Apple iPhone SE (2020) review

Apple iOS 13 with Home key and Touch ID

The iPhone SE (2020) runs on the latest Apple iOS 13.4 OS and should be enjoying about 5 years of uninterrupted software updates - both major and minor. The iOS 13 wasn't that of a major OS update - it focused on improving the default system apps instead.

The iPhone SE relies on Touch ID for biometric security. It hasn't changed one bit since the iPhone 8 - you press on the sensor, and the iPhone gets unlocked immediately upon successful recognition. Lift to wake up works like a charm, too, so no need to manually wake up the screen.

The lockscreen is simple - it has three pages - Central for notifications, Left for Today, and Right for the camera app. There is no visible flashlight toggle, but you can bring up the Control center with a swipe from the bottom and trigger it from there.

Naturally, apps go on the homescreen, there are no widgets and no separate app drawer, but folders are available. The leftmost Today page is here to stay - it is the place where various widgets go, and it also includes a system-wide Spotlight search field.

Lockscreen • Homescreen • Homescreen • Today • Today settings

The navigation gestures stay the same as they were on the iPhones before the X - press on Home key for Homescreen/app close and double press for Task Switcher.

The Notification Center is summoned with a swipe from the top of the screen. The pane was unified with the lockscreen in iOS 11, and if you use different wallpapers for home and lock screens, you may get confused at first.

The Control Center with all your (customizable) toggles, is called with a swipe from the bottom of the screen. You can use haptic touch to access additional controls. And the battery percentage has been moved permanently here because there is no room left for it on that status bar.

Notification Center • Control Center

3D Touch is gone for good, and we have Apple to blame for its demise. The company had years to use it for something more than just an overengineered long-press functionality for quick previews and context action pop-ups, but it appeared it simply chose to ignore it. Its functionality is still here, but now it requires a mere tap-and-hold instead of an actual press, although a press would do it too. The taptic engine provides the appropriate haptic feedback, and it feels like the 3D Touch is still here even though it's not. And we are glad Apple ditched the 3D Touch layer as it helped free some space inside the phones.

So, you can use the Haptic Touch on various app icons to reveal quick actions, if available. You can also use it for notifications, toggles, and in-app content pop-up or expansion (pictures, links, file descriptions, etc.). You can also use Haptic Touch on folders to rename them or see the apps inside that have pending notifications.

And as usual - a pop-up preview of pictures, weblinks, messages, emails, notes, and photos, is available.

Haptic Touch

Apple iOS 13 introduced a systemwide Dark Mode. You can enable it within Display Settings, and it switches to dark all-white backgrounds across iOS. The Dark Mode affects all system apps, but also apps that rely on system backgrounds. It will supposedly save you some battery because the screen is often less lit.

You can choose between always-on or automatic. The latter means you can either manually schedule the Dark Mode or choose from Dark Until Sunrise/Light Until Sunset.

Dark Mode

Siri - Apple's digital assistant - is used by 400+ million people monthly. You summon it by holding the Home hey. It's continuously evolving thanks to all machine-learning improvements, and iOS 13 introduces a new voice with even more natural speech.

Siri Shortcuts were introduced as part of iOS 12, but now those get their standalone Shortcuts app. There are so many things you can assign a shortcut to that it will take many pages to describe them. You can script almost anything available within iOS itself, a lot of stuff from within the system apps, and some advanced actions from any well-known apps such as YouTube or Facebook.

The scripting option offers opening apps, choose a menu from settings, exit app, if and repeats, get different stats, adjust various settings, turn on or off something, calculate, measure, get network details and whatnot.

You can request a various type of files - latest imports from images, a different type of images, screenshots, open PDFs, edit notes, print, scan QR, and many more.

Siri • Shortcuts app

The Photos app is a major part of iOS, and it has been completely overhauled in iOS 13. The Photos tab now has four different views - Years, Months, Days, and All Photos. The last one is what the previous Photos app offered as default view.

Photos

Days, Months and Years tabs use what the AI considers as best pictures at a glance and this way all the clutter gets filtered - you won't see screenshots, notes, or even duplicates. When you scroll through your images in these three categories, all live photos and videos will play automatically, muted, of course. Also, your best photos or videos will show in bigger thumbnails.

