Was The Upgrade Worth It?

I recently started my new job at Vodafone and one of the first things I was told was that I could talk about work. As you can imagine this makes writing about my daily life quite difficult as I spend 5 days a week with the wonderful team at the Vodafone Store in Bridlington.

What I can talk about are the phones and other bits and pieces we sell. I will point out from the start that these are my views, Vodafone has no say on what I type when I review a product and I will not be sharing any privileged information with anyone. Now that’s out of the way though let’s crack on.

The iPhone 11 Pro

The iPhone 11 Pro comes packed with Apple’s latest A13 Bionic SoC that is packed with all a ton of dedicated cores for GPU, CPU, Neural Engine & Machine Learning to name just a few. All this means that the iPhone 11 Pro is bloody quick.

Just like the iPhone X, Xr & Xs before it the iPhone 11 Pro comes with FaceID instead of TouchID. The removal of the TouchID button is a bit weird for the first hour or so if you are coming from previous iPhones without FaceID but once you’re used to it you don’t realise it’s there, well unless you’re wearing a face mask.

The iPhone 11 Pro comes with 4 12MP cameras. One is built into the FaceID Sensor and allows you to vlog in 4K and actually see if you’re in the frame. The back of the phone has the other three, the three lenses give you x0.5, x1 & x2 zoom. The video quality is amazing. All of the cameras come with Optical Image Stabilisation making your videos buttery smooth.

Once you’ve shot your video though you going to want to view it back and the iPhone 11 Pro’s screen does not disappoint. The 5.8″ screen may be the smallest of the iPhone 11 range but as it’s an OLED panel it delivers the full spectrum of the P3 colour gamut and of course is great for watching content shot using High Dynamic Range, such as the iPhone’s cameras. It also has a True Tone Display that shifts the colour of your display order pending on the lighting conditions around you to reduce the strain on your eyes. A feature I love but one that Mrs Jim is not a fan of.

Just like the previous versions, the iPhone 11 Pro comes with a boatload of services built-in such as Apple Pay, iCloud, & Siri. I’m running the iOS 14 beta and I’ve noticed that Siri has improved and not just the voice assistant. Siri Suggestions for example actually knows what I want to do 9 times out of 10, which is a nice change from iOS 13 when it was a bit pot luck. As I’m in the UK I’m still waiting for Apple Cash & Apple Card but Apple Pay is still as good as ever. The only thing I don’t like is that I have to double click the side button when I make a payment, when before I could just rest my thumb on the TouchID sensor.

It is great to have the screen fill up almost the entire phone and the notch really doesn’t bother me as I thought it would. I don’t think we’ll be seeing the notch disappear for a few years yet but the Depth sensor is amazing and just works, unlike the Face unlock feature Abi was using on the Samsung A20. I also really enjoy playing with Memoji and Animoji. They may be a bit silly but it really does show off the capabilities of the sensors and I can’t wait to it out with a bit of animation in unreal engine sometime soon.

Overall I am really happy with my upgrade. If I was coming from the iPhone X line up I probably wouldn’t have upgraded just yet as there really aren’t that many differences. When it comes to choosing between the three iPhone 11s I would still stick with the iPhone 11 Pro over the iPhone 11 or the Pro Max. For me, there are two main reasons for this. The first is that while both the other variants have larger screens, the iPhone only has an LED display, so no true HDR and the Pro Max may have a larger screen but that’s the only difference between the Pro and the Pro Max. Secondly it the camera setup. That ultra-wide camera is going to make filming on the go, allowing me to get wide shots without having to walk 10 or 20 meters down the street for a bit of B-Roll footage.

I’m sure I’ve missed a feature or three during this review if you want to know my views on something I’ve missed just drop me a comment below and I’ll update this post.