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APPLE IPHONE 11 PRO REVIEW: PRICE AND AVAILABILITY
The iPhone 11 Pro starts from Β£1,049, for the 5.8-inch model with 64GB of storage. There's also theΒ
You can upgrade to get more storage space. Β£150 more gets you 256GB. Another Β£200 on top of that gets you 512GB. It's a pretty hefty premium in both cases, and Apple still doesn't include a microSD card slot.Β
These are damn expensive phones, though the Β£1,000 mark is now not uncommon β the Samsung Galaxy Note10+ comes in at Β£999, and just like that model, these are Apple's highest-end offerings.
If it's more than you're willing to spend on a phone, it's totally understandable β theΒ iPhone 11Β (non-Pro version) starts from Β£729, with far fewer cut corners than you'd expect.
The iPhone 11 Pro is available in four colours: Space Grey (black on all sides), Silver (silver edges and a white back), Gold (warm gold edges with a back that's like a dark peach), and the new Midnight Green (with dark green edges, and kind of moody forest green back).
The latter is apparently wildly popular, which is no surprise for a new colour. It looks lovely β it's really dark, and in dim lighting could be mistaken for black, but it clearly has this rich green tint in all other lights.
APPLE IPHONE 11 PRO REVIEW: DESIGN, SCREEN AND SPEAKERS
The design of the 11 Pro is almost identical to the iPhone XS, including the use of stainless steel on the sides with glass across the back.
A falling phone is still far too unpredictable for us to be able to guarantee that the new model won't break after a fall, but your odds are better, and that's all you can ask for, really.
The only notable changes to the look are on the back: the camera, and the texture on the glass plate.
The big triple camera looks far better than it has any right to (though still is not quite a thing of unambiguous beauty). The trick is that it draws from classic design: much like the iPod evoked Braun radios, this is built like triple-lens film cameras such as the Crown8 E3.
The thick ring around each lens on the iPhone leans into this heritage β it makes the camera look practical and important, rather than like Apple has failed to hide it (as can be the case).
I'm not sure it's necessarily better-looking than the central camera arrays on theΒ Samsung S10Β orΒ Huawei Mate 30, but I've become quite fond of its physicality.
The entire glass back of the phone now has an etched texture to it, which makes it more reliable to grip without a case. This is extremely welcome, because I learned exactly which surfaces in my home were flat and which weren't by watching the iPhone XS inevitably work its way towards edges and take a tumble.
On the front, there's still a hefty notch that can't help but make the design look a little behind rivals with punch-holes or pop-up cameras, which give you the full screen to view.
In practice, it's not a problem in any way β iOS has been designed around the notch, and Apple's secure (and now faster) Face ID needs chunkier sensors β but it does feel behind the curve, which isn't exactly what you want from a Β£1k+ phone. Especially when other high-end phones are coming with super-futuristic in-screen fingerprint sensors that work great, which we ultimately prefer to face recognition.
That brings us to the screen, which is our first unqualified rave review for the 11 Pro. Now peaking at 1,200 lumens when viewing HDR photos or video, it's basically like having an OLED telly in your hand.
HDR videos, and especially Dolby Vision, look absolutely incredible. There's no HDR10+ support, but given that this is barely used so far (Amazon Prime Video supports it), while Dolby Vision is on both Netflix and the iTunes Store, we don't mind this omission too much. HDR10+ videos will still fall back to regular HDR10, which is fully supported.
The wide P3 colour gamut makes photos look vibrant and realistic, and everything is pin-sharp. It's utterly, utterly gorgeous.
The iPhone 11 Pro and Pro Max have the same screen density (over 400ppi), but at different resolutions, so there's no difference in sharpness. For movie buffs, there's a strong argument to get the bigger model just to really, really enjoy the display.
Apple has included new 'spatial audio' speakers, with Dolby Atmos support. The effect is really impressive β there's clear separation of left and right, and you can hear nuance in the position of sounds from the front in movies, though you don't exactly get the full rear-speaker experience, unsurprisingly.
Of course, most people will probably use headphones for movies, but the new speaker setup has other advantages: it's super loud, and offers balance and quality that pretty much kills off the need for cheap Bluetooth speakers. It's even better and louder for calls β compared to the iPhone XS, the difference was noticeable from the very first ring tone we heard.
APPLE IPHONE 11 PRO REVIEW: CAMERAS
Okay, this is the big section. The iPhone 11 Pro is Apple's first rear triple-camera system, in a year that's been full of them. The third lens is another first for the iPhone: an ultra-wide lens. These again are now de rigeur for phones, having arrived on just about every high-end handset in the last 12 months.
That's in addition to the standard wide-angle lens and 2x telephoto lenses that the device inherits from the iPhone XS (this dual setup was also found on the iPhone X, iPhone 8 Plus and iPhone 7 Plus).
These remain largely unchanged, with two small but impactful updates. The first is that the telephoto lens now has a larger aperture, which lets in 40% more light β this makes it noticeably better in situations that don't involve bright sunlight, and makes for more detailed portrait shots, as we'll see.
The second is that the wide-angle sensor now has 100% focus pixels, which is tech talk for saying that it's much faster and more accurate at focusing, especially in very low light. This is vital for the new Night mode option, which is exclusive to the 11 series of iPhones.
Like similar options on other devices (Google's Night Sight, Samsung's Bright Night, etc), this takes a slow shot in very dark conditions and pulls out colour and detail that would be totally lost normally.
To accommodate all this, there's a new design of the Camera app that's exclusive to iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro. The flashiest difference is that the live view of what's being shot isn't just limited to the main viewfinder β if you're using the wide-angle lens, a faint view of what the ultra-wide is seeing is displayed under the buttons, making it a bit easier to decide whether you want to change your zoom level.
It's nice, though oddly doesn't always appear when you're in the 1x wide-angle lens. At first, we suspected a bug, but it seems to be connected to focus distance: if you're shooting an object at fairly close range, you get a black interface. Pull back a little and the view from the ultra-wide fades in. Apple didn't return a request for clarification about exactly how this works before publication.
Our favourite other difference is 'Quick Take' shooting, in which if you press and hold the shutter button, you'll capture video instead of pictures, which no change of modes needed. And if you slide your thumb left, you'll lock into recording video, and don't need to hold any more. If you want to shoot bursts (which is what used to happen when you held the shutter button), you slide right. It's a small change, but being able to rapidly switch between stills and video when your kid does something cute is so, so useful.
A bunch of handy controls have been made more accessible (just swipe over the different shooting modes to bring up a different set of buttons) and there's a new icon for Night mode in the corner. This shows whether Night mode is active (it fires up automatically when needed), and how long you'll need to hold still for Night mode to work.
The length of time will typically be one or three seconds if you're holding the iPhone in your hand: iOS calculates the time needed by looking at light levels and your hand shake. If you can go very still by leaning on something, it'll boost to five seconds. When you press the trigger, a little timer counts down to when the shot is complete.
You can actually manually override the timing if you're feeling confident, though β you can set it up to 30 seconds, in fact. You will need a tripod for this to be effective, but you can produce stunning starlight photography from this.
As we've hinted at above, the result of all this is astounding image quality, so let's look at some examples. First up, how the three lenses compare.
