ON March 31, you’ll be able to buy the newest member of the iPhone family: the iPhone SE.
What does SE stand for? Apple says Special Edition, but you could also sum it up this way: Same Engine, Smaller Exterior. Because Apple has crammed the chips, guts, and camera of the iPhone 6s into the crisp-cornered body of the tiny iPhone 5s.
On one hand, Apple now seems to be following the Samsung model of spewing out phones and tablets in every conceivable size, rather than innovating in more substantial ways.
On the other hand, Apple is correct that a certain chunk of the population doesn’t like the jumbo-ification of smartphones, such as the big iPhone 6s and even bigger 6s Plus.
Some people, small of hands, still cling to the three-year-old iPhone 5s (with its 4-inch screen) despite the gigantic improvements in speed, camera power, and wireless abilities in the newer phones.
Three things about the SE are newsworthy: First, the battery life is about 30 percent better than the iPhone 6s’s (good for 13 hours of Web browsing, Apple says) — a side effect of having a screen the same size as the 5s.
Second, at $400 without a contract (for the 16GB model), the iPhone SE is the least expensive iPhone that Apple has ever offered. Finally, with its 4-inch screen, the SE is now the smallest brand-name smartphone sold in America.
The SE is loaded with features (Apple Pay, Live Photos, fingerprint unlocking, 4K video recording, hands-free “Hey Siri” voice commands, and more), but not a single one of them is new in the SE.
It actually lacks one modern feature of the iPhone 6s: It doesn’t have 3D Touch, which makes shortcut menus pop up when you apply additional pressure to the iPhone 6s’s screen. (Compared with the 6s, the SE screen isn’t quite as colorful, the front camera not quite as good, and the fingerprint reader isn’t quite as fast, either.)
In other words, a review of the iPhone SE would, for all intents and purposes, be a re-review of the iPhone 6s.
Therefore, to save us both time and effort, here’s what I said about the 6s, in lightly updated form. After all: If Apple can recycle its finest ideas, why can’t I? (You can skip to the final paragraph for my final thoughts on the new phone.)
Things you’ll appreciate all day long
The biggest new thing is speed.
The processor inside: Apple says it’s “up to 70 percent” faster than the iPhone 6. Opening apps, switching apps, processing things — it all happens faster.
Apple also says that it has tuned both its Wi-Fi and its cellular (LTE) antennas to make them faster.
This, too, is screamingly obvious when you call up websites side-by-side on the old and new phones. Who doesn’t like faster Internet?
Things you’ll appreciate occasionally
Apple makes much of the iPhone’s new camera. It takes 12-megapixel photos, up from 8. And it can capture 4K video (that is, four times the resolution of high definition).
But as Apple itself has pointed out many times, having more megapixels does not mean you take better photos. More megapixels can be useful when you want to crop a wide photo down to a smaller subject and still have enough resolution for a print.
Otherwise, more megapixels just means bigger files — and your phone will fill up faster. But there is one camera enhancement that’s pretty awesome: the selfie-screen flash.
The new iPhone offers a “flash” for taking selfies. At the moment you take the shot, the screen lights up to illuminate your face.
Better yet: It samples the ambient room light and adjusts the color of the screen’s “flash” to give your face the best flesh tones.
What SE really stands for
The $400 for this Smartphone Extraordinaire is a Smart Expenditure. On one hand, it still has the Sharp Edges of the iPhone 5s, and its addition to the lineup will remind critics of Samsung’s Excess.
On the other hand, its 1.5-day battery life means that it only Sips Energy. This is a piece of very Solid Equipment, even if it is a Special Edition for people with Small Extremities./David Pogue, Yahoo!Tech