The iPhone 8 Plus has shipped out to consumers today and we have our unit in front of us. This is the base 64GB model in Space Gray that starts at $799. While the packaging is very Apple-esque, one thing to note is the embossed iPhone 8 Plus on the front of the box. It gives us a nice teaser as to what the iPhone 8 Plus consists of.
Inside the box, we’ll find the iPhone 8 Plus itself, earpods with a lightning connector, lightning to headphone jack adapter, a lightning to USB cable, and a USB power adapter with some standard Apple paperwork and stickers.
If you’ve already watched our iPhone 8 First Look, you’ll notice a lot of similarities with the iPhone 8 Plus. It, too, consists of a glass body that enables wireless charging, it has a dark grey tint to the back that contrasts the slightly darker black aluminum frame that wraps around the device. What you won’t see is any Designed by Apple in California text or FCC text here which we’ve seen in previous models so it looks very clean. The display measures in at 5.5 inches with a 1080p resolution. It does feature True Tone technology that will adjust the display’s color tones based on your lighting conditions to improve the viewing experience.
The iPhone 8 Plus runs iOS 11 out of the box. It’s an incremental update that brings a new files app, improvements to Siri and the Control Center among other things that we do look forward to demoing in a separate video. Performance is expected to be strong with the new A11 Bionic processor and 3GB of RAM. Benchmarks show an outbenching the Snapdragon 835 chipset and even giving some MacBook Pro configurations a run for their money.
The iPhone 8 Plus still has the same camera configuration: a 12-megapixel wide-angle and telephoto sensor and you can now record 4K video at up to 60fps and 1080p slow-motion video at up to 240fps, which is really impressive. One of the biggest new features with the iPhone 8 Plus is portrait lighting. It complements the standard portrait mode to let you add professional lighting effects to your photos but keep in mind that it’s still in beta and isn’t expected to work flawlessly.
Apple has made the speakers in the iPhone 8 Plus louder. Wireless charging is enabled thanks to the glass body. And fast charging is an option with a USB-C charger and lightning cable, which are both sold separately. Similar to the iPhone 8, the iPhone 8 Plus also has a smaller battery than its predecessor, the iPhone 7 Plus. There’s a 2675 mAh battery under the hood.
So this has been a first look at the space gray 64GB iPhone 8 Plus, which starts at about $800.
