After months of rumours that suggested Apple might not have much innovation to celebrate in its next iPhone, the new iPhone 11 Pro’s three cameras, faster processor and better battery life make it a pretty tempting proposition regardless.
The prices are the same as last year’s models, that is £999 for the 64GB 5.8in model and £1099 for the larger 6.5in screener, and some features have even been removed, but there’s more than enough here to form a queue when they go on sale on 20 September.
Here are our first impressions.
From the front, the 11 Pro looks just like the iPhone XS: all-screen front with a perfectly symmetrical bezel all the way round and a same-sized notch at the top. But turn it over and the differences are obvious.
For a start, there’s a matte finish to the rear glass that’s different from any previous iPhone. It comes in more colours than before, too, adding midnight green to last year’s space grey, silver and gold. All of them are slightly different to the previous hues though. The gold has a subtle sheen that makes it really stand out and they glint as you move them in the light.
The Apple logo has been moved down to the centre of the handset’s rear and all wording, such as the official boilerplate text as well as the actual word iPhone, have been removed, giving a much more spare and elegant look.
But the big difference to the design is one that divided opinion when it leaked: the camera bulge. In fact, it’s not quite as expected. True, the large square block on the phone, holding the three rear cameras and flash, sits on the top left as expected. But instead of a deep block with flush cameras, the main block is thin and the lenses jut out a little. The result looks much, much better than we’d been led to believe. Note that the panel under the camera lenses is gloss where the rest is matte. On the iPhone 11, it’s the other way around.
The stainless steel band around the edge of the handset has also been carefully colour-matched to the rest of the phone, so there’s a dark edge on the midnight green and space grey, lighter on the other two.
Other details are just like last year’s phone, though it definitely looks and feels like something new and different – the matte finish looks like it will be less slippy than previous iPhones.
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