Glowing and glamorous, the Apple iPhone XS ($999) aims to be the sweet spot for iPhones this year.
But while it's certainly an excellent phone, I find it to be the least distinguished of Apple's 2018 lineup.
If the XS stood alone, I'd be judging it more highly.
But it doesn't.
I see where it fits in: The XS has a 2X zoom camera and an OLED screen, and it's not quite as big as the XS Max.
But the Max is a bigger leap forward from previous iPhones in the Plus family, and a more striking device all around.
Ultimately, I feel most people will want to pay an extra $100 for the iPhone XS Max, or save $250 on the iPhone XR.
There's No Small iPhone Anymore
At 5.65 by 2.79 by 0.30 inches (HWD), the iPhone XS is almost the exact same size as the iPhone X.
Like the X, the design is basically a glass sandwich around metal.
It has an edge-to-edge 5.8-inch, 19.5:9 OLED screen with the infamous notch at the top.
I'm happy to see Apple finally getting rid of its gigantic bezels, but at 2.79 inches wide, the XS is 0.14-inch wider than the iPhone 6/7/8 and just about at the borderline of what most people consider to be a one-handed phone.
The XR is even wider.
(For more on the size of the new iPhones, check out our story in which we do the math.)
The XS isn't designed exactly like the X, though.
In addition to silver and space gray, it also comes in gold.
The new 4x4 MIMO antennas forced Apple to slightly move the camera bump, which means many X cases and accessories will not fit on the new XS.
I tried the Olloclip Mobile Photography Set for the iPhone X, for instance, and found that it did not align properly with the XS cameras.
Speck cases, on the other hand, work on both the X and the XS.
The phone also no longer ships with a Lightning-to-headphone dongle.
This made some of my testing more annoying, but I can't get too worked up about it because the dongle only costs $9.
The AMOLED screen is the same size as the iPhone X's, but it's both brighter and has better color accuracy.
We're currently waiting for test results from Dr.
Ray Soneira at DisplayMate Labs, and we'll update this review when we get them.
But initial looks have the XS in the running with the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 for the brightest, most accurate, and least reflective screen available.
Apple says the iPhone XS's new glass is tougher than previous glass, so it's less likely to crack.
The phone is also IP68 rated for water resistance at up to 6 feet in depth.
We can confirm that the XS held up just fine after half an hour in water.
Testing this led to a pleasant surprise: The screen works better than competing phones when it's wet.
For most phones, if you're trying to type on a wet screen, the keyboard will go a little haywire.
The XS performed perfectly well with a wet screen, which Apple confirmed is a new feature on this year's devices.
From left: iPhone XS Max, iPhone XS, iPhone X, iPhone 8
The phone's 2,659mAh battery is slightly smaller than the iPhone X's 2,716mAh cell, but the XS more than makes up for the gap with a more power-efficient processor and radio.
Especially on LTE, 4x4 MIMO really reduces the amount of power needed to eke out a signal.
Unfortunately, my battery tests haven't completed yet, but I got 9 hours, 50 minutes of video streaming over Wi-Fi with the iPhone XS Max, and Apple says the XS has slightly less battery life.
That puts it in full-day range, but short of the Galaxy Note 9.
I'll update this review when I have a battery result.
Apple includes the same slow-charging 5W power adapter it always does with its phones, but says that it will charge faster with iPad or MacBook adapters.
We put that to the test last year and decided that the iPad adapter is a must-buy to charge your phone with.
There's a new twist, though—literally.
For wireless charging, Apple says it has tightened the coils in the phone so it wirelessly charges faster than previous models.
That requires a 7.5W wireless charger, though.
We only had 5W wireless chargers in out test lab, and found that the phone charged wirelessly by 18 percent in 30 minutes.
Processing Power
Apple's new A12 processor is, CPU-wise, the fastest handheld device processor available.
It scores about 15 percent better than the A11 did on Geekbench benchmarks, which measure hard-core CPU math.
It just crushes the Snapdragon 845 on Geekbench, although on the more realistic Antutu benchmark, which tests UI elements too, it's only about 6 percent faster than the Galaxy Note 9.
You definitely see major improvements on graphics benchmarks as well.
We averaged 43fps in the GFXBench Car Crash offscreen benchmark, which just cranks the GPU without taking screen resolution into account.
Compare that with 35fps on the Galaxy Note 9, 25fps on the iPhone 8, and 18fps on the iPhone 6s.
