iPhone 16 series review: A camera built to give you control

If you’re looking to upgrade to a new phone this year, the iPhone 16 series is built to last. Apple has redesigned the internals, added stronger glass to the front and back and squeezed in a larger battery to help you make it last longer throughout the day without needing to charge.

Oh, and the extremely cool camera control button everyone is talking about—yeah, it’s on the regular iPhones this year, too. It’s not often that the Pro and non-Pro iPhones all get flagship features in parity, but this year, the regular iPhone 16 and 16 Plus get a host of camera improvements, the potential for Apple intelligence later this fall, and last year’s flagship hardware feature—the Action button.

There isn’t as much to separate the pros from the regular iPhone 16, which is good for you if you want to save some money and get a phone in a fun colour. Last year, my thesis when testing the iPhone 15 Plus was that it’s Pro enough for most, and this year, I’m doubling down.

WTF is a camera control?

Camera Control is Apple’s name for the new touchpad/button on the right side of the iPhone 16 series. It’s placed for your index finger to use as a shutter button for photos and videos, but because it’s also a touchpad, and Apple loves to go above and beyond, it can do a lot more.

To use it effectively, you need to understand the real ways to interact with it. The first and most straightforward is to just ‘click’ the button down. If your phone is locked, this will wake it up, and once it’s awake, it will launch the camera very quickly with a rather nice animation. Once you’re in the camera, click it once to take a photo or hold it to take a video.

You can also ‘swipe’ on it while in the camera app to do things like zoom in and out, adjust exposure or play with the new Styles and Tones (more on that later). The most hidden of the three gestures is a soft ‘press’ where you apply pressure to the button to open the Camera control menu. Once you get the hang of this one, it’s super easy to use, but it does have a bit of a learning curve since you need to get used to the right amount of pressure to put on the button to differentiate between a click and a press.

All the gestures work really well and, in typical Apple fashion, are fairly well thought out, but adding some haptic feedback to help people with poor eyesight navigate the rather small contextual menu would be really helpful. I also think making the camera control a little longer on the side of the phone would make it easier to swipe along and it might fit more hands perfectly. The only real personal gripe I have is that I wish I could reverse the scrolling direction of the Camera Control like I can with my Mac trackpad to make it better match my camera lenses.

Ok, does this make my photos better?

Not exactly, but it allows you to open the camera with lighting speeds, making you less likely to miss your shots. What does improve photos a lot are the new Photographic styles and the ability to control Tone.

Tone is the less flashy of the two features, but when you control it you can basically add shadows back into your photos, allowing for much more dramatic shots compared to previous years where the iPhone camera focused on capturing bright HDR photos with minimal shadows. If you were ever frustrated with how little contrast iPhone photos had in the past, this option remedies it. You can access tone right from the Camera control menu or edit in post.

Photographic styles are refreshed this year to come at the end of Apple’s photo processing pipeline, letting you change them after the fact. In previous years, when you applied a style, it was baked into a photo forever, but this year, you have control over everything in the editing room, and it’s really fun. I’ve been using the Amber style with a little extra tone added to bring my shadows back, and it’s kind of like the ‘Rich Contrast’ style from previous years, but with some added warmth. That said, after editing all my review samples, there are areas where all the styles shine, and the ‘Stark Black and White’ option is really impressive in HDR on the iPhone screen.

So, to answer the question – does this make my photos better – yes, but you need to take a little agency to dial in the look you want. This might seem annoying at first, but you can set a default in the settings app once and forget it if you want. But because you set it, you get to make it look like you want. You’re not relying on Google or Samsung to know what’s best for you or your skin tone, you get to decide, and in the end, that means each user can get the perfect results for them, instead of something more generalized.

The final camera upgrade is the ability to use the Ultrawide camera to take macro photos and this has been super fun. You can get insanely close to your subjects, making photos of small things like bugs pop in a way the base-level iPhones couldn’t do in the past.

A new chip that’s ready for AI and next-gen mobile gaming

Because of the impending Apple Intelligence AI updates coming in October (and more after that), Apple has skipped the A17 chip series and jumped the iPhone 16 right up the A18 and packed in 8GB of RAM. In practice, this means the camera is really fast for a smartphone, and games run great on the device.

