Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “3 Features the iPhone 13 Didn’t Add!”.
Hey what’s up mkbhd here and i got a couple: phones, three phones. I want to talk about today. Well, four, if you include the iphone, but all three of these phones here that i’m holding have one bleeding edge hardware feature that the iphone has managed to avoid for one more year, so in case you’ve been living under a rock and somehow missed it, in which Case i would love to check out that rock, but there’s a new iphone. The whole iphone 13 lineup just got announced it’s a relatively minor upgrade as i’ve mentioned, but there’s a solid checklist of things that are new this year, including promotion on the pro phones.
I made an entire video summarizing it all in one place, so to get all that info. There’S a link right below the like button for you, the iphone plays it safe with the hardware notoriously i mean, i think it’s more obvious this year than ever so fresh off the heels of all the people who have just showed up to the channel for the First time, seeing that iphone, i give you three phones and each one of them has some hardware feature that is so bleeding edge that it’s actually kind of a bit risky, and there is a reason why each one of these hardware features isn’t in the iphone. Yet so i’m going to go through each of these and if you don’t mind, i’m going to reference the iphone 13 for each of them, because the difference between what apple is doing with four new phones per year versus what some of these other companies do. With dozens of new phones per year is kind of massive, so first up this is xiaomi’s brand new 11t pro xiaomi makes a ton of phones, it actually just became the number one smartphone manufacturer in the world in terms of sales and a lot of their phones Have some pretty crazy hardware? This one definitely comes with a charger in the box. You know why. I say that, because this is the charger, a massive brick that yes is going to hit 120 watts at its peak 120 watt fast charging. It’S kind of incredible now: that’ll, take this massive 5 000 milliamp hour battery from zero dead, all the way up to 100 percent full in less than 20 minutes.
It’S kind of crazy. Now, before we all go down to the comments to leave your explosion, jokes or your fiery hot – takes about how this will probably nuke your battery life. I’Ve seen a lot of those on twitter and that’s been a common concern, but batteries these days are better than ever, and i know it’s natural to have the concern that, like something that could charge, this fast would probably have just awful effects on your battery. After a year of use – or something like that, but xiaomi of course, has considered this. They actually had a slide up during their presentation for this phone that directly addressed that showing they expect about 80 battery health after 800.
Charge cycles, which they say is actually better than some other flagship phones. Now i don’t know if i buy that it’s going to be better than other flagship phones, but 20 degradation after 800 charges which for context is about one full charge a day for two years straight. That’S actually pretty good. Now this is by no means the first fast charging phone we’ve had 45 watt fast charging 65 watts. There’S a couple hundred watt phones floating out there, but this is the fastest i’ve seen yet at 120 watts and for context.
The iphone 13 is still charging at 20 watts. Now, it’s not for no reason it’s not like apple, could easily bump the iphone to 120 watts without trade-offs, and they just don’t want to for one. This is a split battery cell for faster parallel charging, which technically does shrink the total battery capacity a little bit, and you also do generate quite a bit of heat with this type of voltage. So xiaomi is doing a lot of cooling and a lot of thermal monitoring to make sure the phone does this as safely as possible. But i do still believe that the top reason why we haven’t seen this extraordinarily fast charging in the iphone yet is still long-term battery health. So my iphone 12 pro that i’ve been using since it roughly came out for about a year is sitting at 95 battery health, which is pretty good after two years. That’S about 90 percent and to apple that’s a more desirable feature than super fast charging. I mean this is the company that shipped a 5 watt charger with the iphone up to the iphone 11 and who would rather throttle down your cpu speed and make your phone slower than risk overworking your battery. So it’s it’s not something. I see them. Switching up anytime soon and i’m sure if you ran the numbers, most people do most of their charging overnight anyway, but you got to admit the sheer convenience of fast charging is super important and to people like me who have gotten used to it. It’S kind of indispensable, it’s amazing having like knowing you have to leave in like five minutes and your phone’s nearly dead, and you just realize you have to charge it up real, quick and getting like 30 to 40. Just like that is something uh. Some people will go a lifetime without knowing about, but because of all the things we’ve talked about.
Overall battery capacity, thickness, thermals long-term battery health apple has decided, yeah, 20 watts. So all right, this is the zte axon 30.. This is a 500 android phone with a snapdragon 870 6 to 12 gigs of ram, pretty huge 6.92 inch, 120 hertz display and a solid battery with fast charging. But what could this modest mid-range phone have that the iphones? Don’T? What was that? It’S that right there, that is the new second generation under display selfie camera, and it is way better than the first one. So i recently did a whole video on the first generation version of this, and it was pretty rough, not gon na lie. It was still very visible in a lot of situations, especially with the lighter colors and the image quality that came from the camera behind the screen is just bad.
It’S just foggy and hazy blurry, not great right. This second generation camera here to my eye honestly and the camera, gets it pretty. Well, it’s nearly invisible like it’s a huge improvement and you can see it looks like they’ve doubled, the pixel count and the rectangular cutout. So now objects and sharp text passing through this area are only mildly pixelated this time and they even do a great job with the ui of making sure things typically don’t pass through that area anyway, so it rarely catches your eye during any sort of regular use.
Also, i believe, adding those pixels back also helps with perceived brightness, so it’s legitimately really hard to see anything back there now the photos it takes still pretty trash uh, and this is the part that i wonder how long it will take to improve, because, honestly, the Hiding it behind the screen. Part is now functionally perfect, so i wonder how many more generations it’s going to take to make a selfie in perfect lighting, not hazy and soft. I mean it’s serviceable, it’s fine for an average video call or a basic selfie, but nobody would ever say the quality is really good. So despite the defogging algorithm, there’s still blooming in highlights and discoloration and a lack of sharpness, so people who buy this zte phone today or the xiaomi mix 4 or the galaxy z fold 3 for that matter are going to be people who don’t care as much About the highest quality selfies in the world, and that might again be the exact opposite set of priorities as the iphone which has had now the largest notch in the entire smartphone world for a couple years now, because it’s got face id and the selfie cameras up Front, but this is the first year that they have actually shrank the notch on the iphone.
