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Mike asked: “I heard a lot of good and bad reviews about the iPhone 7 Plus. I’d like to know what you think. I have a Droid and thinking about getting an iPhone.”
Mike, the iPhone 7 Plus is a fine phone. No complaints about any major defects and it’s a fast phone with a very good camera with 2 lenses (one wide, one tele), and it’s water resistant.
What you may not like about it is the lack of a headphone jack, though that complaint seems to have disappeared after the phones actually hit the market, maybe people don’t actually care after all. And, it doesn’t have a pen, like the Samsung Notes do, if that’s something you’re after.
Other than that, it’s a worthy flagship. Coming from Android you’ll know the operating system is different, but it’s intuitive and you won’t have trouble understanding it.
The iPhone 7 Plus screen is brighter than the earlier iPhone models, with a better color reproduction, but it’s still no OLED screen. If you put it next to a flagship Samsung phone, it’ll look washed out.
The battery life on an iPhone 7 Plus is ridiculously good
As for that missing headphone jack, yes it’s a pain if you want to listen to headphones and charge the phone at the same time, but that won’t happen often. The battery life on an iPhone 7 Plus is ridiculously good. Even when we’ve done a lot of video streaming, which is the most battery intensive thing a phone can do, we can’t get the battery below 50% after a full day of use. So it’s going to be really rare that you need to charge the phone while plugging in headphones. If you do, there are inexpensive adapters you can buy that give you two Lightning ports instead of one.
The biggest thing about the iPhone 7 Plus, aside from its dual lens camera, is the speed. It is an extremely fast phone. Most synthetic benchmarks say it is the fastest smartphone on the market, although Google’s Pixel ranks very high as well. And that’s our final note for you on this matter.
If you’re an Android user and comfortable with that, the Google Pixel XL, in terms of its hardware AND its operating environment, is every bit the equal of the iPhone 7 Plus. It truly is a “pick ‘em” choice and you should take whichever one will be easier for you to use. We’ve had these phones side by side and there’s never been two pieces of consumer electronics so equally matched when competing.