Apple iPhone 8 Plus
The iPhone 8 Plus—really the iPhone 7s Plus, when you think about it—may be the sweet spot in Apple's new phone lineup. Its dual cameras will enable better augmented reality experiences than the iPhone 8, and its bigger screen offers a better spotlight for high-intensity applications powered by the new A11 processor. And, starting at $799 (for 64GB), it's significantly less expensive than the iPhone X. While we wish Apple had been more innovative with its screen and modem here, the 8 Plus is our Editors' Choice for iPhones right now.
|Design|
From the front, you may have some trouble telling the iPhone 8 Plus apart from the 7 Plus. At 6.24 by 3.07 by 0.3 inches and 7.13 ounces, it's the same size, but heavier. It has a similar 5.5-inch, 1,920-by-1,080 LCD, although it's been enhanced with True Tone, which gives it better white balance in different kinds of lighting. The Touch ID home button sits below the screen, as usual. There's a Lightning port, but no headphone jack, and the phone is water-resistant.
Flip over the 8 Plus to see the difference from last year's model. The phone now has a glass back, rather than smooth metal. It also supports wireless charging with all the popular Qi-compatible chargers. We put it on both Mophie and Samsung wireless charging pads and it charged just fine, if slowly, at about two-thirds of the speed of standard wired charging. Apple says a firmware update will enable faster wireless charging in the future.
The Apple iPhone 8 Plus looks a lot like the 7 Plus from the front.
The iPhone 8 Plus runs iOS 11, but it doesn't take advantage of its larger screen to offer iPad-like multitasking.
The iPhone 8 Plus (left) has a 5.5-inch screen, while the iPhone 8 (right) has a 4.7-inch panel.
The 8 Plus has 12-megapixel dual cameras
The new iPhones have glass backs for wireless charging
Nope, it's still just a Lightning jack. But you can charge while listening to headphones by using a wireless charging pad.
The SIM card slot is on the right side.
The left side of the phone is mostly smooth.
Flip over the 8 Plus to see the difference from last year's model. The phone now has a glass back, rather than smooth metal. It also supports wireless charging with all the popular Qi-compatible chargers. We put it on both Mophie and Samsung wireless charging pads and it charged just fine, if slowly, at about two-thirds of the speed of standard wired charging. Apple says a firmware update will enable faster wireless charging in the future.
The Fastest iPhone Yet
The A11 Bionic processor has six cores, two of which are "high performance" and four of which are "efficiency" cores. That's more than the four-core A10 and the two-core A9, but the whole core thing is a red herring; it's possible to design a fast processor with few cores, or many cores.
What makes it Bionic? Well, bionics is the science of combining biological and electronic parts and methods, so I think it's referring to the new Neural Engine. The Neural Engine is a custom block of the A11 dedicated to machine learning. On the iPhone 8 Plus, it doesn't do much yet, although it's involved in scene recognition in the camera app. But iOS 11 includes an API called CoreML that helps third-party developers integrate machine learning into their own apps—recognizing types of food or clothing when they train the camera on them, for instance
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