Don’t buy the new iPhone SE!, Here’s why…
Why Apple’s iPhone SE 2020 feels like a BIG disappointment
It has taken four years, but Apple finally updated its budget, pocket-friendly iPhone SE. The original model took the internal hardware of the iPhone 6s (about six months old at the time) and crammed it into the smaller body of the iPhone 5s. The new model takes the same approach, stuffing a lot of the iPhone 11 hardware into an iPhone 8 body.
Let’s see why it fails to hold up high expectations by comparing it to other iPhone models.
Design
The new iPhone SE looks a lot like the iPhone 8, complete with a large bezel below the screen (housing a physical home button with Touch ID). There’s also a large bezel above the screen. The glass back is fairly plain, with just a small camera bump in the top left corner.
A lot of what’s been sacrificed to keep the price down is in the design: the screen technology and quality on the iPhone 11 is far ahead of that in the new iPhone SE, which is using the same screen setup as the iPhone 8 from 2017.
So the new iPhone SE is smaller and lighter than the iPhone 11, but looks rather more old-fashioned and bezel-heavy which is quite a bummer for a phone launched in 2020.
Who buys a phone in 2020 with such large bezels?
Neither phone has a 3.5mm headphone port.
A Petite (small) Display
The iPhone SE 2020 has a 4.7-inch 750 x 1334 IPS LCD screen with 326 pixels per inch
In my opinion, the screen size should have been at least 5.5 inches.
Who buys a phone so small nowadays?
For binge-watching on Netflix or YouTube, playing games, or doing some work on the phone like editing documents on the go, the screen size matters a lot. A bigger screen is a must for these types of tasks and thus I feel the screen size is the biggest disappointment in this phone.
Neither phone matches the superior OLED display of the iPhone 11 Pro nor the screen is big as you get in the latest Android phones in a similar price range like Pixel 3A, OnePlus 7, Poco X2 or Redmi K20 Pro.
Only a single Camera
The good news is that the iPhone SE appears to have the same rear-facing wide-angle camera as the iPhone 11 (12MP and f1.8). With the A13 chip inside, it’s capable of nearly all the same image and video processing, including all the portrait lighting effects and Smart HDR. However, Apple makes no mention of Night Mode, which is strange…there’s appears to be no reason the iPhone SE couldn’t do it, but it can’t.
The bad news is that you only have the one rear-facing camera: no telephoto lens, no ultra-wide lens. You can do Portrait Mode, but as with the iPhone XR, it only works when it detects a person’s face, and there’s no Portrait Mode on the front camera.
The front-facing camera isn’t as good on the iPhone SE as on other modern iPhones. It’s a 7MP camera that seems identical to that found on the iPhone 8, and is limited to 1080p video at 30fps. The A13 Bionic processor enables better image processing with it, but the hardware is a little aged.
So the photo and video quality from the rear camera should be up to par with the iPhone 11, but you don’t have as much flexibility as with dual or triple camera setup.
Battery life matters the most
If you want a really epic battery life, you might want to look beyond the new iPhone SE. While I don’t expect it to have bad battery life, it should definitely not last as long as the iPhone 11 or iPhone XR.
Apple says it should get 12 hours of video playback or 8 hours of streaming video. For the iPhone 11, those figures are 17 hours and 10 hours, and the iPhone XR is about an hour less.
Smaller phone, smaller battery, less battery life.
It’s disappointing when you compare it to more recent iPhones that have dramatically improved battery life.
You’ll miss Memoji and Animoji
If you don’t have Face ID, you don’t have the TrueDepth module. And if you don’t have the TrueDepth module, you can’t really use Memoji or Animoji. The front-facing 3D scanning sensors that are used for Face ID are also used to approximate your facial expressions and motion on Memoji and Animoji.
It’s also used to take Portrait Mode selfies. You’re giving up all these things with the iPhone SE.
I just want an iPhone that I can keep for 5 years
iPhones are expensive! Some people want the latest model every year, and others just want something reliable that they can keep for five years until it stops getting software updates.
If you’re keeping your phone for four or five years, you want one with the best camera possible. That means waiting until the fall and spending more money, but years from now you may be glad you splurged on a phone with a better front-facing camera and a rear camera capable of Night mode than the iPhone SE.
5G is the future
Right now, 5G isn’t a critical technology for your iPhone. You can’t get a good 5G signal in most places, and even when you can the benefits are modest compared to the hype. There’s not much you can do with 5G right now that you can’t do with a good 4G LTE signal.
That won’t always be the case. The carriers will be working overtime over the next year or two to blanket the country with 5G coverage and improve its performance. It’s not like 4G LTE is going to stop working for a long time, but over the next several years, 5G is going to grow, to be much faster and better than 4G LTE.
If you’re buying a phone to keep for four or five years, you might want to wait for an iPhone 12, which is expected to support 5G networks. It won’t make a big difference this year, but in 2022 you could be glad you did.
Conclusion
The iPhone SE 2020 is the ‘budget’ iPhone you might have been waiting for, as it substantially undercuts even the basic iPhone 11.
But the design is arguably more dated, the screen is smaller, the battery life is supposedly worse, there’s only one rear camera and — rather than Apple’s modern Face Face ID system — you get older Touch ID.
So a lot of sacrifices and changes have been made to keep the price down — but the new iPhone SE is also small, which is something else several people still like their phones to be, so it’s ultimately quite a different proposition to the iPhone 11, and it can be the better option for some only.
Tags : iPhone SE, iPhone SE 2020 review, impressions, thoughts, opinions, honest advice, honest review.