Another XR fan here. I went from 6s to XR. It’s much faster, the camera is amazing and the battery life is exceptional. It lasts 1.5 days of heavy use no problems at all.
The only compliant is sometimes I pull it out of my pocket and try and use it upside down. And the torch comes on in my pocket about once a week.
All new phones replacing a several year old model exhibit the same characteristics you say here.
Of course going from 6s->XR is faster (several generations of newer cpu), has a better camera, and that brand new battery lasts a long time. Your old phone was about 3.5 years old.
You could have gotten a new 6s and it probably would have had most of the characteristics you say, because it wouldn't be throttled due to an old battery. Or just replace the battery. It would hold a charge a lot longer. The only thing that wouldn't really be different is the camera.
I just upgraded from a 6s plus to an XR. For me it’s slightly faster, though I would never have done it if it weren’t subsidized by my company. My 6s was plenty fast for me.
Me too. I think media has generally been unfair about XR not selling well. It is easily the best iPhone I have used. I actually enjoy reading on it; just finished a 1000 page fiction novel on it. And yeah, hacker news loads fasssst. Faster than my MacPro :)
Odd, I just finished a night shift in which I used my Galaxy S9 quite a lot, after a day of using it quite a lot (including wifi hotspot, camera, video, maps & navigation) and it's showing 65% battery. This is after 23 hours of constant usage. I think this may be due to both better and larger batteries in all flagship phones, as well as better power management in both Android and iOS. Or maybe I just got lucky?
I have an S8 and generally have to charge it half way through the day. Going on a 1 1/2 walk while just listening to spotify will drain the battery between 18-24%. Been trying to decide between the Pixel, XR, or S9 since its been so bad recently. If the S9 really has that amount of improvement I wouldn't mind doing the straight upgrade since video/picture quality isn't a big deal for me.
Sounds like I got lucky. I've noticed this with Li-Ion batteries; some are awesome and provide days of charge, and some are terrible and require half-daily top-ups. I'm not sure if the manufacturers do testing to determine which ones are better.
Spotify seems to be a real battery hog, but are you in a low-signal area? (especially on LTE). I've noticed a big difference in battery life on the S8+ (and to some extent, the Note 9) based on whether I'm in a "1 bar" area or "4 bar" area.
That might be it. I'll give it a check later today but I am walking out to the trail. I'd have hoped since I have the playlists downloaded that it wouldn't matter.
How so? An OLED will always have better blacks than an LCD screen, which leads to better contrast, which leads to better picture quality (perceived at least).
Black levels are one attribute of a screen. However the Xr also has a few upsides: A higher brightness, and no display flickering due to PWM. I personally thought the Xr also exposed less yellow screen tint than the Xs and scrolled with less blur and distortion, but that might have been subjective.
The other thing that is often advertised as pro for the Xs is a higher resolution. However that is not entirely true, since the Oled displays use a pentile matrix, where there is not a full sub-pixel available for each pixel. Which means in other words the difference in actual resolution is not as high as the pure numbers might want one make to believe.
I think both displays are excellent, and won't disappoint.
I did not expect OLED to be this much better than LCD before I got the X. It makes an absolutely enormous difference when you use the phone in a dark environment, say to check the time if you wake up at night.
Honest question, because I’m a bit confused: the 40% is good or bad? It seems comparable to my old iPhone SE, is battery life so much worse on the newer generations?
I've never really looked at it like that, but I guess we should take the least generous values from both:
Pure Capacity:
iPhone XR: 2,942 mAh
iPhone SE: 1,624 mAh
Draw:
iPhone XR: "Up to 15 hours", so 196,134 mAh of draw if we take the best case for the iPhone XR.
iPhone SE: 12-13 Hrs on Internet (so, LTE, according to apple) that's roughly 129,92 mAh
; while the capacities are wildly different I don't see the SE being so far behind.
If you can get real power draw numbers you can make your own conclusion. I suspect Apple expects a certain about of idle time (which has been optimised for on the later generations).
Using those numbers, when an SE hit 0% after 9.27 hours of usage, the XR would be at 28.5% (12.97-9.27)/12.97. That seems reasonable and makes my original claim that an XR would be at 40% was a hit high, but in the same ballpark. There’s certainly no doubt that the SE’s battery size and power management doesn’t compare to the current phones’.
Though it's worth pointing out that the SE did beat out its contemporary iPhone 6s, with which it shares most of its innards. Differences are the smaller display, slightly smaller battery, 1st vs 2nd gen TouchID, and a lower res front-facing camera.
24% longer on wifi web browsing. Worse on the graphics benchmark, but only because the framerate is higher (smaller screen resolution) which keeps the CPU from idling as much.
Makes you wonder what the performance of a modern small iPhone could be like.
It is worth pointing out the test were using WiFI and assume best connection. In real usage the XR would get better LTE performance and hence even better battery life than what was tested.
Good. Ugh... I have XS Max and without charging it I usually have around 20% at the end of the day. I use it heavily for commute into NYC on the bus so that might contribute.
The lack of 3D Touch is such an oddity, product lineup wise. Every touch device (watches, iPhones) since the SE support 3D Touch. I understand that there might be technical issues behind this decision, but I'm not sure Apple would've released the XR in this state a couple of years ago (even post Jobs).
> The lack of 3D Touch is such an oddity, product lineup wise.
I’d be surprised if most users use it. I’m not sure that most are even aware it exists. It’s possibly the least ‘discoverable’ feature ever introduced in a user interface.
I find this method is more accurate for me than 3D Touch, so I actually do this instead on my iPhone 7 Plus. Basically, it takes a split second to trigger 3D Touch, and in that period of time I could have long-pressed the spacebar. The latter is very reliable for me, but the former doesn’t trigger as reliably.
I tried it on my old iPhone 8. But it doesn't work that great there, since the spacebar is at the very bottom of the square screen, and therefore there is no further space for scrolling down from there.
On my new iPhone XR it's far more convenient to use, since the spacebar is not at the bottom, and scrolling down (e.g. in order to edit a message) works more reliable.
It still doesn't feel as good as 3d touch on the old thing, e.g. it sometimes doesn't go into touchpad mode when pressed directly after a word and doesn't feel as precise. But it's good enough that I don't terrible miss it.
Earlier poster is correct about not being intuitive. Now that I know about it, that's awesome. Sadly, it's not supported by the Google keyboard (long press kicks off voice search).
It is the natural and best way to do so. You press hard and the cursor moves freely like a mouse pointer, put it where it should be and release. Along with haptic feedback, it's a must have once you start using it. Really beats the magnifying glass method.
An interesting fact is that it's actually a Post 3D touch feature. It should have been possible to do it all the years. But the feature only had been introduced with iOS 12, after the first phone without 3d touch (iPhone Xr) after some years had been released.
I would have been useful for devices like the iPhone SE too.
Put side-by-side with a XS, i'm hard pressed to find a visual difference between screens, quality-wise.