By Adam Turner
With an enhanced screen and new stereo speakers, Apple's latest iPhone improves its credentials as a pocket cinema.
At first glance Apple's iPhone 7 appears identical to its predecessors, headphone jack aside, but look closer and you'll find a wide range of enhancements from more grunt under the bonnet to support for faster mobile broadband speeds. While these will please some iGadget fans, others will be won over by the iPhone 7's multimedia overhaul.
When lightsabers clash you can see and hear the iPhone 7's multimedia improvements.
Last year's iPhone 6s inherited the same screen and speakers as the iPhone 6, except that the 6s added support for Force Touch so it can tell how hard you're pressing the screen. This year the screen on the new iPhone 7 is 25 per cent brighter and can also display a wider range of colours.
Shine on
Apple chief Tim Cook speaks at the launch of the iPhone 7 in San Francisco.Credit: Bloomberg
The screen's increased brightness is noticeable but not striking – it's barely enough to make a difference when it comes to overcoming outdoor glare when reading in direct sunlight. Take the phones back inside and you'll notice that the iPhone 7's image highlights are a little more vivid and pure whites look a little warmer, with the iPhone 6's whites seeming to have the slightest of blue tinges in comparison.
This is assuming that both handsets have their brightness cranked up to full and Auto-Brightness disabled. Turn Auto-Brightness on and they look identical in a brightly lit environment.
Take the phones into a dark room and the iPhone 6 actually looks a little brighter, as the iPhone 7's Auto-Brightness appears to be slightly more aggressive. This might be a ploy to help extend the battery life, as the screen is one of the biggest culprits when it comes to sucking juice.
If you're watching a movie like The Force Awakens on the iPhone 7 in bed at night with the lights off, you'll want to kill Auto-Brightness and crank it up for the picture to look its best. Even then the improvements are subtle – lightsabers look a little more striking, as do Stormtroopers' uniforms, while the orange in BB-8's paint job is a bit more vivid.
A visitor tries out an iPhone 7 on the first day of sales at the Apple Store in Berlin.Credit: Getty Images
Living colour
More important than brightness in terms of picture quality is the iPhone 7's support for DCI-P3 wide colour gamut, which you'll already find in the 5K iMac and 9.7-inch iPad Pro. This basically means that the screen can display more vivid colours and a greater range of fine colour variations, but only if the content supports it.
The red test image above, from the WebKit colour gamut resource page, reveals the difference. It's a "Display P3" test image with the WebKit logo embedded in such a way that it's only visible on wide colour gamut screens like the iPhone 7. Below you can see what the hidden logo should look like.
Even if you drop the brightness on the iPhone 7 the logo still stands out clearly in the picture above, because the background red (shown in purple below) is a particular red which older iPhones – and most other devices – simply can't display so they choose another red. On an iPhone 6 the red of the background and the red of the logo appear identical, so the logo is invisible.
Content providers like Netflix are starting to take advantage of wide colour gamut as part of their support for Ultra HD, but the problem is that this content is aimed at Ultra HD televisions rather than pocket-sized smartphones.
At least for now, the Netflix iOS app doesn't support wide colour gamut so an Ultra HD show like Marco Polo doesn't offer richer colours on the iPhone 7 apart from the benefit of the brighter screen. Wide colour gamut is open to all iOS developers, Instagram has pledged support and so have some game developers.
Listen up
Tip the iPhone 7 on its side to watch a movie and you'll immediately notice the benefit of true stereo sound, thanks to the fact that the earpiece above the screen now acts as a second speaker on the opposite end of the phone to the original speaker alongside the Lightning jack.
When you're watching a movie, the soundtrack now appears to come from the middle of the screen rather than off to the side. During lightsaber duels, you can hear the sound shift with the combatants as they move across the screen. The handset automatically flips the speakers when you flip the screen, so the left and right channels always come from the correct side of the phone.
You can also hear the stereo separation when you play music so, if you tend to lie your phone on the table with the base pointing at you, you'll want to get in the habit of spinning it around so it faces you side on. You might even stand the phone up on its side, but surprisingly Apple's Music app doesn't support landscape mode.
Home theatre buffs might scoff at the thought of watching your favourite movies on a tiny screen, but the iPhone 7 is certainly a step up from its predecessors when it comes to keeping a portable cinema in your pocket.