#COOL THINGS FOR IPHONE XR FULL#
#COOL THINGS FOR IPHONE XR PLUS#

There are a couple edge cases where it doesn't work as well, like if you want to reach over and unlock the phone or if you want to have multiple people registered. Now, a year later, it's not just tough to go back, it's slow.

In place of the home button is an upward swipe and gesture-based navigation system that took me about a day to get used to. In fact, the XR screen is pretty much as big as an entire iPhone 6s or 7 or 8, case and all. IPhone XR, though, brings that next-generation, almost full-screen iPhone experience to the table, and for considerably less than the more expensive than ever flagships. Not just because of their discounted price but because of their consistency with previous generations.

#COOL THINGS FOR IPHONE XR PLUS#

That's probably why, more than a year into the age of iPhone X, we hear anecdotes about how well last year's iPhone 8 and 8 Plus are still selling. Again, tech hot takers can bemoan Apple's quote-un-quote boring design all day long, but for everyone consistency was a tangible user benefit and the Home button was a tactile escape hatch that could reorient us whenever anything got the least bit dodgy or confusing. iPhone XR Navigation + Face IDįor most people, the biggest change moving from an iPhone 6s, or any traditional iPhone, to the XR will be the loss of the Home button. And, since one of the reasons Apple puts so much power into its chipsets is so that they'll be able to handle updates for the next 4 or 5 years to come, if you're planning on keeping an iPhone XR anywhere nearly that long, even as a hand-me-down, it should legit more than last. This year, some of that kind of stuff can still come close, but there's just so much headroom that I think it's going to take a year or two before we see anything really put A12 through its paces. Two years ago, Portrait Mode could peg an iPhone 7. It feels like you're only ever constrained by the speed it takes to pull data off the storage - which is also silly fast - or off the internet, which is about the only time anything ever really spins or makes you wait. Literally nothing outside the terrible, freeze-prone coding of the Instagram app - can we please go back to Objective C or Swift? - slows it down. Because there aren't that many pixels to push around, even the interface moves like it's on a hair trigger. Rendering short video feels like saving images and saving images feels like… like closing them without saving. We knew from the start that Apple's A12 Bionic was going to be a beast of a processor, but that's really born itself out.

AR quick view, by the way, where you tap a web link and suddenly you're in augmented reality is one of those features that make you think you're living in the future. Same goes for pretty much any high-end game that supports it, but also heavy-duty computational photography filters, video effects, machine learning models, and more. Me, personally, I can die at 60 fps and I can die well, but if you can actually play and win, you can do it pretty damn gloriously on the iPhone XR.įortnite on iPhone XR (Image credit: iMore) You can play Fortnite at 60 frames-per-second. One month later and I want this battery path to be Apple's new normal. And with iPhone XR, even more than iPhone XS, they have. I said in previous years that Apple had to start testing not for the light web browsing and email checking of the past but the social, photo and video, and gaming realities of the present.

#COOL THINGS FOR IPHONE XR FULL#

Just for fun, I took both phones out for Pokémon Go's community day this past weekend and even with both batteries near full health, the iPhone 6s was almost dead at the end of four hours but the iPhone XR could have easily gone 4 more. I watch a lot more YouTube now than I did back then, not coincidentally, and my single biggest battery blaster remains Pokemon Go, which didn't exist when iPhone 6s launched but debuted the following summer and its combination of screen-on time, data, rendering, and GPS just brought most phones to their knees. Thanks to video and stories with rendered and geo-based filters, they're always downloading and displaying media, pulling GPS, and otherwise hitting the battery.

Snapchat and Facebook have come and gone for me already, but they were huge battery hits when I was using them. Not just because of the capacity but because of the workload.īack when I first got my iPhone 6s at launch in 2015, my typical usage was just starting to get more demanding. (Mine was at 88% before I got the swap, now back at 100.)Įither way, it makes a real difference. That's about one and a half times as much battery life, on its best day, or if you've already gotten battery replacement.

Cool things for iphone xr