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Introduction
"Off the charts" best describes the buzz that surrounded Apple's anniversary phone, or as it became to be known, iPhone X. Predictably, the introduction of the iPhone 8 was the amuse-bouche, preparing us for the delights of the main meal. We always knew the iPhone 8 was going to look overly familiar to us until the iPhone 'family' aligned further down the roadmap defined by iPhone X.
Those of us who wanted to upgrade our iPhone 7's and 6's were left in a quandary. For several of us, iPhone X genuinely wasn't suitable and having committed to the Apple-verse we were left with a fait accompli from Apple, leaving us with no choice but to upgrade to iPhone 8 or 8 Plus.
Put the form factor and OLED screen aside, supercharged by Apple's A11 Bionic SoC, an even more capable LCD display driven by Apple's first in-house GPU and sporting an upgraded dual camera system, the iPhone 8 Plus is by any definition a flagship-grade device.
Better yet, touting old school bezels - it's retro. And we all know retro is cool, right?
Seriously though, what do we think of owning iPhone 8 Plus as daily drivers? Read on and find out.
This is our fourth article in a series of long-term reviews - a format which is quite new. While our regular reviews are focusing on assessing every aspect of a device's performance in the most objective way possible, the long-term review is where we will give you a more subjective look - an outline of what it's like to live with a specific smartphone every day. We would appreciate your feedback on this new format in the comments section, and we'll do our best to incorporate your suggestions into the next iterations.
Design
Of course, given the industry direction, we can't talk about the iPhone 8 Plus without first addressing those bezels. Yes, who wouldn't want smaller bezels and the resultant smaller phone that would give us? But in isolation, in day to day use, the bezels don't irritate us or fill us with buyers remorse that we didn't go with the iPhone X. Plus, if you choose Space Gray, the black bezels are less intrusive throughout our interactions with the phone.
The capacitive Home button with Touch ID for some of us is preferred over gestures and Face ID. We're lucky, in that we got a great deal of time to spend with both before buying, with Touch ID winning out - appreciating just how fast and reliable this combo is.
The iPhone 8 Plus next to the iPhone X - shared DNA is obvious
Whether a result of familiarity or merely intuitive design, the capacitive home button with its haptic feedback provides a frame of reference to orientate the phone when removing from our pockets, jackets, and bags which helps.
In fact, it's that very same familiarity with the design that's the biggest disappointment for us and not the bezels. Applying the 'if it ain't broke don't fix it' approach for such a lengthy period of time (4 years - Ed) left us with a feeling of disappointment. After having spent a large sum of money, no matter how good it is on the inside and in use, you just don't get that 'new' phone sentiment.
Build quality
The most significant influence on the change of materials in the construction of the iPhone 8 Plus was a direct result of enabling wireless charging for the first time in an iPhone. Enabled by electro-magnetic transfer, wireless charging requires a non-metallic region for the inductive charging to take place. Apple chose glass but could have gone with many other non-metallic materials in its construction. Ceramic would have been more robust than glass, a'la the Essential Phone but working with ceramic has its own challenges and cost implications. Considering that this will be the last iteration of this design why would Apple make the investment. So for now, glass it is.
Inevitably with the glass back comes the obligatory fingerprints and smudges - easily solved by the use of one of a plethora of 'thin' cases.
A color-matched aerospace grade aluminum band curves around to marry together the front and back glass surfaces. In our iPhone X long-term review, we drew attention to the fact that the tolerances were not tight enough where the back glass and the band (stainless steel in the case of the iPhone X) met. Either as a result of the construction or the physical shape, it's here on the iPhone 8 Plus but much less noticeable.
That one issue withstanding, the iPhone 8 Plus follows Apple's usual high build quality while being .2mm larger in all dimensions to the iPhone 7 Plus. In all likelihood, this can be attributed to the glass is thicker than the aluminum used previously in an attempt for it to live up to "The most durable glass ever in a smartphone" moniker bestowed on the iPhone 8 Plus by Apple.
We don't like the fact that it's heavier than the 7 Plus - it's more than 200g now while its battery is smaller. The glass on the back obviously is not as light as aluminum.
While not in the same stratospheric price range as the iPhone X, the iPhone 8 Plus is an expensive iPhone to repair if you use Apple servicing.
At the time of writing, a screen repair costs $ 169/€ 201.30/£ 176.44.44 with Other damage costing $399 / €451.30 / £406.44.
Sound
Our previous tests confirmed that this is indeed the loudest iPhone to date with crisp and clear sound quality. It's the first iPhone that we actually have no problem listening to music through its stereo speakers on the odd occasion.
While it's old news as Apple removed the headphone jack with the iPhone 7, it will be a new reality for many just upgrading now.
