Buttoned up & ready to roll!

Crisp autumn leaves, pumpkin spice lattes and the whole lineup of new Apple iPhones is what the beginning of fall brings every year. Among the new iPhone launches this year, I’ve been spending time with the Apple iPhone 16 Pro, a compact flagship, that brings in a special Camera Control button this year, along with upgraded software features. Here are the highlights of my experience with the device, along with a few niggles along the way.

Design

Minimal, classy, not too flashy. Typical Apple aesthetics on the iPhone 16 Pro. I’ve got the Natural Titanium colourway, which is basically grey. Not as appealing as I find the Desert Titanium version, with its subtle gold tones. But hey, to each his own. It sports a 6.3-inch display with barely-there bezels. It’s taller and wider than the iPhone 15 Pro but still feels surprisingly lightweight at 227 grams.

The hardware remains pretty much unchanged except for the addition of the Camera Control key, which finds a home beneath the power button on the right. It lays flush with the side of the device, and I’ll elaborate on the functionalities further down. The Action Button remains on the left, above the volume rocker and lets me customise what it triggers. I can choose between silent mode, focus, flashlight, voice memos, recognise music and more. 

Display

The 6.3-inch OLED Super Retina XDR display is crisp and hasn’t seen many upgrades this year, except it can now be dimmed down to 1 nit of brightness. It means you can operate the phone at very low levels of brightness without disturbing others around you while they’re trying to sleep.

Rich, saturated colours and accurate hues on iPhone 16 Pro

Camera Control 

Before we talk about upgrades to the camera itself, let’s look at the most significant camera-related upgrade this year - the Camera Control button. With a recessed button placed where the user’s thumb would rest naturally, the Camera Control multitasks across functions. A firm single press-down opens up the camera app, a quick press-and-release snaps a photo, and a long press starts recording a video. Now, here’s the tricky bit. The button operates on a two-stop basis. A soft half-press triggers the zoom-in/zoom-out function, with swipes down and up respectively. Lightly half-pressing twice brings up options to tweak exposure, depth of field, zoom, cameras and photographic styles.

The half-way soft press and the full press down for the camera took me some getting used to. Regardless, I have to say I love the integration of this hardware button. Capturing photos and videos throughout the review easily became a smooth single-handed process for me.

You can also customise the functions for the button and have it open a code scanner or even a magnifier instead of the camera app if you so wish. 

Tech Specs

The Apple iPhone 16 Pro is built on the new A18 Pro silicon chip. The brand says it enables faster performance in general, along with more seamless gaming, improved camera capabilities, and quicker data transfer.

While Apple doesn’t share exact battery capacities, the iPhone 16 Pro definitely has a longer battery life than last year’s model. My usage involved photography, videography, browsing, Spotify, YouTube, and responding to emails. Even on days of extensive use, the battery levels didn’t drop below 25 per cent when my work day was done. Charging speeds don’t seem to have improved much. It still takes almost an hour for the device to charge fully. 

Camera

The iPhone 16 Pro comes with a 48 MP Fusion camera, a 48 MP ultrawide camera, and a 5x telephoto camera. Shots in bright sunlight were sharp, crisp and captured a ton of details. In low-light shots taken indoors, the camera still managed to capture shots, making it appear slightly brighter than in real life. However, the Google Pixel 9 Pro was able to deliver more saturated and accurate colours in the same frame. The selfie camera remains unchanged, and delivers some decent selfies, again provided the lighting is good enough. It also captures skin texture quite well.

You can also now shoot 4K videos @ 120 fps and the videos look super-smooth and stable. You can create some stylish slo-mo videos by tweaking the playback speed as well.

I shot a couple of videos on the iPhone 16 Pro, with a fair bit of background noise that came in the way of my voice’s clarity. Thankfully, there’s a new set of tweaks to get better audio quality from the phone. While editing the video, I could choose from Standard, Studio, In-Frame or Cinematic. Both Studio and In-Frame gave me the best results in terms of eliminating any background buzz or white noise.

Incidentally, the smartphone can also capture

Spatial Audio by default when recording in Video mode.

This is useful if you’re playing back a track with AirPods, Apple Vision Pro, or a surround sound system.

“The phone is also built for Apple intelligence, the company’s proprietary AI system. However, at the time of writing Apple Intelligence hasn’t landed on the devices.”

Verdict

If you love compact smartphones and have iPhone 13 or an older model, the jump to Apple iPhone 16 Pro would improve your experience significantly. The smartphone holds on to the brand’s innate strengths - excellent build quality, vivid display, great videos and photos - and builds on it heavily this year. The handy Camera Control, meaningful audio improvement options, and better battery life are sure to lure in those who’ve been on the fence about switching to the latest model.  

Price - ₹1,19,900 (128GB)

₹1,29,900 (256GB)

₹1,49,900 (512 GB)

₹1,69,900 (1 TB) 

Pros -Bigger display, premium build, feels lightweight, Camera Control button, better battery life

Cons -Selfie camera could have been upgraded, slow to charge