A fantastic screen

by Phonedesk Admin November 23, 2019

iPhone 11 Pro Screen Corey Gaskin / Digital Trends

With a name like “Super Retina XDR,” the display improvements over the iPhone XS better be substantial — and they are. The iPhone XS’ OLED screen was already impressively balanced and vibrant, but the iPhone 11 Pro doubles the contrast ratio, improves HDR, and ups the max brightness to a 1,200-nit peak.

You’ll usually only get up to 800 nits, as 1,200 nits is achieved when viewing HDR content. But all this adds up to a display you can easily view indoors and out, and dynamically adjusts to deliver the brightest highlights and inkiest blacks. Colors appear vivid but accurate, giving it a slight leg up on the impressive Galaxy Note 10, which in my eyes looks a bit over-saturated.

It’s truly wonderful to look at and a joy to watch videos on, thanks to the sharp 2,436 x 1,125 resolution. If you watch a ton of movies and videos on your phone, it’s worth considering the iPhone 11 Pro Max, which offers up a much bigger 6.5-inch screen, but I’m satisfied with the screen size here.

Killer performance, and a dark iOS

Apple said the new A13 Bionic chip has up to 20% faster CPU and GPU performance and the benchmarks corroborate this dominance. It’s the fastest phone we’ve ever tested, and playing games, working, or just flipping through music and social media will always be a fluid experience on the iPhone 11 Pro.

Here are a few benchmark results:

AnTuTu 3DBench: 455,778
Geekbench 5 CPU: 1,323 single-core; 3,503 multi-core

The AnTuTu score is the highest we have ever recorded on a smartphone, beating out phones like the Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus by almost 100,000. The only other phone to come close is the iPhone 11 — see what I mean about Apple competing with itself?

iOS 13 brings us the long-awaited dark mode, as well as privacy-oriented features like Sign In with Apple, case-by-case permission of location access for apps, and a slew of other new features and improvements. Check out our iOS 13 in-depth impressions to get the full rundown, but as far as the iPhone 11 Pro goes, the operating system is as smooth as ever.