Because of the much higher screen resolution than iPhone 8, though (2,436-by-1,125 vs.
1,334-by-750), you actually get higher apparent frame rates in onscreen benchmarks on the 8.
The XS is delivering 60 percent better GPU power, but it's pushing 2.7 times as many pixels as on the iPhone 8's screen.
See How We Test Phones
The most impressive part of the new processor is the hardest to test.
Apple has massively improved the Neural Engine, a part of the chip dedicated to AI and machine learning tasks (basically, matrix math), bumping it from two cores to eight.
Standard benchmarks don't tend to test NPUs, so we turned to AIMark, a dedicated benchmark for things like object identification in scenes.
The results were stunning: The XS got 3,320, triple the 1,206 score of the Galaxy Note 9.
If anyone can figure out what to use the Neural Engine for, it'll really set the XS apart.
You also can't discount the effect of Apple's tight hardware-software integration on performance.
In the browser-based Basemark Web benchmark, iPhones tend to utterly smoke Android phones—the XS scored 532 to the iPhone 8's 385, the Galaxy Note 9's 265, and the OnePlus 6's 295.
Those latest Android phones performed more like the iPhone 6s, which scored 244.
That has to do with how utterly integrated and accelerated Safari on iOS is versus Chrome on Android.
The A12 also increases available storage.
The iPhone XS comes in 64GB, 256GB, and a new 512GB model, with built-in software taking up about 8GB.
There's no removable storage, but that's a lot of space.
Why do you need so much storage? Well, if you're recording 4K video at 60fps, you're running at 400MB per minute, or 24GB per hour.
Honestly, I can't figure out the math to justify having 512GB in a phone.
But if you insist, knock yourself out.
Radio Gaga
For the first time in years, there is one iPhone model for North America.
That means any iPhone bought will work on any US or Canadian carrier, unlike with previous models, where AT&T and T-Mobile phones often had trouble with Sprint and Verizon.
It's worth noting that this is the first iPhone to support T-Mobile's new Band 71, for rural coverage, and the first iPhone to support LAA, for additional speed in dense urban settings on AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon.
Globally, there are four different regional versions of the XS, with slightly different LTE bands.
They'll all roam globally, but they're each best for primary use in the countries where they're sold.
(We have a full rundown of the differences here.)
The iPhone XS is a great leap forward from the iPhone 8 and X in LTE capabilities.
The key is 4x4 MIMO, which uses four antennas rather than two to improve signal strength and speeds.
We'll test that further in the weeks to come, but in our experience with other devices, 4x4 has had very dramatic effects on LTE performance.
Take a look at the charts in our Fastest Mobile Networks story comparing iPhones with Galaxy phones and notice that even the Galaxy S8 was, on average, faster than the iPhone X: That's 4x4 MIMO.
The really radical innovation here isn't active on our test phone as of this writing.
That's the iPhone's new eSIM, dual-SIM capability.
Less than 5 percent of Americans carry dual-SIM phones, because carriers haven't sold them up until now.
When dual SIM is active, it will allow you to add a second, temporary, or permanent subscription on a supported carrier.
Why do this? You may want separate home and work numbers, or add a temporary number when traveling abroad.
For now, all iPhones will ship with a physical SIM from their associated carrier.
If your phone isn't locked (only AT&T still locks phones nowadays), you'll be able to add a secondary subscription using the settings menu in the future.
You'll also be able to transition the eSIM into being your primary SIM, which means you can switch primary carriers for your phone much more easily than if you had to go to a store and get a new SIM card.
That could be pretty exciting if you're looking to switch carriers to take advantage of lower rates.
With two subscriptions active, you can use both for phone calls and SMS.
You have to pick one to use for data, and one to use for iMessage.
Voice call quality is excellent, and the top and bottom dual speakers (for calls and other audio) are plenty loud.
The iPhone XS, XS Max, and Samsung Galaxy Note 9 all delivered about 82dB at a 6-inch distance when we called a recorded conversation line.
The dual speakers on the iPhones deliver an expanded sound field, though, with audio seeming like it's coming from farther away around the phone.
That's pretty neat, especially if you play music on the phone's speaker a lot.
Like the iPhone 8 and X, but unlike previous iPhones, the XS supports the EVS voice encoding system for higher-quality calls.