Paul jumped from the iPhone 6s Plus and was genuinely worried about the loss of the headphone jack. But as he explained in a recent Sunday debate "The only inconvenience is charging while listening to wired music now requires another dongle. I worried initially, every night this is precisly how I listened to podcasts and music to sleep. I simply changed my habits to ensure that I charge my phone before hitting the sack, which is made convenient by a couple of wireless chargers in my house".
Combined with wireless headphones while either training, working or 'out and about' made this predicted hurdle a non-event - for Paul at least.
Display
With a full HD screen resolution of 1080 x 1920 pixels, the iPhone 8 Plus has a respectable pixel density of 401ppi and delivers 1300:1 contrast ratio. While other flagships, now even from within the Apple fold, offer greater DPI - the reality is that you're not left wanting. You can't make out the individual pixels, and there are with no visible jaggies.
Of more significant impact is the wider color gamut. Apple displays have always had excellent color accuracy which is only improved further on the iPhone 8 Plus, serving up vibrant colors and high contrast.
Again, in our choice, we preferred the screen size when compared to the iPhone X as we came from iPhone 7 Plusses.
Unlike OLED screens, off angle viewing is a strong point and remains constant, this is great for sharing the viewing experience with others when posting/viewing your latest 'Snapbook' updates.
Perhaps of more relevance for day to day use is the introduction of True Tone, one of the technologies inherited from the iPad Pro. Making use of the four‑channel ambient light sensor in the iPhone 8 Plus, the white balance is automatically adjusted to match the color temperature of light around. This best replicates interacting with materials that reflect light, and in most circumstances, it greatly enhances the user experience and reduces eye strain. Note this is different to Night Shift that shifts the colors to the warmer end of the spectrum to help you sleep.
Enabled by default you can turn True Tone off in Settings > Display & Brightness.
Our comparison shots demonstrate the marked differences between the modes. Your personal mileage will vary, while everything looks better when it comes to content such as eBooks, e-mail, and web-pages - we're less convinced of its value when viewing photos and video. Apple provides no granular control to dictate when True Color is utilized, it's system-wide.
The iPhone 8 Plus on the left has True Tone On
Turning our attention to HDR and Dolby Vision and the lines get a little blurred. The reality is that the display in the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus isn't truly HDR capable. But, you will see a notably better picture when playing back HDR & Dolby Vision content with increased dynamic range, better contrast and utilizing that wider color gamut.
Given the capabilities of the A11 Bionic SoC, we found it disappointing that the latest iPhone's can't deliver a 4K HDR picture to an external 4K TV or monitor with the Lightning Digital AV Adapter. This edge case isn't a show stopper but a 'nice to have,' especially now that we have 4K content more readily available not only from Netflix & Amazon Video but Apple themselves - to date our iTunes Movie library has had at least 40% of our purchases upgraded to 4K HDR for free.
We'll end this section with a quick tip relating to the screen size. If you struggle using the keyboard one handed, iOS 11 allows the on-screen keyboard to be compressed to the left or right which helps one-handed use. You can either enable this via Settings > General > Keyboard > One-Hand Keyboard or by holding down the Emoji key on the keyboard itself.
Change keyboard alignment • Right aligned keyboard
Main Camera
In a similar vein to the design, on the surface, the cameras sound familiar. Packing dual-12MP (wide+telephoto) sensors, positioned behind f/1.8 and f/2.8 lenses respectively.
Hardware wise, the new sensors have 'deeper pixels' which is another way of saying that less light is bled between pixels on the sensor itself which results in a purer picture being captured. The hardware is all topped off by the quad-LED flash now supporting slow-sync. By capturing more ambient light, by keeping the shutter open for longer, ensures that flash photography produces more natural looking images without the dark background that we've become accustomed to. Surprisingly, the flash in the iPhone 8 Plus is stronger than that found in the iPhone X resulting in better images with flash photography.
On the flip side of the coin, the hardware is all supported by enhanced image processing oomph courtesy of the A11 Bionic's new Image Signal Processor and noise reduction algorithms.
The iPhone 8 Plus is now capable of recording slo-mo video at 240 fps full 1080p HD.
Overall, the iPhone 8 Plus has an excellent primary camera system and is up there with the best of them taking pictures that are low on noise with true to life colors and markedly improved low light performance.
Check out our camera samples below that we've taken on our travels.
