iPhone 8 Review: Glass on Both Sides Again, But the Camera Changed Most

Worth the upgrade if you are on an iPhone 7 or older — assuming you are not buying an iPhone X.

Among the newest iPhones, the iPhone 8 sits in an awkward spot.

Next to the iPhone X, with its face recognition and edge-to-edge screen, the iPhone 8 looks almost exactly like the phone it replaces — same size, same camera, every button in the same place.

That was our first impression when we picked up the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus. From the front you cannot see any difference at all; iPhones have looked like this since the iPhone 6.

The smooth glass back is the only obvious thing that sets the iPhone 8 apart from other phones. Since plenty of people cover the back with a case, passers-by probably will not be able to tell that the phone in your hand is the new model.

What the iPhone 8 got was a set of performance upgrades rather than cosmetic ones. The changes are all in places you cannot see at a glance.

We ran a simple test on an iPhone 8 Plus over one day, hoping to answer one question: with a stronger new model about to go on sale, what exactly is different about this one?

What One Sheet of Glass Does: It Changes the Feel and the Color

The back of the iPhone 8 brings the iPhone 4 to mind — the whole back smooth and fine-grained, a single sheet of glass bonded onto metal, nothing like the brushed metal iPhones have had since the iPhone 6.

With the glass, the front and back panels of the iPhone 8 feel almost the same under your fingers. The sensation is familiar: the Jet Black iPhone 7 used a special process to polish metal until it felt like glass.

The two differ in a subtle way, though. On the iPhone 8, the glass and the metal beneath it combine into a sense of layers, while the seamless smoothness of Jet Black is more like a piece of jade — which, if anything, feels a little more expensive.

In everyday use the iPhone 8 is clearly the tougher of the two. It does not pick up fingerprints and scratches as readily as Jet Black did.

The glass also makes the phone noticeably heavier; you can feel the added weight in your hand. Some of that is probably an illusion the glass creates: by Apple's own specifications, the iPhone 8 Plus is only 14 grams heavier than the iPhone 7 Plus.

What surprised us is that the glass also gives the back a new set of colors. The iPhone 8 Plus we got is the gold version, and the back panel is actually somewhere between pink and gold, closer to a pale pink, while the silver iPhone 8 looks more like milky white.

The iPhone 8 line has also cut back to three colors — black, silver and gold. Rose gold and Jet Black are gone.

That is the color of the back. The metal frame around the edge does differ slightly in color from the glass, keeping the shade and texture of the metal itself. Even so, you can barely feel a seam between glass and metal. The glass is bonded tight to the metal base, and its edges are polished so the curve runs naturally into the frame. By comparison, the edge of the front panel is the part that digs into your hand.

A New Feature: Switch On the Phone and It Moves Your Data Over

This one comes with iOS 11. The first step of setting up a phone usually means a long queue of configuration screens and typing account passwords over and over. The new Quick Start feature moves your data from the iPhone you are using now to the new device, provided both are running iOS 11.

We tried it with the new iPhone 8 Plus and the old 7 Plus. Switch the new phone on and a screen asks whether you want to use Quick Start. The 7 Plus lying next to it shows a prompt at the same moment; tap Continue and an animated verification pattern appears on the new device.

You then point the old device at the pattern on the new one, and the two phones start moving data by themselves. If you have ever paired an Apple Watch with an iPhone, you will find the two processes very much alike.

Most system settings and everything backed up to iCloud sync across this way, sparing you the fiddly business of setting up Siri and passwords again. You do still have to re-enter your fingerprint.

The Camera Hasn't Changed, But the Photos Have Got Better

On paper, the cameras in both iPhone 8 models match their predecessors: the 4.7-inch iPhone 8 has a single 12-megapixel camera; the iPhone 8 Plus still has two lenses, a 12-megapixel wide-angle at ƒ/1.8 plus a telephoto with a slightly smaller ƒ/2.8 aperture that gives 2x optical zoom.

