iPhone 11 Pro review

If you were to ask people what they want in a new smartphone, they would probably say they want it to be fast, have a long-lasting battery, be nice and durable, and have a really awesome camera.

It just so happens that's what you get with the iPhone 11 Pro. But it's also what you get with the iPhone 11, which costs £320/$300 less. The Pro is certainly an upgrade, but it doesn't do a lot to justify its "Pro" moniker or very "Pro" price.

Still, the iPhone 11 Pro is a tremendous iPhone, with some noticeable (and not-so-noticeable) improvements over last year's iPhone XS. As good as it is at what it does, it's hard not to think Apple could have done more to justify the big price gap over the iPhone 11 and the "Pro" name that comes with it.

Note: This review refers to the iPhone 11 Pro as a single entity, though we tested both the iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max. The only difference between the two phones is that the Max is larger and has a little bit longer battery life. It's best to just think of the iPhone 11 Pro as a single product that comes in two sizes.

It's all about that camera

With each new iPhone, the camera gets better. It's often the thing people notice and care about more than anything else. That's true this year more than most - while the iPhone 11 Pro has other improvements over previous iPhones, that camera grabs people's attention.

Apple's high-end iPhones have had a wide and telephoto camera duo on the rear of the phone for a couple years now. The iPhone 11 Pro adds a third, ultra wide, camera. It is, in a word, fun.

Landscape photographers will enjoy it and you can get taller panorama photos, but I think even average everyday users will find themselves using ultra wide quite often. You can get more people in a shot without backing up, or capture that big statue or sculpture without having to stand so far away that people walk in front of you. The distorted perspective effect of a wide lens makes subjects look larger, which can create a real sense of scale. If a telephoto lens makes things intimate, a really wide angle lens makes them expansive.

But the iPhone 11, the "non-Pro" model, has this same camera. It's the telephoto camera that distinguishes Pro from non-Pro, and honestly, it's just not that big a deal. I found it far more useful to zoom out than to zoom in. The telephoto camera is better now, with a wider f/2.0 aperture that lets in a lot more light than the f/2.4 telephoto camera in the iPhone X and XS. You'll get better shots in poor light and a nicer natural bokeh.

The existence of the telephoto lens permitted the iPhone XS to do something the iPhone XR could not: shoot portrait mode photos of any subject. Now that both models have an ultrawide lens, they both gain that capability. It's nice to take portrait mode photos with the standard wide-angle lens (which you could not on the iPhone X or XS), but it's just one more way the Pro fails to distinguish itself from the standard model.

Better sensors and a much more powerful A13 Bionic processor combine to produce much better photos than the iPhone XS, which was already one of the best cameras on a smartphone. Detail and dynamic range is improved, and colour accuracy is really on point - this phone produces some of the most true-to-life colours of any smartphone I've seen, while even the best Android phones sometimes get a little aggressive with making the colours "pop" and sharpen things up with a post-processing filter.

The selfie camera is now 12 megapixels instead of 7, with a field of view 15 degrees wider (85 instead of the 70-degree field of view on previous iPhones). Both make a significant difference. You'll get clearer and sharper shots in more conditions, and group selfies are easier than ever.

I appreciate that it's not so wide as to be unnaturally distorting. It's not the front-facing equivalent of the ultra wide camera on the back.

Finally, there's Night mode. When this was introduced on the Google Pixel and followed on other Android phones, iPhone users were understandably upset that they didn't have the same feature. Now, Apple has their own version of Night mode, and it's done in a very Apple way.

When it's dark enough to warrant its use, Night mode automatically engages, and will ask you to hold your phone still from one to three seconds while the screen brightens, as if developing a photo.

The resulting photos are often full of grain and noise, but the same shots without Night mode are even worse, in addition to being so dark that you can't see anything at all. Night mode shots are much brighter and more colourful, but not unnaturally so, as we've seen in many Android phones - it doesn't turn night into day, it just captures a shot that looks like what your eye might see at night.