iPhone 7 and 7 Plus

iPhone 7 & 7 Plus Design

If you’ve seen any of the iPhone 7 leaks you’ll know not much has changed in terms of design, but those familiar antenna bands have now migrated to the edges of the device rather than the back. The enclosure creates the housing for the camera bump because it is all crafted from the same bit of aluminium.

There are two new iPhone 7 colors: Jet Black and regular Black. Jet Black is the piano black you might have heard about and it is glossy and sexy as all get out. Black is more of a matte black but will definitely appeal to those that aren’t into building their fingerprint collection. You’ve also still got options for Gold, Silver and Rose Gold.

iPhone 7 & 7 Plus Home button

The home button has been re-engineered from the ground up and it is customizable on the iPhone 7. The iPhone 7’s solid state home button is now Force Touch sensitive and works together with Apple’s Taptic engine to be more responsive to a wider range of frequencies. According to Cook, it provides and “incredible new feel”.

What’s more, the new home button is used throughout iOS, providing unique feedback for messages, notifications, ringtones and navigation. It actually sounds pretty cool, meaning you’ll know by touch alone what is going on with your iPhone 7, but as we’ve seen with other attempts to move to pressure sensitive sensors (across tech in general), it’ll more than likely divide opinion.

IP67 water resistant

For the first time, Apple has released a water-resistant iPhone. With an IP67 certification, the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus are protected against harmful dust particles (but they are not dustproof) as well as high-powered water jets and splashes. The IP67 certification means that it is now on par with many Android flagships that have been IP67 rated; Apple may have taken a while to launch this but at least they didn’t say it was a ‘ground-breaking revolutionary feature’, eh?

iPhone 7 & 7 Plus Camera

Apple introduced all-new cameras on the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus. They feature optical image stabilization, meaning they can comfortably handle up to three times longer exposures. The f/1.8 aperture six-element lens lets in 50% more light too.

The new 12 MP sensor is 60% faster and 30% more energy efficient than the iPhone 6s and the True-Tone flash now has four LEDs and a Flicker Sensor that reads the flickering of artificial lighting for even better exposures.

The iPhone 7s gets a new image signal processor that has twice the throughput of previous versions. It uses machine learning to set exposure, focus and color balance, all in 25 milliseconds. I don’t care what anyone says, this new iPhone 7 camera is going to be good.

If you opt for the larger-screened iPhone 7 Plus, you’ll even get a second 12 MP camera on the back: a regular wide-angle lens and a second telephoto lens. The two lenses not only allow you to switch between wide-angle and zoom photography, they will also work in concert with software to create a depth map of the scene in front of the lenses. This all happens automatically in Portrait mode.

Dual lenses certainly aren’t new – Apple is merely playing catch up to a plethora of dual-camera phones including the Honor 8, Huawei P9 Plus, LG V20 and the LG G5 – so it’ll be interesting to see how Apple’s implementation compares to that of its Android competition.

Although the new iPhone 7 Plus won’t ship with this new depth-mapping feature, it will be a free update later in the year. What it does is essentially allow the software to analyse the image and create an artificial Bokeh effect by distinguishing between the subject and de-focusing the background.

The new iPhones supposedly have improved low-light performance thanks to the larger aperture, a faster sensor speed supports high-speed exposures and you even get OIS when shooting Live Photos, which are now supported by third-party apps. Oh, and RAW file support has finally come to the iPhone (time to buy the high storage capacity version kids…) and it’s long overdue, considering how long it’s been available on Android. That being said, a very welcome feature addition for iPhone users.

Both new iPhones come with a 7 MP FaceTime camera up front with auto-image stabilization. Improved color capture capabilities guarantee better looking selfies than on any previous iPhone.

iPhone 7 & 7 Plus Price and release date

The iPhone 7 release date is September 16 with pre-orders as of September 9. The iPhone 7 price starts at $649 for the 32 GB version (with options up to 256 GB) and the iPhone 7 Plus price starts at $769 for the 32 GB version (again, with models up to 256 GB).

To put that in perspective, those are the same price points as the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, except you get double the internal storage for the same price. Because that means no one would probably bother with the iPhone 6s or 6s Plus any more, Apple is also upping the storage on last year’s models. The brand-new Jet Black iPhone 7 only comes in 128 GB and 256 GB options, making it the new “must-have”.