The changes are where you cannot see them, in both hardware and software. According to Tim Cook at the launch event, the iPhone 8 has a better image sensor that takes in 83% more light than the iPhone 7. The A11 Bionic chip also gives the algorithms more to work with.

What does that change in practice? We compared the iPhone 8 Plus with the 7 Plus and with Samsung's latest flagship, the Galaxy S8.

In ordinary light, with all three phones on default white balance, focused on the same object and shooting without zoom, the two Plus models produce shots that are not far apart. Look closely and you can see a difference in overall color.

The iPhone 8 Plus gives higher color saturation and contrast than either the 7 Plus or the Samsung: greens are more vivid, yellows brighter, the gap between light and dark wider. It is a tone that flatters the eye, and quite unlike the generally cool look past iPhones produced.

Judging by the samples we shot, the iPhone 8 Plus comes closest of the three cameras to the colors the naked eye sees.

The clearer gain is in detail. The iPhone 8 Plus has more latitude — the term for the range of brightness a camera can hold in one frame, and whether the detail inside that range is recorded faithfully.

In our shots, the iPhone 8 Plus picked out more detail in macro photos; you can see the fine texture of a petal. The iPhone 7 Plus did not do badly either, only with duller color and some detail lost, while the Samsung S8 could not really render the layers at all.

The wider latitude shows up again when you shoot into the light, where the gap between bright and dark is stark. In the iPhone 8 Plus photos you can still make out what is in the shadows — the windows on a building, for instance.

The three cameras differ a good deal here. Broadly: the iPhone 8 Plus beats the Samsung S8, which beats the iPhone 7 Plus.

How much detail a camera resolves also shows in shots taken with optical zoom. Both the iPhone 7 Plus and the 8 Plus switch to the second camera — the one with the smaller aperture — at 2x. Anything beyond that is digital zoom on top of that lens.

The Samsung S8 has no optical zoom, and its digital zoom stops at 8x. We shot the same scene on all three phones at 1x, 2x, 3x and 8x. At the far end, the iPhone 8 Plus was the sharpest, the 7 Plus next, and the Samsung the blurriest.

Letting in more light also means the iPhone 8 shoots better in the dark. In our night shots, the iPhone 8 Plus photos were plainly brighter overall, handled the gap between light and dark better than the 7 Plus, and held clear detail even in the shadows.

Look closely, though, and the iPhone 8 Plus is not much cleaner than the 7 Plus in terms of noise. On that count the Samsung S8 finishes ahead of both.

So the conclusion is this: the iPhone 8 Plus camera has genuinely improved, but if you are waiting for a leap in quality you will be disappointed.

To use a rough comparison: if going from the iPhone 6s Plus to the iPhone 7 Plus was a jump from 50 points to 80, then the iPhone 7 Plus to the iPhone 8 Plus is worth maybe 10 points. This time it is a partial gain in performance, nothing more.

Portrait Lighting Is New — and Only the iPhone 8 Plus Has It

Portrait mode was the other thing Apple pushed at the launch event. The feature arrived with the iPhone 7 Plus, and Apple says that because the iPhone 8 Plus has the A11 Bionic chip and a better image sensor, the portrait-mode algorithm has been tuned and the results are better.

Here we compared the two generations of Plus against a Fujifilm X-T1 with a 35mm prime lens.

The complaint about the iPhone 7 Plus was that portrait mode shoots with the second camera, and in low light the image quality was terrible.

This time the change is clear enough. In ordinary light, portrait shots from the iPhone 8 Plus are already sharper and more natural than the 7 Plus's, with tones closer to the real thing; in low light, the iPhone 8 Plus also shows far less noise.

Still, the iPhone's portrait mode is a blurred background produced by an algorithm, and set beside a photo from the Fujifilm it looks unnatural.

Portrait Lighting belongs to the iPhone 8 Plus alone. It builds on portrait mode and adjusts the light falling on the subject.

