hey everybody it’s la inside and we’re taking a look today at the new iphone se this is the 2022 version and this phone looks a lot like an iphone 8 and it also looks a lot like the prior edition iphone se but they put a faster processor inside this is now running with an apple a15 chip which is similar to what you might see on an iphone 13 from a performance standpoint but it’s not going to be quite as fast as the iphone 13 pro we’re going to get into what this phone is all about in just a second but i do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure that i paid for this with my own funds all the opinions you’re about to hear are my own no one is paying for this review nor has anyone reviewed or approve what you’re about to see before it was uploaded so let’s get into it now and see what this new iphone is all about now the price point on this starts at 429 and goes up from there there are 64 gigabyte 128 gigabyte and 256 gigabyte storage options available
and the price kind of ladders up based on the storage that you choose like other iphones you cannot add additional storage to the phone so you have to get the storage level that you think you will need when you buy it because there are no upgrade options or sd card options on these it is very lightweight it weighs 5.09 ounces or 144 grams as i mentioned at the outset here it looks a lot like the prior generation iphone se and really like the older iphones that we saw from the earlier period of the decade here so you’ve got very large bezels on it it doesn’t have face id like some of the newer fancier phones do instead it has a fingerprint reader here at the bottom that you use to unlock the phone in many ways sometimes the fingerprint reader is a little more convenient i think for getting into the phone especially if you can’t look at your phone while you’re driving or something like that on the left hand side here we have our volume rockers and our silence switch on the other side you have the power button and the sim card tray now this phone supports 5g and it will support all of what they call the sub 6 5g meaning that it will work with most of the 5g towers you will encounter out there but some of the faster ultra wide towers that are out in urban areas and other densely populated areas will not work with this one so if you wanted to take advantage of some of that gigabit 5g you would need to go up to the iphone 13 to get that but again this will support most of the 5g you’ll encounter out there at this point it’ll also work on 4g networks now the display on this one is 4.7 inches the same as what we’ve seen on the iphone 8 7 and even the 6.
it does look very nice though it’s got really nice sharp text and the photos look great on it the colors are very nice on this as well it is a retina display so you have a lot of resolution packed into those 4.7 inches so it runs at 1334 by 750 it can go up to 625 nits so it is very bright but it is not running with oled technology that you might see on some of the more expensive iphones and certainly on many of the android phones that are out there so if you put this side by side to a more expensive iphone you definitely would notice a bit of the difference but i think for this price it is fine and it also supports apple’s true tone technology so you will see the display’s white balance shift a bit based on conditions to keep the colors consistent and that’s something you can turn off on the settings here now it does support stereo audio out of its speakers it does have two speakers so you have one here on the bottom and another one here in the handset so now with this oriented like so i’m getting left out of the handset speaker and right out of the bottom speaker and if i flip it over it will actually reverse the stereo order depending on the orientation but there is no headphone jack on this one so you will need to connect up bluetooth headphones in order to have any kind of private listening or use a lightning to headphone adapter here at the bottom in order to achieve that and of course this does work with apple airpods the phone is waterproof it is ip67 rated so it can sit in a puddle for 30 minutes fully immersed and still work after you pull it out they say it’s good for about one meter i would say the typical thing you might encounter are toilets and it would certainly survive that so it is waterproof to some
degree but i wouldn’t go swimming with it without some kind of waterproof case just to be safe now this does support wireless charging we’ll get my wireless charger out here which means that the back of the phone is made out of glass so you definitely want to be careful about dropping it you might want to consider the apple care if you are prone to drops a good case should work with this and given that this this phone’s overall packaging here is the same as prior generations there will be a good number of case options available for it it does not come with a charger though and if we look in the box here all you get is a usb c to lightning cable this still has the lightning plug here at the bottom and so you will have to find yourself a usbc power adapter or use an older usb iphone cable to charge the phone but you’re definitely going to have to bring your own charger to the mix this does support though faster charging if you have a 20 watt usbc charger now battery life on the new phone should be better than prior editions it’s got a larger battery and in my testing it’s been working all day no real issues there you will see variations in battery life though depending on what you’re doing with the phone so if you are far away from your tower the radio has to work a little harder to communicate that will impact battery life if you play a lot of games on the phone that will impact battery life but if you are a casual user who uses it for an occasional phone call an email every once in a while you should have easily a full day of use out of this without having to run
back to a charger now the camera system on this one is relatively basic you’ve got a rear camera here that will shoot at 12 megapixels it’s got a 1.
