Now that the iPhone 15 has been out for a little bit, I can say wholeheartedly that Apple should have made the move to a USB-C charger years ago. While it's not the biggest feature on offer here, what with the extremely impressive cameras, great performance, and gorgeous colorways; not having to constantly carry around seperate chargers for the iPhone and whatever other devices I'm carrying around has been a huge improvement.
And as such, the iPhone 15 is finally one of the best smartphones out there, especially if you've been waiting for Apple to ditch its decade-old Lightning cable. So now, if you've been using one of the best Android phones, the iPhone 15 marks the easiest time to ever make the switch from Android to iOS.
Apple iPhone 15 – Design and Features
At first glance, the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus look nearly identical to the iPhone 14, even down to the same visual profile of the camera. But there are differences if you look a bit closer. The biggest of these is that instead of a notch at the top of the display, you now get the much-better Dynamic Island that was exclusive to the iPhone 14 Pro last generation.
This is basically a little island in the display that will usually be pure black, but certain notifications and statuses will show a little icon. This island houses your front facing cameras, too, but there are several devices, like the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5, that are able to use a selfie camera under the display without interrupting your image. It seems like Apple may be heading in this direction too, but until the company figures out how to do it to its own standard, the Dynamic Island is a much better way of housing the front-facing cameras.
The glass around the back of the iPhone 15 is also different. This time around, Apple managed to infuse the color directly into the glass itself. Realistically, this won't mean much to most people, but it should prevent any discoloration from appearing over time as dust and grime work their way under the glass.
In practice, of course, this means the new iPhone looks amazing outside of a case, but that's how things have always been with Apple's smartphones.
Of course, the biggest change comes at the bottom of the phone with the new USB-C port. However, while the iPhone 15 Pro gets USB-C 3.0, which has been around for 15 years, the iPhone 15 is stuck with USB-C 2.0, which is way slower than pretty much every other phone on the market right now. I understand that the kinds of people transferring a lot of data to and from their phones are going to opt for the iPhone 15 Pro anyway, but it doesn't make much sense to strap the iPhone 15 with such an outdated USB spec in 2023.
But still, all USB-C 3.0 devices are backwards compatible, so it's not like going with the older standard is going to affect anything but speed, but it's an oversight I wouldn't have expected from Apple.
As for the camera bump, you still get the two-lens configuration of the iPhone 14, but both lenses have been significantly updated. I love that Apple was able to update the capabilities of the camera without changing their footprint, but you'll still have to live with a camera bump, which seems inevitable these days.
As for colorways, I was sent a green iPhone 15 Plus and a pink iPhone 15, but there are actually a ton of different colors available, with blue, yellow and black joining pink and green. Both phones I tested are absolutely gorgeous, but the colors are oddly muted again, with the pink colorway looking white in most lighting situations. I guess bright colors go against Apple's sense of style. How droll.
Finally, Apple has also introduced a new safety feature that's genuinely helpful if you either live in a remote area or you regularly go hiking. You can now call for help via satellite, whether that's roadside assistance or something more dire. This means that even if you don't have cell signal, you can get help in an emergency. Luckily, if you already have an iPhone 14, Apple quietly supports the feature for you too, so you don't need to upgrade.
Apple lines out how this works in a help article, but essentially, you can find the app in you settings by just selecting Emergency SOS. There's a demo, too, so you can see how it works before you're in a life-or-death situation.
Apple iPhone 15 – Camera
The iPhone 14 kind of got screwed over when it came to the camera. While its 12MP main sensor was good, and it was of course boosted by Apple's generally excellent image-boosting algorithms, it was far behind the iPhone 14 Pro. That's still kind of the case, with the iPhone 15 Pro having an excellent shooter, but the iPhone 15 is much better off this time around.
The iPhone 15 has a two-camera array on the back of the phone, pairing a 48MP main camera with a 12MP telephoto lens that combine to create truly excellent photos. On the front, you get a 12MP TrueDepth camera, which is essentially the same camera as the iPhone 14's selfie cam. It's good enough to get great selfies, and of course portrait mode remains the highlight of any iPhone camera.
It's nice, then, that the iPhone 15 enables Portrait mode by default whenever the camera senses there's a person or pet in the frame. It's able to do this through depth sensors in the camera array that can tell immediately whether or not you're capturing a person. The phone does make the assumption out-of-the-box that you actually want portrait mode by default, but I can't imagine why you wouldn't.
What's surprising, though, is how immediate it is in practice. There isn't any downtime between opening the camera app and getting a shootable image – it's totally seamless.
Apple iPhone 15 – Performance and Gaming
The iPhone 15 Pro seems to be going all out to be the de-facto gaming phone these days, what with it courting AAA console games like Resident Evil Village. The iPhone 15, on the other hand, remains a stealthy pick for mobile gamers.
While it doesn't have the A17 Pro with its 6-core GPU, the A16 Bionic is no slouch. We're talking a 6-core CPU with 2 performance cores, 4 efficiency cores and a 5-core GPU. It might not officially support the high-end games coming to the Pro, but I wouldn't be surprised if support was incoming, because the performance is pretty phenomenal.
In the mobile games I regularly play, including Marvel Snap, Diablo Immortal, and Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes, the iPhone 15 can swap between them without breaking a sweat. What's more surprising is how little impact to the battery life gaming seems to have. I am constantly playing games on the phone, and over a week or so of using the iPhone 15, I've only really needed to charge it maybe three times. You can regularly expect the phone to last all-day, pretty much no matter what you're doing. Although, the USB-C 2.0 connection stops your phone from charging as fast as some of its Android counterparts.
That USB-C connection does do a lot if you want to play games, though. Not only do most controllers support USB-C these days, but there are so many controller adapters for phones out there, like the Razer Kishi. That device, specifically, is what I use to play games on the phone, and being able to use a USB-C model means that no matter what kind of phone you upgrade to in the future, you won't have to swap to a different controller attachment. It's a small thing, to be sure, but it means a lot when you don't want to spend another $100 on something you already have.
However, if you know you are going to be playing a lot of games on your phone, you might want to opt for the Plus.
Between the two phones, the larger 6.7-inch display on the iPhone 15 makes it much easier to tell what's actually going on. The actual chip inside is the same – you're getting the A16 Bionic no matter what – but the extra half an inch of display really makes a difference.
Apple iPhone 15 – Display
Speaking of the display, Apple has done it again. While it's not the most impressive on paper, with a resolution of 2,556 x 1,179 for the iPhone 15 – Apple has again tuned the display to be extremely color accurate and bright. Let's be clear, there are higher resolution smartphones out there, and there are phones with insanely high refresh rates, but somehow Apple has cracked the code at making a display look flawless.
I regularly find myself pulling out my phone and watching YouTube videos or reading comics, even though I have devices with bigger displays handy, just because the iPhone 15 display is that good. The absolutely jaw-dropping 2,000,000:1 contrast ratio makes blacks extremely dark, while having a peak brightness of 2000 nits outdoors means that the brighter areas of any scene just pop off the display.
A lot has been said about HDR and how it can truly transform the content you consume, but when you have a display that's as good at displaying HDR content as the iPhone 15, it really does exist in a league of its own.
