The News18 Tech And Auto Awards 2018 witnessed some serious competition for the Smartphone of The Year category, perhaps the most exciting category among all. The contenders for the throne included the Apple iPhone XS Max, the Google Pixel 3 XL, the OnePlus 6T, the Samsung Galaxy S9+ and the Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro. In the end, after some very serious deliberations, the iPhone XS Max emerged as the undisputed smartphone of the year.
The iPhone XS Max, the largest ever iPhone, runs what is known as the A12 Bionic chip, succeeding the A11 Bionic chip from last year’s iPhone X. This is a 7-nanometer architecture chip, and this is quite a rare sight in the world of smartphones. The A12 Bionic is 15 percent faster than the excellent A11 Bionic, consumes up to 40 percent lesser battery at the same time and the gaming as well as graphics performance is up to 50 percent faster than before. The iPhone X was already a fantastic performer, be it for gaming, multitasking, running Augmented Reality (AR) apps and even 4K video editing. All this translates into what is perhaps the biggest performance leap one has ever experienced in an “S” generation iPhone evolution. It will in-fact be a travesty of justice if we were to start counting how many apps we can run before we witness the first hints of a performance stutter.
The biggest performance boost is perhaps reserved for the neural engine for artificial intelligence algorithms. The A11 Bionic chip could do 600 billion computations per second, and we thought all along that it was fast. The iPhone XS Max’s A12 Bionic can perform as many as 5 trillion computational operations per second, which also benefits the Face ID facial recognition feature—face scans are certainly quicker than in the iPhone X, and we noticed this is even better in low light. While the iPhone X mostly refused to authenticate you if you were looking at the phone at an angle, the iPhone XS Max does seem a bit more flexible in that regard.
The party piece of the iPhone XS Max is the large 6.5-inch OLED display, which has been labelled as Super Retina. Compared with last year’s iPhone X’s screen, this has 60 percent more dynamic range. The simple result is you’ll be able to distinguish even finer colours—great news for photo editing, though you may not notice the difference instantly. The contrast ratio has been improved as well, which means blacks look considerably darker still, which has a positive impact on how all the other colours look. This screen supports the Dolby Vision and HDR10 high dynamic range (HDR) standards.
The dual 12-megapixel cameras now advantage of the new image signal processor, will work with the neural engine to do facial detection and implementing tweaks depending on the frame you have clicked. Apple claims it can do a trillion operations in every photo. The best part is, you don’t have to do anything at all with it. In terms of the photography performance, the great camera combination of the iPhone X, has now become even better. Apple has added a Smart HDR feature, which will take multiple images of the same frame in the background, at different exposures, and merge them together in the final image to give better detailing of moving subjects, imperfect lighting or a more accurate representation of a complex frame. The magic lies in the fact that you do not see or have to manually control any of this, and all this happens in the background without user intervention.
The Tech and Auto Awards are India's first and only Technology and Automotive Awards, brought to you by News18.com. Over the years, technology has changed our lives and most importantly our mobility. Thus, at News18, we see Technology and Automobiles as an extension of one another. After a stupendous first edition we returned with the second edition of the awards, which were bigger and covered even more genres of technology, as we salute the best of Technology and Automotive innovations in 2018.
Comments
0 comment