Apple iPhone XR – Hands On

The latest launches mark the upgrade-and-tweak phase of the iPhone cycle, having unveiled the more fundamentally redesigned X past year.

The iPhone X comes with a 5.8-inch OLED display while the iPhone XS has 6.5-inch OLED screen – the biggest ever on an iPhone. There’s no home button on any of them – love it or hate it, Apple is putting the fingerprint reader permanently out to pasture. It boasts the same set of features found in other iPhone X models. Apple has done coloured phones before, with the iPhone 5c, but these colours are shimmery aluminium under glass, and they have a rich, enamel-like look to them.

It’s the internet, so of course people are.

Apple appears to have leaked the names of its new iPhone line-up on its website just hours before its live event to launch the products.

While online sentiment was mixed, an obvious key focus was the high price tag – also a target of criticism around the launch of the iPhone X past year.

Well, welcome to the future everyone. The phone doesn’t have gigabit LTE like the XS does, although it does support T-Mobile’s new rural Band 71.

The TL;DR version? Nothing revolutionary. The XR’s blue, red, and yellow are much more appealing than the XS’s gold, which honestly looks pretty brown.

We’ll start with the XS.

The company also introduced a lower-cost 6.1-inch (15.5 cm) iPhone XR made of aluminum and with lower screen quality.

All the new features and sensors have no ill effects on battery life, claims Apple.

Others pointed out that it was a missed opportunity, arguing that the firm should have called its XS Max – which has the biggest iPhone display yet – the iPhone XL. This time around, the iPhone XS will stay at the $999 mark while the iPhone XR will use cheaper materials and sell for about $750.

The new iteration brings a number of upgrades, including UI tweaks and the option to apply the device’s Breathe app to the watch face. It comes with a enormous 6.5-inch screen, which really should qualify it as a small iPad.

We’re talking of course about the iPhone Xs, the iPhone Xs Max, and the iPhone Xr.

It’s hard to choose which model you might buy.

As for the iPhone Xr, you get a choice of 64GB, 128GB or 256GB of storage.

The tech blogger and well-known Apple watcher John Gruber also weighed in, noting that he could find a picture of an AirPower mat but no mention of the product by name on Apple’s site.

Apple definitely is leading the smartwatch sector by a significant margin, and the company was even keen to point out that the Apple Watch is the most popular watch overall as well (Though that’s just because there’s no one dominating classic watch in a similar position).

“Fall detection is a feature we hope you never need, but it’s really nice to know it’s there”, said Apple chief operating officer Jeff Williams.

How about a new operating system instead?

The iPhone XS comes in 64 GB, 256 GB, and 512 GB variants and starts at $999.

There are some new tools to monitor how much time you spend looking at your phone and some tweaks to how notifications display.

“The larger screen will be very important in China to turn around the trend there, because they have lost some share in the last few years, partly because of screen size”, she added.