled with true tone and scratch-resistant ceramic glass coating. No official rating is declared by apple officially about scratch resistivity. Still, in our vigorous testing, it stood well against daily enemies like keys. However, the addition of the oleo-phobic coating makes it a bit less fingerprint magnet.
Sides are neatly organized with the power/ lock button on the right and volume and silent toggle switch on the left. We have a lightning port at the bottom, it would be appreciated if Apple upgraded to a USB Type-C port and a speaker grill. The speakers are decent, with an avid amount of low ends. However, they tend to struggle at higher volumes with distortion. On the back, we have a dual-camera setup. The primary shooter is a 12-megapixel shooter with a wide enough f/1.6 aperture and optical image stabilization onboard. iPhone 12 can shoot up in 4K resolution at 60 frames per second and supports a slow-motion video at 1080p, clocking 240 frames per second.
Moreover, it comes loaded with some useful features like dual pixel PDAF and OIS by software. The secondary lens is also a 12 megapixel slightly narrow f/2.4 aperture that is an ultra-wide lens. To add, we have a dual-tone LED flash that produces some natural effect while using it. The HDR feature helps you capture some fantastic shots even with very little knowledge of photography. The front-facing camera is yet another 12-megapixel f/2.2 aperture. It can take some decent selfies and record 4k video at 60 frames per second. Overall it can shoot some amazing pictures as well. It performs decently in well-lit environments, but it suffers drastically at night time. The face detection is precise and is very useful when using the feature of animoji.
Some basic sensors such as accelerometer, proximity, gyro, compass, and barometer are also included. Apple iPhone 12 is powered by the latest A14 Bionic chip, it’s a Hexa-core processor clocked at 1.8 GHz assisted by Apple 4 core Graphics processor. It has 2 dedicated cores that can turbo boost up to 3.1 GHz. It’s the latest processor by Apple, and the same found in flagship models. This is a very appreciable step by Apple that all the variants carry the same brains in the entire line up. It crushes the benchmark scores of both single and multi-core. This is a good initiative by Apple to include the latest and upmarket chip in this supposed mid-range product. It comes with a 4 GB of RAM and 64 GB of storage as the base variant. The performance is up to mark and very responsive. The lag was not noticed at any point. Even when running demanding applications, it showed no trouble at all. Multi-core tasking is very impressive. The chip is efficient and fast. On top, it runs the latest iOS 14. The software is seamlessly integrated with the hardware. Application management is excellent. It uses every possible sector of hardware to utilize each bit efficiently. Here we would like to mention the battery capacity as well. A non-removable 2815 mAH powers the device. On papers that not up to standard with the 2020 line-up.
In some cases, it’s even too small for 2018 standards. However, testing it thoroughly, we were surprised that it lasted for a day with ease. The software expertly manages battery life. The efficiency of software in optimizing the battery life is appreciable. The background tasks are suppressed, and the once active are channeled through various algorithms to gain most of out the battery. Still, we would love to have seen at least a 3000 mAH battery pack, just to get over that battery anxiety.
Final Verdict:
Coming in at a steep price tag of $829 for a 64 GB variant by Apple, we found that Apple iPhone 12, offers its consumers the flagship specifications in terms of internals and maintaining a reasonably decent and modern look. The boxier design is very industrial and provides a very solid grip in your hands. The built quality is fantastic and the unboxing experience is posh. In 2020 we would really appreciate that if Apple added a Type-C port in their upcoming models. This would leave the consumers with one less cable to worry about.
Score:
- Unboxing experience 8.0/10
- Built 8.5/10
- Design language 8.0/10
- Performance 8.5/10
- Battery life 8.0/10
- Price justification 7.5/10
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