(For more on that, see our feature here.) If you're upgrading from an iPhone 7 or below, and you primarily call other EVS-capable phones on the same carrier, you'll get very noticeably better sound quality than previously.
For Wi-Fi, the XS proved to be on par with the Galaxy Note 9 and other top smartphones in testing.
The Most Popular Camera
It used to be that I reviewed iPhones in cooperation with Tim Gideon, our audio analyst.
The iPhone was a phone, plus a handheld computer, plus an iPod, after all.
I don't think that's really the case anymore.
The iPhone is now a handheld computer, plus a camera, so I turned it over to our senior camera analyst, Jim Fisher, to test it.
The iPhone XS and XS Max use the same dual-lens rear camera system.
Last year, when the 8 Plus and X were announced, Apple made a big deal about a larger image sensor.
Our testing, along with iFixit's X-rays, showed that, if the sensor was indeed larger, it was only minimally so.
Apple made a smaller deal about a larger sensor this time around, but snuck one in there.
The XS's main camera now sports a 4.25mm f/1.8 lens, a slightly longer focal length than the 3.99mm f/1.8 we saw in the previous generation of iPhones.
If sensor size was identical, that would mean the iPhone XS captures a slightly narrower angle of view.
It doesn't—its lens is a little bit wider.
The iPhone X angle of view is pretty close to a 28mm full-frame lens, and the XS is more like a 25mm.
The new sensor is most likely a 1/2.3-inch design, the same as you get with the Samsung Galaxy S9, the Google Pixel 2 XL, and low-cost point-and-shoot cameras.
The question on everyone's mind is the same as it is with every phone: Is the iPhone XS better in low light? The sensor is, without question.
It manages to capture images with crisp detail and little noise through ISO 100.
That's not a high number if you're talking about a full-frame camera, but for a phone? It's up there with the best we've tested, negating the one-stop advantage the Galaxy S9+ showed over last year's iPhones in our testing.
The secondary 2x sensor performs a little bit better than the same as the one on the iPhone X.
It's about a half-stop sharper to my eye at lower ISOs, but evens out at settings above ISO 400.
The lens is marginally wider—it's now a 6mm design instead of a 6.6mm—which makes sense as the main lens has a wider angle of coverage as well.
It's still an f/2.4, although it is stabilized, unlike the 2x lens on the iPhone 8 Plus and 7 Plus.
You shouldn't worry too much about its high ISO performance, as the iPhone automatically switches to the brighter, wider lens and applies digital zoom in dim light.
If you use a third-party camera app you can force the phone to use the 2x lens in any sort of light.
We used the Moment app for testing as it supports Raw capture and manual ISO control, both of which are missing from Apple's baked-in Camera app.
Improvements to the image sensor are good news for iPhone owners, but they don't tell the entirety of the camera story.
A lot of the new stuff happens behind the scenes in software.
The A12 Bionic processor (explained in more detail in the next section) allows the camera to do a lot of cool computational photography tricks.
There's better HDR thanks to quicker multi-shot capture and processing.
One example is the comparison above, where you can see the XS has truer color to the gray day and does a better job preventing clipping of highlights than the 8 Plus.
Portrait Mode is included, of course, and now you can adjust the level of blur.
Oddly enough, Apple has used an f-stop scale to show you the effect in the interface.
That's something which is intuitive to photographers, but might be a bit confusing to folks who just want to snap a pretty picture.
Older phones can do the same thing, but require a third-party app, Focos, to do so.
I'd like to see the Apple Camera app pick up Focos's other neat trick, the ability to change the focus point with a tap—it's not included in the iPhone app at this time.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LOH9g8zMH8[/embed]
HDR now works in conjunction with Portrait Mode, so the buildings behind the Buckingham Palace Guard statue aren't blown out like they are on the iPhone 8 Plus.
It's a subtle difference, but one that can make images more pleasing to the eye.
I also found an improvement when using Portrait Mode in dim lighting.
I was able to snap a shot of my lunch with the iPhone XS Max, while I simply couldn't get it with the iPhone 8 Plus.
The older handset kept telling me that I was too close, and when I backed up a bit the phone said I should keep my subject within 8 feet of the lens.
This has been a frustration point throughout the time I've used the iPhone 8 Plus as my daily driver.
I'm glad to see it work a bit better in dim light, but I do think Apple could go further.
The forthcoming iPhone XR is able to...