By Apple's own account, Portrait Lighting is more than a filter: behind it runs an algorithm driven by the A11 Bionic chip, and artificial intelligence is involved too.

In theory, then, it should read the light on a face in the photo accurately and compensate for it to improve the picture.

Portrait Lighting is still in beta, with five effects to choose from. The default is Natural Light; the others are Studio Light, Contour Light, Stage Light and Stage Light Mono.

The last two have the strongest look, and you use them differently: you have to frame the face inside a circle. The phone then adds highlights to the face and turns the background pure black, producing the effect of one hard light source — a stage lamp.

In our testing, what Portrait Lighting produces also depends on the light you shoot in. With plenty of light, Stage Light Mono in particular can be a genuine surprise; move into a dim corner and the photos start to look like a badly cut-out Photoshop job.

How Fast Is the A11 Chip? We Ran a Small Test

The other selling point of the iPhone 8 is the six-core A11 Bionic processor, which the launch event described with a pile of numbers: the four efficiency cores are up to 70% faster than the A10 Fusion and the two performance cores up to 25% faster; it runs as many as 600 billion operations a second, letting the iPhone handle harder image-recognition work; it processes 30% faster than the A10 on a claimed 50% of the power.

You may not care what those numbers mean so much as how fast the phone feels day to day.

Again using the 7 Plus and the Samsung S8 for comparison, we installed Lightroom and Videoshop on all three phones and had each process the same image and the same video file. Rendering tests a processor's raw arithmetic, so these two apps say something about how fast each phone chews through data.

The result was obvious while the test was still running. The iPhone 7 Plus lagged slightly from the moment it opened the image, stayed a step behind the 8 Plus throughout, and finished about 8 seconds later.

Allowing for the human error we could not control, and given that the whole run took only a little over a minute, that is a decent showing.

The Samsung S8 was unexpectedly slow. The other two phones had finished everything while it had not even imported the video. In the end it came in 50 seconds behind the iPhone 8 Plus.

The Samsung S8 is this year's flagship, running the best processor Qualcomm currently sells, and it is not using slow flash storage either. With that in mind, the iPhone 8's processing power still counts as a reason to upgrade.

AR Games Are Fun and New, But Far From Useful

The A11 chip is also the hardware AR runs on, and with the two cameras alongside it, Apple says AR on the iPhone 8 Plus is already very smooth. But the point of AR is not whether it works; it is whether it is good for anything.

When iOS 11 shipped, the new App Store put up an AR collection on day one. We tried a few of them.

Conduct VR is a little train game: find a flat surface, set an island down on it, and a train runs around the island. Your job is to switch the tracks and steer the train off the island and over a bridge to another one.

Another game, MathNinja AR, works much the same way, with the island swapped for a courtyard.

We also tried Stack AR, a small game where you score by piling up blocks.

ARKit supports more than the iPhone 8 — in theory any iPhone 6s or later can download and run the AR content in the App Store, though the iPhone 7 Plus was already dropping frames.

We also found that AR depends directly on light. When the light is even and surface textures are clear, objects stay reasonably steady. Otherwise things that ought to stay put drift around the frame.

You cannot pinch to zoom; you have to move the camera closer or further away, so the game and the real world work on each other. That experience is nothing new, but it is visibly smoother on the iPhone 8 Plus.

From our brief time with them, today's AR games are all of the three-minute-thrill variety. Next to games that hold people over months, curiosity about AR games probably outweighs the fun of the games themselves by a wide margin.

So Who Should Upgrade to the iPhone 8?

The iPhone 8 is nowhere near as tempting as the iPhone X on new features. It is not much cheaper, and its functional upgrades are not striking. It seems unlikely to convince anyone who already owns an iPhone 7.

The iPhone 8 is not a big step up from the iPhone 7. But if the phone in your pocket is two years old and you see no need to go all the way to the iPhone X, the iPhone 8 is a reasonable upgrade.

Then again, once you have given up on owning the newest model, is there not also a case for buying the cheaper iPhone 7?