Apple announced two new iPhone models at the company’s media event (along with a new Apple Watch) in San Francisco.
The iPhone 7 coming at 4.70-inch starts at $649 (approximately UGX. 2,200,000) for the new 32GB entry-level variant, doing away with the 16GB model.
While the iPhone 7 Plus comes at 5.50-inch, starts at $769 (approximately UGX. 2,600,000) for same 32GB storage. Apple has also doubled the storage variant on other models, with 128GB and 256GB models now rounding up the lineup.
Design: New colors, redesigned home button
The latest iPhone models comes with a new design, doing away with the antenna lines at the back, and they will be available in two new colours: (matte) black, jet (glossy) black, in addition to gold, silver, and rose gold.
The iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus also feature a redesigned home button which is now solid-state and force-sensitive. It uses Taptic vibrations instead of a physical click, just like the trackpad on the latest MacBook and MacBook Pro models. Apple has also added IP67 water and dust resistance, a first for the iPhone series.
Wireless: No Headphone Jack
The new iPhone has no headphone jack! So if you are planning to buy an iPhone 7, you might want to sell your headphones too, just to free up some cash for a new pair of wireless headphones.
The new phone will come with a pair of earbuds that plug into its Lightning port, along with an adapter for your existing headphones. Apple also showed off some new wireless AirPods, which look like the regular earbuds that ship with your iPhone, except without the wires. They have a chip inside that controls on-board accelerometers, and they’ll be sold separately for $159.
Camera
The iPhone 7 Plus packs in the widely rumoured dual rear camera setup – one 56mm telephoto lens and the other wide-angle lens. The bigger iPhone is also capable of 2x optical zoom, with total zoom up to 10x.
There are camera improvements, with the iPhone 7 also getting optical image stabilisation (OIS). There’s a new 6-element f/1.8 aperture lens with 12-megapixel sensor and quad-LED with True Tone Flash. A new 7-megapixel front camera is included as well. The newest iPhone models come with a new image processing engine, which, Apple claims, delivers better, faster pictures.
Other key specs
The new iPhone models comes with a 25 percent brighter display with a wider colour gamut and improved colour management.
The iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus are powered by a new A10 Fusion 64-bit quad core chip, which is 40 percent faster than the A9, and more power efficient, which means the new models have the “best battery life ever” on an iPhone.
The speakers in iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus are stereo – one at the bottom, and one at the top, and twice as loud as their predecessors.
[Wired, NDTV, Apple]