Apple iPhone 8 Plus photos: regular camera
Apple iPhone 8 Plus photos: Zoom camera
Apple iPhone 8 Plus photos: Portrait mode
Apple iPhone 8 Plus photos: Wide • Zoom • Wide • Zoom
Apple iPhone 8 Plus photos: Panoramic mode
File Formats
We appreciate that the iPhone 8 Plus supports the HEIF format for images and HEVC (H.265) for video resulting in about half as much storage being used for our captured content. Enabled by default you can turn this off in Settings > Camera > Formats. This is merely a toggle though covering both image and video formats. We would like to see more granular control allowing us to choose what format we adopt for photos and for video. We use both Macs and PCs, and while in MacOS High Sierra the new formats are fully supported, PC users have mixed feelings about the HEIC photo format. Still not finding a nice viewer for this type of images and sharing is painful as it involves converting the photos first.
In our experience, certainly in the case of images you genuinely do get something for nothing - with the use of HEIF not degrading picture quality at all. The same can't quite be said of HEVC where dependent on the level of movement between frames can result in a slight drop in quality.
HDR
Apple is so confident with the results of HDR photos captured that it's now enabled by default within the camera settings for the iPhone 8 Plus (Settings > Camera > Auto HDR). When enabled you no longer see the HDR option within the camera app interface. Handy tip, if you prefer to control the HDR setting, like us, disabling Auto HDR in Settings returns the HDR icon to the camera app.
While on the subject of the camera app, we wish some additional camera settings were quickly available to us from the camera app itself. Having to go into Settings > Camera to alter the video resolution and FPS is counter intuitive.
Studio Lighting
Studio Lighting is an extension to Portrait Mode, and we still feel the 'beta' tag is well deserved. Subsequent iOS 11 updates don't seem to have improved the algorithms behind Studio Lighting, and we have no indication when it will leave its 'beta' status behind.
Suffice to say, its a fun and enjoyable addition, but it won't have professionals selling their lighting rigs on eBay anytime soon. For those of us who don't see the value of Studio Lighting, it would be nice if we could turn it off and declutter the screen at the same time.
Selfie camera
The front facing camera is probably the weakest link in the iPhone 8 Plus camera setup is taking 'ok' pictures but certainly not the best we've seen with its 7 MP sensor.
Apple iPhone 8 Plus photos: Selfie mode HDR • Non HDR
Performance
We won't cover old ground here, we know the benchmarks are exemplary. They only keep getting better, and with good reason. Designing and building an increasing number of its own class-leading components enables Apple to optimize the interplay between software and hardware to control its own destiny.
Steve Jobs often quoted Alan Kay as saying "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware".
It's no coincidence that just as Apple starts to take Augmented Reality seriously, they develop their own GPU.
The result is that iOS quirks withstanding, in day to day use the iPhone 8 Plus does everything you ask of it and you're not left wanting. Earlier we briefly covered Augmented Reality (AR), and it's a great test of the capabilities of the iPhone 8 Plus. One app in particular that we keep returning to because of it's real-world value is IKEA place. More than just a great technology demo, IKEA place provides real value in allowing you to view furniture in your own home or office accurately. It's the power of the CPU, GPU and ArKit software framework that ensures the technology doesn't get in the way and you can get on with the task in hand choosing furniture. We've been genuinely impressed with how it copes in all lighting and room scenarios so far (before you ask - 'no' we're not sponsored by Ikea).
IKEA place AR at its most useful
One departing observation though. We love the fact that Apple now provides base storage starting at 64GB. We still can't say the same for RAM though. We know iOS, and the hardware together makes efficient use of all available memory, and in single application use, it's not an issue. Switching between tasks, however, highlights the lack of memory. Your workflow is 'paused' as data has to be reloaded. For example, web-pages having to be refreshed, e-books having to be reloaded. This is more pronounced as the rest of the system is lightning fast. While we don't need to go to the heady heights of its rivals - we'd like to see 4GB as standard in the next generation.
Battery Life
Straight out the gate, it's very ungenerous of Apple not to include a fast charger. Charging the iPhone 8 Plus either wired or wirelessly, via the included 5W charger is excruciating slow.
If money is no object and then invest in a USB-C charger and USB-C to Lightning cable. This combination will top your tank up to 79% in an hour.
We use our iPad's 12W charger which gives us 72% charge within the same hour. We still don't find it to be as quick as some of the quick charge solutions but companies such as Oppo/OnePlus or Huawei.
When it comes to battery life though we're more than happy. Packing a slightly smaller 2691 mAh battery than an iPhone 7 Plus we can comfortably get two days of usage on a single charge, and we still haven't found a high-end Android phone which gives us that long battery life. The best we've tried get us a day and a half - the Galaxy Note 8, Pixel 2 XL and the Mate 9.
Wireless charging
We'll try not to cover old ground as we reported on wireless charging in our iPhone X Long-term review. Suffice to say that wireless charging is a welcome and long overdue addition to the iPhone family.