The iphone 13s compressed, the same face id and selfie stuff to be 20 smaller this time. But it looks like that’s mainly from moving the earpiece up top and it also looks like you: don’t really get any more info on that extra screen real estate. I was hoping. Maybe there would be like a battery percentage up there but looks like same ideas.
Last year so another year with a notched, iphone and another year with a bleeding edge, selfie camera behind the display, but that still definitely has its drawbacks. Maybe the third generation is when it graduates from gimmick status to uh, genuinely something we could see. Other phones using, but for now it’s a little uncommon, a little risky and a little rare, but alright. Last but not least, this is the infinix 0x.
This is a really competitive budget phone that i haven’t talked too much about it’s also pretty new and, aside from the pretty squared off sparkling design. That reminds me a lot of a nexus 4 from a couple years ago. There’S not a whole lot striking about this phone, but it does have the numbers on paper going for it, and one of those numbers is a 108 megapixel main camera. That’S right, you’ve seen it now a bunch.
The triple digit megapixel count has made its way all the way down to a sub 300 phone. It means almost nothing about the actual quality of the photos coming out of this phone, but it’s still pretty impressive. Now all the cameras on the iphone 13 lineup this year did take a leap forward which is pretty sick. We’Ve got bigger. Sensors all around we’ve got that sensor shift image stabilization on the primary cameras. You’Ve got wider apertures, i mean i am really looking forward to testing these cameras, and i talk all about this in the summary video again, if you haven’t seen it check it out, and the review should be in the works shortly after, but apple has stuck with The same 12 megapixel resolution for the rear camera on the iphone since the iphone 6s.
Now, what i’m not saying is that apple just needs to jump to a 100 megapixel camera. No, i kind of doubt they’ll ever do that actually, but what i am saying is, i would really like to see, and i’ve always been curious what apple could do with a bit more resolution. This is something i also wondered about the pixel for the past couple years with a couple: 12 megapixel primary cameras in a row, and it looks like we’ll finally see with the pixel 6 jumping to a newer, bigger 50 megapixel sensor. But this isn’t just about numbers. This is just about getting a higher dxo mark score. I find those as useless as anybody else, but 12 megapixel photos from the iphone or older pixels, while they look great while you’re looking at the wide as soon as you zoom in a bit, they start to break down like they look fantastic, full screen, which is How you look at most photos most of the time, but the second you want to crop in a little bit at all.
There’S not much detail information to work with, and it looks worse than something higher resolution, also with video. If you’ve ever wondered why the iphone doesn’t do 8k video, while some other phones do 8k. Video is 33 megapixels per frame, so they can’t do 8k video until they jump to at least a 33 megapixel sensor.
But the higher resolution cameras is funny enough. The thing i’m least expecting apple to do anytime soon, because, if you’ve noticed uh every single one of these super high resolution, primary cameras, whether it’s this 108 megapixel infinix phone or this 108 megapixel xiaomi phone or this 108 megapixel samsung phone, they all do what’s called Binning by default, so every smartphone sensor is subdivided, of course, into a matrix with x amount of total pixels. That’S the megapixel count, so the higher your megapixel count, the smaller those individual pixels or photo sights have to be now in brightly lit environments.
That can be fine, but in lower light the pixels are so small that not a lot of light hits each individual one and you end up having to really boost iso sensitivity to make up for it. That introduces noise graininess, i’m oversimplifying a bit, but that’s the general physics of it. So what they do is combine typically groups of photo sites and then, without bumping sensitivity you can take in more light per effective pixel to get more accuracy and thus lower resolution.
In the final picture, but these also happen to be smaller file sizes too. So this infinix, for example, does have a 108 megapixel sensor, but by default, when you’re taking normal photos, they’re all been down to 12 megapixels every time. Now, if you want the higher detail, but also potentially higher noise shots, you can turn on 108 megapixel mode and most others also have like a special, separate high resolution mode.
You have to switch to to shoot the full 100 megapixels, so the iphone has just stuck with their normal higher individual natural pixel size, 12 megapixel sensors. So there is definitely a marketing advantage to being able to say you have a 100 megapixel sensor and there is an occasional shot, maybe a landscape where you will get the most out of having all those pixels and it’s worth it and you can print it on The back of the phone and run commercials talking about it, but is it actually worth it? I guess the real question is: how often do you actually go over and switch to the high resolution mode? If you actually have it, i hardly do i’m guessing most other people hardly ever do, and i also think most people when they realize they’re going to want to crop later, just zoom in or use the telephoto. That’S on most of these high-end cameras anyway. So yeah google didn’t budge on this for years.
All the way up until pixel, six and iphone is still sticking with it. How long they’ll do this? Only time will tell so yeah. Those are some some big phones with some big numbers and some big interesting pieces of hardware. I also could talk about foldables, which are obviously another huge hardware risk and that’s another thing. Apple, probably won’t jump into for a long time until it’s fully ready, but just wanted to show some things that i haven’t showed on camera. Yet, which is these three new phones, but i’m curious if any of these are things that you would want to see in a new iphone? Is it fast charging because i feel like that’s the one? A lot of people would be most interested in, but let me know in the comment section below which of these features you’d be most interested in seeing in a iphone 14 or 15 somewhere down the road either way. Thanks for watching catch you in the next one peace, you .