The flagship smartphone market is one of the most competitive consumer spaces out there. It’s the place where manufacturers get to showcase their greatest research and development, and most luxurious designs. These are the best phones of the year.
APPLE IPHONE XS MAX
The iPhone XS Max is Apple’s biggest ever smartphone with a massive 6.5-inch AMOLED display. For the most part, it looks like a supersized version of last year’s iPhone X, with a shiny stainless steel frame (in a gorgeous new gold color). Apple also advertises it as having the most durable front and back glass used on any smartphone. Environment resistance is also better and is now IP68 rated.
While the XS Max’s 6.5-inch display makes it sound huge, the phone is actually about the same size and weight as an iPhone 8 Plus. The display itself has a 2,688 x 1,242 pixels resolution (~458ppi) and is practically perfect, with rich colors, deep blacks, excellent contrast, and perfect viewing angles. It is HDR10 and Dolby Vision certifed, with a 60% increased the dynamic range so HDR content looks even better now.
Audio on the XS Max is provided by a stereo speaker setup comprising of one downward firing speaker, and the earpiece doubling up as the second speaker. Sound is impressively loud, with a distinct left-right stereo separation.
Like last year’s X, the XS Max lacks a fingerprint scanner and relies entirely on FaceID for biometric security. While the components are the same, it has been upgraded to be faster than the X.
On the rear of the XS Max there’s a new, bigger 12-megapixel sensor in the wideangle camera that delivers cleaner images in low light. Both rear cameras also boast zero shutter lag thanks to a rolling four-frame buff er that continuously captures images whenever the camera app is open. Inside the XS Max is
Apple’s new A12 Bionic chip, which is one of only two mobile processors currently made on a 7nm process technology (the other is Huawei’s HiSilicon Kirin 980). The A12 Bionic packs a hexa-core CPU, a quad-core GPU, as well as a ‘nextgeneration’ octa-core neural engine for machine learning and AI tasks.
This story is from the January 2019 edition of HWM Singapore.
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This story is from the January 2019 edition of HWM Singapore.
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