Hands-on with the iPhone 7: Apple has come a long way
SAN FRANCISCO -- I'm not gonna lie to you: the new iPhone 7, which Apple unveiled on Wednesday, feels exquisite and offers the faintest hint of nostalgia.
The highly-polished Jet Black exterior (there are other case options, like the matte Black), is eerily reminiscent of the very first iPhone case: black, incredibly shiny and smooth.
On the other hand, the phone, which I had just a bit of time with in the Apple Product demo room, is also thinner and cooler to the touch than that first, plastic-bodied device was. It's also many light-years ahead of it on the technology front.
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A freshened look
Beyond art museum looks is a handset that's both familiar and fresh. It's essentially the same size and shape as the iPhone 6s. It's still crafted out of 7000 series aluminum alloy. I couldn't detect any weight difference, and Apple representatives in the demo room did not encourage side-by-side comparisons with different devices.
Regardless, there's no mistaking how Apple has taken curves and tolerances to the next level. The antenna lines are gone, and where the iPhone 6 and 6s cameras popped sharply out of the phones' backs, the iPhone 7 body curves up and hugs the lip of the 12 MP camera.
The iPhone 7 is pure symmetry
Volume up and down, power and mute appear unmoved and unchanged, but, again, I couldn't quite compare with the existing iPhone 6 or 6s.
At the base, the iPhone 7 is pure symmetry. There are dual grills and in between is a single, perfectly positioned lightning port. There is no sign the 3.5mm jack ever occupied any part of the space. I did not see the promised dongle that will adapt your old 3.5mm headphones to the multi-purpose lighting port.
The other big change is the home button. It's still in the exact same place and actually looks just like the iPhone 6s home button, but this one doesn't move at all.
I was immediately impressed with how the new Taptic Engine fooled my dense digits into believing the button was actually moving up and down.
Those body changes, removing holes, not allowing certain things to move, no doubt helped in Apple's quest to make the iPhone 7 water resistant. Sadly, there was not a drop of water in the demo room for us to test this ability. The iPhone 7 is supposed to repel dust, and I can only assume that as we all poked at these devices, they were beating back particulates.
Snapshot
Apple upgraded both cameras. The back one is now a six-element, 12-megapixel camera, and the front-facing selfie camera can now shoot at 7 megapixels. Taking shots in the well-lit demo room wasn't much of a test. The preloaded images I saw looked amazing, naturally. Apple said they do something like a billion calculations to generate each image, some of which start before you even press the shutter button. However, the excellent quality is also probably due to the Retina HD Display's new wider color gamut (the resolution is unchanged from the iPhone 6s).
I think the change that pleases me the most -- even though I couldn't see the difference in the demo room -- is the addition of optical image stabilization to the smaller iPhone 7. The camera feature has typically been reserved for the larger, Plus phones. No longer.
The iPhone 7 iSight camera will still shoot the same footage in 4K at 30 frames per second and 1080p at 60 fps. Its slow-mo rate still tops out at 240 fps.
The guts of it
Inside is the new A10 Fusion processor. Apple says it's 40 percent faster than the A9, but also has power-management cores that hop in to take the load when the high-performance ones aren't; needed. That should result in better battery life. This is not something I could discern from a few minutes in a circus-like demo room.
I will say that playing games on the the iPhone 7, there was a lot of detail for smartphone. But Apple has always impressed on the performance front. The game I played was also enhanced by the new stereo speaker system, which pumps sound out of the bottom edge of the phone and from the opening next to the font-facing camera. It can get loud. That in combination with the game's use of the Taptic Engine that third-party companies can now write to added up to a pretty interesting little game experience. It didn't feel like I was holding onto a console controller (which can really rumble in the hand), but I did feel something.
Apple managed to do what was necessary
Overall, it looks like Apple managed to do what was necessary (waterproof, better performance, keeping up or maybe surpassing Samsung on the photo front) without adding fringe features, like wireless charging. That did surprise and disappoint me a bit since the Apple Watch clearly proves that have the capabilities in house.
The Apple iPhone 7 is, at first blush, an evolutionary device, which proves that Apple can both refine and impress at the same time. I challenge anyone to hold the new Jet Black iPhone 7 and not quietly say "oooh."
Lance Ulanoff was Chief Correspondent and Editor-at-Large of Mashable. Lance acted as a senior member of the editing team, with a focus on defining internal and curated opinion content. He also helped develop staff-wide alternative story-telling skills and implementation of social media tools during live events. Prior to joining Mashable in September 2011 Lance Ulanoff served as Editor in Chief of PCMag.com and Senior Vice President of Content for the Ziff Davis, Inc. While there, he guided the brand to a 100% digital existence and oversaw content strategy for all of Ziff Davis’ Web sites. His long-running column on PCMag.com earned him a Bronze award from the ASBPE. Winmag.com, HomePC.com and PCMag.com were all been honored under Lance’s guidance.He makes frequent appearances on national, international, and local news programs including Fox News, the Today Show, Good Morning America, Kelly and Michael, CNBC, CNN and the BBC.He has also offered commentary on National Public Radio and been interviewed by newspapers and radio stations around the country. Lance has been an invited guest speaker at numerous technology conferences including SXSW, Think Mobile, CEA Line Shows, Digital Life, RoboBusiness, RoboNexus, Business Foresight and Digital Media Wire’s Games and Mobile Forum.
