An excellent camera, a great price and strong battery life make this a clear winner for best iPhone
Pros:
- Great camera
- Long-lasting battery
- Really nice colour options
- Surprisingly excellent value for an Apple phone
Cons: - A screen resolution bump would have been nice
- Still no fast charger in the box
The iPhone 11 is the natural successor to the ridiculously popular iPhone XR and sits below the more expensive iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max in Apple’s current phone line-up.
You could think of it as an iPhone XRS: it takes the previous phone, leaves the design virtually unchanged and alters the internals. For example, there are now two cameras on the back and the same A13 chipset as the Pro model. Most surprisingly, the iPhone 11 costs less than the outgoing model: at £729/$699 for the 64GB base as opposed to £749/$749, this could be the best-value iPhone yet.
The 11 offers the best size of any iPhone. There’s more screen to play with than on the 11 Pro, but the phone doesn’t feel overly bulky or heavy. In terms of battery life, the iPhone 11 is a really long-lasting phone that we found went slightly further than its predecessor on a single charge.
The new rear cameras are also excellent. The iPhone 11 is much more affordable than the Pro models but boasts exactly the same wide-angle 12-megapixel optical image stabilised (OIS) main sensor with an f/1.8 aperture and the same 12-megapixel ultra-wide-angle camera (f/2.4).
The only thing you’re missing out on is the Pro’s 2x optical zoom telephoto camera, but if you’d take ultra-wide-angle over zoom, you might well see this as a fair trade – it’s hard to see any differences when comparing photos from the Pro and the 11.
The 6.1-inch Liquid Retina LCD, however, falls below the competition in terms of resolution and it would have been nice to see the 1792 x 828 panel upgraded to a 1080p version.
Also less than impressive is the 5W charger included in the box. The omission of a fast charger is clearly a cost-cutting measure and remains a significant negative aspect of this phone. The charger provided has always felt slow and this is even more obvious now that the iPhone 11 Pro models come with an 18W charger.
Overall, if you’re updating an older iPhone then you’ll notice the vast array of improvements to camera, battery life and design straight away. This is a great buy that’ll hopefully perform comfortably for a number of years.