The new Photos app also offers new editing mode, both for photos and videos - more powerful, and yet easy to use.

Editing a photo • Editing a photo • Editing a video • Editing a video

The rest of the iOS app package is quite familiar - Books is here for your documents, PDFS, and eBooks. Apple Maps, Stocks, and News are onboard. Safari is your default web browser, and it has Download manager now.

There is also an updated Health app with improved summary, highlights, and new cycle tracking feature.

Maps • Books • Stocks • Safari • Health

The Apple TV app is part of iOS 13, and it is your default video player for local movies and shows you what you've added via iTunes. This is also the digital store for movies and TV shows, but it is also the place where Apple TV+ streaming service will launch in just a month, and all new iPhones will come with 1-year free subscription.

Apple TV

Music is the default player, and it relies heavily on Apple Music. But even if you decide not to opt for the streaming service, it can still do an excellent job if you have a few minutes to add your songs via iTunes. The number of clicks is the same as if you were to copy them via Windows Explorer, but the prejudice against the app quadruples those.

Music

Finally, Apple pushes Apple Pay even more with iOS 13, and there is a new feature called sign-in with Apple. You can use this in iOS 13 to quickly sign into apps with your Apple account, authenticating with TouchID (and with two-factor authentication included). Apple will send the app a unique random ID. If an app demands your email address, you can choose to give it your actual email, or a random one automatically created by Apple for you with built-in forwarding (and these throwaway emails are actually per-app, so you can delete only one that's associated with a specific app if you choose to).

Apple A13 runs the iPhone SE

The highlight feature of the $400 iPhone SE is its hardware platform - Apple A13 Bionic - the same one within the premium iPhone 11 models. The A13 has 8.5 billion transistors and is built on a 7nm+ process.

The Apple A13 Bionic chip packs a hexa-core processor with 2x2.65 GHz Lightning high-performance cores and 4x1.8 GHz Thunder efficient CPU cores.

The A13 SoC has a new GPU that keeps the 4-core design introduced with A12. But is now 20% faster and a whopping 40% more efficient when delivering the same performance as A12's GPU.

The third generation Neural Engine has 8 cores (20% faster, 15% more efficient) and is in charge of the iPhone SE image processing features such as the single-camera Portrait Mode.

Finally, all iPhone SE come with 3GB of RAM - 1GB (or 25%) less than the iPhone 11 4GB of RAM.

And now it's time to run some benchmarks.

We ran GeekBench first. Apple has been a leader in GeekBench charts, and with the A13, it continues to be the chart-topper. The Lightning core is much faster than anything the Android competition has to offer right now, even the most current Kryo 585 Prime core.

GeekBench 5.1 (single-core)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone SE (2020)
  1334
• Apple iPhone 11 Pro Max
  1332
• OnePlus 8
  919
• Realme X50 Pro
  911
• OnePlus 7T
  776

When two Lightning cores fight together, they are a good match to four of the most current Kryo cores by Qualcomm.

GeekBench 5.1 (multi-core)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 11 Pro Max
  3503
• OnePlus 8
  3399
• Apple iPhone SE (2020)
  3237
• Realme X50 Pro
  3175
• OnePlus 7T
  2858

Unfortunately, GFX Benchmark isn't optimized for the most current iPhones and we couldn't test the GPU performance. But it should be the fastest on any iPhone given the most current chip and the lower resolution screen.

Finally, we ran the compound AnTuTu 8 test and the iPhone SE did very well, though not the best of the bunch - its lower RAM impacted the performance and it scored lower than the iPhone 11 Pro.

AnTuTu 8

Higher is better

• Realme X50 Pro
  592447
• OnePlus 8
  564708
• Apple iPhone 11 Pro Max
  536883
• OnePlus 7T
  485585
• Apple iPhone SE (2020)
  462253

Not that it matters that much, but the iPhone SE packs a lot of oomph under the hood, a lot more than it needs. It's like putting a Ferrari engine in a Beetle. Still, it is very much welcome, and it should last the iPhone SE for the planned 5 years ahead and probably beyond.