Apple iPhone 8 review

Photos

Photos is a very easy to use gallery app with support for various automatic (places, faces, etc.) and custom albums, camera roll, and even a Recently Deleted section.

Photos app

The automatic sorting in Memories, which scans your photos and sorts them in automatic albums by landmarks, animals, people, topics, and various other criteria, is available, too and should be much faster now with hardware accelerated machine learning. Each new Memory gets an automatically created Video Memory, which you can edit anytime. You can add or remove pictures or clips, change the background music and the stitching effects.

Memories • A Memory • Viewing a memory • Editing a Memory

The Photos app in iOS 11 brings some new features such as easy Watch Face creation. A new menu row also gives you the ability to choose different Live Photo effects - Live, Loop, Bounce, and Long Exposure. The same menu has a new Related row where thanks to the new machine learning you will see similar or related pictures.

Watch Face creation • Watch Face creation • Watch Face creation • Live Effects • Live Effects

The gallery also offers some rich editing skills.

The edits apply on both the picture and the Live Image

You can also search in Photos by names, places, months, or similar.

Although not limited to the Photos app, iOS 11 supports wide color DCI-P3 color profile and RAW files. The wide color support applies to images captured with the front and rear camera of the iPhone 7 and 8 (but not videos) as well as images imported to the device using color spaces such as Adobe RGB. The RAW support is in the form of API where third-party apps can capture RAW files, which can be edited on the phone within the Photos app or a compatible third-party app.

Limited video player

Unfortunately, this is yet another iOS update which fails to do anything about the video player. You can upload only supported formats via iTunes or purchase videos from the iTunes store. This is an extremely disappointing showing by a platform that is supposed to excel at multimedia consumption.

The video player

The lack of extra functionality is bad enough, but having to use just an extremely limited number of media formats or resorting to converting files, which is both slow and inconvenient, is a real deal-breaker.

Music app

The Music app relies heavily on Apple Music service and has five tabs - Library, For You, Browse, Radio, and Search. You can edit the Library's section if you like.

The 'For You' section shows music based on your listening history, likes, as well as the genres and artists you had previously chosen when you first launched the app. Browse helps you make your way through one of the richest song collection in the world.

Finally, the Radio tab has the Beats 1 radio, which is available 24/7 and the tracks there are chosen by real DJs, not machine algorithms. There are quite a few other stations available already, including programs created automatically by Apple. This section is available even if you don't subscribe to Apple Music.

Music app

The Now Playing screen also comes with lyrics support.

The Music app can do without Apple Music, don't you worry. You just need to add your music collection through iTunes, and you are good to go. And while many people are suspicious about the Apple's player, it is a very easy process, and they shouldn't be afraid.

Now Playing • Lyrics • Local library

Audio output is nicely clean, not very loud

The Apple iPhone 8 audio performance was very much in line with its larger Plus sibling. Its clarity was excellent both with headphones and with an active external amplifier, but unfortunately its loudness levels left something to be desired.

Depending on the impedance of your favorite headset that might not matter too much, but it's good to keep in mind nonetheless. At one point Apple was leading this particular race, but its competitors have since moved forward whereas the iPhones haven't seen any change in ages.

Apple iPhone 8 frequency response

You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.