8 aperture so it does okay in low light it does support optical image stabilization and it will shoot video at 4k at up to 60 frames per second i always like to run down my porch here with a heavy walk to see how well it stabilizes and it stabilizes quite well for video and this was walking very heavily so if you walk a little lighter on your feet i think you will have a very good experience here taking video with this camera and this is on par with other apple devices that we’ve looked at that have this same sensor on it so optical stabilizer great video output all good there now the rear camera also supports portrait mode photos that you might see on the more expensive iphones and it does a pretty good job here this blurred background is all done in software artificially as you can see here it’s pretty clean even around my hair in pulling me out from the background but it does require a person be in the frame so i did try to take some similar shots with my dog and it would not blur out the background because it looks for people for this feature and the reason is is that this phone doesn’t have extra cameras and advanced sensors to build out a depth map so it’s doing it all through artificial intelligence where it needs to look for a subject that it’s familiar
with in this case people in order to pull them out from the background so if your intention is to take portrait mode photos of pets i think you might run into some trouble with that but it does have some of the advanced editing features that you might see on the more expensive phones when it comes to portrait photos so if i click on edit here i can do some of the light changes where you can adjust the type of lighting that it’s simulating here including some of those cool shots where it pulls you out of the background and thanks to that a15 chip it’s able to do all of that very quickly if you tap on the f-stop up at the top here you can also make the background more or less blurry too so you do we get a lot of the features that were in the more expensive phones here but there is going to be some limitations to what you can do with the portrait mode given that it only has a single camera without advanced sensor systems but if you look at this picture you do get actually a pretty decent natural bokeh so this shot was not a portrait shot but i just had the camera focus on the pine tree here and you can see that it is blurring out the background naturally and it does have a ton of detail for a low end camera phone here so i think if you are you know looking to take some pictures of the family and friends and other things when you’re out and about we also have a front-facing camera on the phone here this is a little lower quality than some of the newer phones it is a 7 megapixel
camera with a 2.2 aperture it supports 1080p video at 30 frames per second not bad for a front-facing camera on an inexpensive phone but there are of course better cameras out there on the more expensive iphones but it’s fine for doing face time calls and other things and to a large degree this camera is going to be a lot better than the camera you see on a lot of expensive laptops so for conferencing and other light types of front-facing video tasks it should be fine this also supports portrait mode out of that front-facing camera the same rules apply though it has to be a person that it sees in front but it can give you a good amount of blurry backgrounds and you can do a lot of the same adjustments that we saw out of the rear camera so let’s take a look now and see how it performs we’ll begin with the basics some web browsing to start and as you can see everything is very responsive here i do have this on my wi-fi 6 network because this does have a wi-fi 6 radio on board but of course it’ll support older wi-fi standards as well now the screen of course is very small compared to other devices that are out there so what you can do to get more out of the screen is use the safari browser’s reader mode and that will get rid of a lot of the graphical elements and stick to just the photos and the text so this might be something you’ll find yourself using more often on this phone versus larger
screen phones so you have that option available to you but all in not bad here from a performance standpoint and that’s what i would expect actually given the processor that’s on board let’s take a look at youtube now uh one thing to note is the speaker is quite loud on it and it doesn’t sound tinny it actually sounds pretty good uh for a low-cost phone so that’s pretty nice to see and as you can see here the video is playing back just fine now you can also do some picture-in-picture video playback on websites that support that so for example we’re on the nasa.gov homepage here watching one of their videos and if i make it full screen and then jump back out here you can see that i can have the video playing while i do other things the issue though of course that the screen is rather small so you can make the video window here a little bit smaller to compensate but it is doable here if you are used to using that picture in picture feature on other ios devices so let’s move on now to gaming and because this has an a15 processor a majority if not all of the iphone game library is available on this phone i’m using what’s called a backbone controller right now which adds a little bit easier controls to the mix here this game is ocean horn 2 but you can also play on the touch screen this iphone like all the others supports xbox and playstation controllers too so you can buy these mounts to work with an existing controller or get something like this that plugs directly into the
phone what’s cool about this game controller is that it also has its own headphone jack to it so you pick up the headphone functionality that you lose with the phone on its own here but the game runs great it looks like it’s running close to 60 frames per second it feels very very playable here and there’s a very large library of ios games as i’m sure you’re aware of that you can get through the app store and then of course they have their subscription plan now the apple arcade which has a lot of high quality stuff in it for a monthly fee so gaming no problem on here everything looks great you just have the smaller screen to contend with but the performance feels on track let’s take a look now at game streaming alright so here we are playing forza horizon 5 from xbox game pass here on the phone now this is not being played on the phone natively but rather it is streaming in over the internet now a lot of the games on game pass require a game controller to be connected but they do have touch controls for a lot of it and we’re playing this right now over my wi-fi network which of course is the ideal way to do it but if you’ve got a strong 5g connection you should be able to get something playable out of game pass that way as well but all in from a gaming perspective this is not a bad little phone here for the price and on the 3dmark wildlife benchmark test we got a score of 8574 on the low res version of that test and on the extreme version we got a score of 1143 that puts its performance lower than the iphone 13 pro that has the same
processor and the reason is is that apple clocks the processor on this lower end phone below that of the higher end ones so even though it is the same chip it just isn’t running as fast as it can run on a more expensive phone but from a gaming perspective that doesn’t matter much because a bulk of the app library especially the game library is targeted at phones with slower processors than this one so you should find that almost all if not all of the games on the app store will run on this phone and they’ll all run quite well so if you’re looking for a reasonably priced iphone without all the bells and whistles this one is definitely worth considering it performs exceptionally well it supports wireless charging you’ve got the stereo audio on board the camera is decent and passable and can shoot 4k 60 frames per second video so it does a lot that the bigger more expensive phones do without having to spend as much for those phones and you can get this unlocked at a very reasonable price without a carrier commitment and i think it is a good value for people that just need a basic smartphone and this one is certainly far beyond basic offering most of what you would expect out of a more expensive iphone that is going to do it for this one until next time this is lon simon thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by the london tv supporters including gold level supporters jim tannis and tom albrecht hot sauce and video games and eric’s variety channel brian parker and frank goldman amda brown and matt zagaya and chris allegretta if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month over to lawn dot tv support to learn more and don’t forget to subscribe visit lawn dot tv slash s
Read More: The Wyze Cam Vulnerability and How the Verge Blew it Out of Proportion
