New features on iPhone 7 and 7 Plus put to the test

New iPhones put to the test How good is the new iPhone camera? And are the phones actually water resistant? Consumer Reports put the phones to the test.

Apple’s latest iPhones continue to be hot commodities, and their upgraded features have been making headlines around the world.

The iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus are the first iPhones that claim to be water resistant. The phones are supposed to withstand being submerged in up to one metre of water for about 30 minutes.

“Our water immersion tests indicate that the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus passed, but we will continue to check them for functionality,” said Consumer Reports’ Maria Rerecich.

Apple also claims that the camera system in the updated phones significantly improve the quality of both the front- and back-facing cameras. But Consumer Reports found that pictures taken with the 12-megapixel camera were not much better than the ones taken with an iPhone 6 or 6 Plus. But tests did find there was some improvement to the iPhone 7 Plus camera, which has more megapixels on the “selfie” camera and a second optical zoom lens on the main camera.

“In our preliminary testing, we found the telephoto lens was sharper and had better overall image performance than the primary lens, but that primary lens was pretty comparable to previous iPhones,” said Rerecich.

The iPhone 7, iPhone 7 Plus and older iPhone 6 models all performed about the same in low light.

Apple has taken a lot of heat over removing the traditional headphone jack and replacing it with a lightning cable connection. Consumer Reports found that there was no significant difference in sound quality between the lightning cable headphone connection and the old headphone jack.

Consumer Reports is still evaluating the new phones’ voice quality for phone calls as well as battery life.