Yes, I know we’ve performed quite a few unboxing videos lately, but this one’s pretty major. After messing around with the iPhone 8, here we are with the bigger brother, the iPhone 8 Plus and boy does it feel like a letdown. At 202 grams, you’re getting into battery phone territory and I don’t know how Apple got a phone so fat. Priced at $799, the device gets unboxed below.
Unveiled on September 12th, with the iPhone 8, this phone swaps the full metal body approach for a glass back one and balloons to 202 grams of weight. Inside the box we find the charger, Lightning cable, Lightning to 3.5 mm adapter, plus the manual, stickers and SIM metal key. Of course there’s also the pair of EarPods headphones, pretty much unchanged from last year.
Even though it ditched the metal back, the phone still remains waterproof, within the IP67 standard of course. It measures a reasonable 7.5 mm in waistline, but I have a very hard time getting over the whole 202 gram thing… I mean, look at Samsung and LG with their 6 inch phones, not even going past 180 grams or less. Anyway, the screen is very much the same 5.5 incher IPS LCD from last year, albeit this time with warmer colors, perhaps thanks to the whole True Tone thing.
Inside we find the powerful Apple A11 Bionic processor, plus 3 GB of RAM and 64 or 256 GB of storage. The battery is a 2691 mAh unit, a dumbing down compared to last year’s 2900 mAh unit, but optimization probably saves it. On the camera front things seem unchanged from last year, with a dual 12 MP camera, with a telephoto lens and a wide angle one. OIS is here, Quad LED flash too and 2X optical zoom.
What’s new is the Portrait Lighting mode, with lets you mess with the focus and lighting of a scene and portrait at the same time. Upfront we find a 7 MP selfie camera. The fingerprint scanner stays the same and in many areas this feels very much like an iPhone 7s Plus. We’re going to certainly look into it and see what’s so special about this release. I can tell you one thing: I wouldn’t want a 200 gram phone in my pocket. You can get the device here.