Since I’ve been working on a few reviews this week, I haven’t had much time to put my feet up and really dive into a game. However, one of my old favourites, Hello Kitty Island Adventure, had some hiccups on the iPhone 13 Pro when my girlfriend Alex and I played it two summers ago, but it ran like butter on the new Phone 16. This new chip also means that you can play console games like Assassin’s Creed: Mirage and various Resident Evils. 

The ability to play these games was launched last year with the iPhone 15 Pro as a flagship feature, but now that the regular iPhone 16 has the power to support them, I’m hopeful more games will come to Apple’s mobile platform. The iPhone 16’s GPU benchmarks at 27,423, whereas my iPhone 15 Pro only hits 19,554, so the new phones are quite a nice leap forward in the gaming department.

At launch, the phone does not have AI features, but notification/email summaries, the camera clean-up tool, and a few more will be available with iOS 18.1 sometime in October. Expect a separate story on the MobileSryup homepage, breaking them all down around then. That said, I’m speculating that since Apple decided to pack this phone with such powerful hardware this year, it suggests that it plans to support future AI features on this phone for a few years to come.

How’s the battery life?

The regular iPhones don’t have the best battery life of Apple’s phones. That crown goes to the Pro iPhones, specifically the super long-lasting iPhone 16 Pro Max. However, over this review period, Alex and I have been pushing the phones really hard, taking tons of photos and videos with them, and if you plan to power use your phone, I’d recommend the larger 16 Plus, which we found lasted roughly three hours longer than the regular iPhone 16.

On our main day of shooting sample photo and video content, the iPhone 16 Plus lasted from about 6:30AM to 3:30PM,  while the regular iPhone died a little after noon. That said, these tests weren’t super scientific since we were using the cameras constantly, which takes a much bigger chunk out of the batteries than a normal day of use.

The next day, I was tied to my desk writing content, so I used my iPhone 16 Plus more sparingly, and it lasted from 11am Monday to 4pm on Tuesday. None of this is to say that the iPhone 16 battery is bad, it’s definitely better than the iPhone 15, but if you want to worry less about battery life, the Plus model will last longer.

Final thoughts

There is a lot to love about the iPhone 16 Series, and these are some of my favourite features in rapid fire.

• Great speakers that get super loud.
• The colour accuracy and brightness of the screen is great. Only 60Hz if that bothers you, but it’s locked at 60 and I find it to be more than good enough.
• Fun colours this year, including the Ultramarine blue that’s really growing on me. The insides of the USB-C ports are colour-matched to the phone, too.
• No yellow or orange this year 🙁
• These phones are super light and comfortable to hold compared to the weighty Pros.
• Apple frames the camera as a Fusion camera, but it only lets you crop-zoom into 2x. No 28mm or 35mm default modes like on the Pros.
• Camera Control to wake the large iPhone 16 Plus from sleep is quite handy.
• I’d recommend getting an Apple case this year since they have a capacitive button that works great with Camera Control.
• MagSafe is still one of the best iPhone features

Is this the iPhone for you? Probably

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This is Apple’s most well-rounded iPhone in years, and ideally, it will get even better over the next few months with the addition of Apple intelligence. That said, what’s in the box is better than ever, and subtle improvements like the larger battery and the stronger screen should go a long way to helping your phone last longer.

Other improvements like last year’s Pro iPhone Action button and this year’s Camera Control are great additions, and now that I’ve used Camera Control, I don’t want to go back to a phone without it. By combining that with the new Photonic Engine, most people should be able to make their new iPhone work just how they want it, and I love that.

At this point, the only pro features I really want on the regular iPhone are the Always On Display and the 35mm default camera lens option, but for most, those are just nice to have upgrades and don’t add much to the iPhone experience.

All of that said, if you plan to upgrade your iPhone this year, I’d really recommend getting the 16 series. It’s tough to recommend products based on future upgrades, but the power jump of the A16 to the A18 chip alone should help the iPhone 16 get support for longer than the 15 or 14, and it should also get new software features since it has all the hardware to accept them. Again, I don’t know this for certain, and sometimes Apple will only bring some software features to new phones (looking at your 35mm default Fusion camera), but since the company decided to add the A18 and camera control to the iPhone 16 and didn’t make them Pro only, suggests to me the company is planning years ahead with the iPhone 16.

The iPhone 16 comes in Teal, Ultramarine (blue), Pink, Black and White, and the regular size starts at $1,129, and the iPhone 16 Plus starts at $1,279. Both phones start with 128GB of storage.

• – Product photography by Alex Arellano