In our continued investigations, we discovered that Apple adopted version 1.1 of the Qi wireless charging standard from the Wireless Power Consortium (WPC) to implement in the latest iPhones. This standard tops out at 7.5W of charge.
We previously suggested that Apple would enable 15W charging when the AirPower Mat is launched later this year to differentiate its own product and potentially justify its price - our bad. As it turns out, that will not be the case.
So buying a 15W wireless charger, while future proofing your set-up, won't result in being able to charge your iPhone 8 Plus any faster now or in the future. We'll wait and see if Apple adopts version 1.2 of the Qi wireless charging standard that enables wireless fast charging topping out at 15W.
As we observed in our iPhone X long-term review, while charging still works through thin iPhone silicon cases, it still requires the phone to be placed accurately in the center of the charger. If the phone is misaligned by more than a few centimeters, the charging stops. On more than one occasion this has resulted in a partially charged phone as we've either not placed it correctly or it's got knocked. Which brings us to the next page, where we discuss all the little annoyances we've stumbled into while using the smartphone.
Frustrations, niggles, annoyances
We've covered off a number of our frustrations, niggles, and annoyances before getting here but also we have to cover iOS 11. We can't remember a release of iOS in recent memory that had so many issues. It's been rumored that in future Apple will modify its development and release approach to ease the burden that it places on its engineers to smooth out the peaks and as a result deliver higher quality features. It's been speculated that we may even see this new approach manifest itself later this year with the release of iOS 12. Here's hoping but for now here are whats frustrating us.
With the launch of the 'Plus' models Apple enabled several apps to work in landscape mode, alongside an extended keyboard. Several generations later, Apple still hasn't enabled all of its apps to work in landscape mode, for example, the Clock app. Additionally, iOS 11 removed the extended keyboard from landscape mode which we used extensively - why? Makes it less usable. We can't help but feel that the extended keyboard didn't work on the iPhone X's screen aspect ratio resulting in it being pulled altogether.
Selecting the camera app from home screen now needs a very exaggerated swipe.
iOS is still littered with visual glitches, ranging from cut-off screens within Reminders to losing icons within Safari. When combined these take the 'polish' off what is otherwise a great product.
What happened to the extended keyboard in iOS 11? • Bookmarks icon goes solid blue • Display glitches are all to frequent
Auto-brightness can sometimes have a mind of its own, with us having to adjust our brightness manually constantly.
The phone sometimes gets stuck in the wrong orientation, and the accelerometer stops responding. It also results in pictures being taken in the wrong orientation too for a similar reason - the camera often gets confused which direction we're keeping the phone in - landscape or portrait.
Quite often the screen lights up during a call and stays like that for the duration of the call. We haven't looked into the reasons for that, but it seems some app notifications wake it up. And on an unrelated note - there is this final niggle - Apple, can you please silence all app notifications during a call - it's immensely annoying and distracting to get notified of emails, messages, and whatnot straight in your ear while you are taking a call.
With the iPhone 7 Apple removed the mechanical Home button and instead of moving inward when you press it, the Home button detects the presence and pressure of your finger with feedback being given by the haptic engine to fool you into thinking that you're pressing a physical button. Moving from an iPhone 6s Plus to the iPhone 8 Plus we discovered that this 'trick' is very effective when you're holding the phone. But used on a flat surface or in a car dock the haptics don't provide the right feedback, and as a result, you end up pressing for too long and activating Siri. Of interest, it was during this review that we discovered that this is dependent on whether you use a case or not and the type of case you use.
We miss a tactile hardware shortcut for starting the camera before we've even had a look at the screen. We really appreciated this convenience while using the Galaxy and the Pixel phones. And when you think of it - the quick double press of the Power key was left unused on the iPhone for years before the iPhone X came along and even there its potential is underutilized.
Conclusion
The iPhone 8 Plus with this design iteration ends its reign on a high.
Yes, we would have dearly liked to see a design change a few years ago, but that aside, in its current iteration it can still be considered a worthy flagship device.
It has class leading performance courtesy of its A11 Bionic innards, and now comes with more than adequate amount of base storage at 64GB - with up to 256GB if needed. The 5.5" display is its best yet providing rich, color accurate images to best display your memories captured from a highly capable dual camera system. Long overdue, but non the less welcome, are the wireless and quick charging capabilities.
So, having lived with the iPhone 8 Plus out of choice since launch, do we regret our decision not to go with the iPhone X? Not one bit. As for niggles - our experience tells us that a large number those that we encountered are software based and should be resolved over time.
Exciting times are indeed ahead as the iPhone X's DNA is reflected in the iPhone lineup later this year. For it's flagship devices in 2018, for those of us who are tied into the Apple eco-system, we'll be presented with another fait accompli from Apple having to accept that gestures and Face ID will be part of our lives.
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