iPhone SE 2020 in 2021. Is it still any good? By Tech with Andrei

Hello everyone and welcome to my channel for everyone. That's new here. My name is Andre. I'm a tech enthusiast and I do tech videos for a hobby with the biggest focus coming on valley for money gadgets, because well guess what having tech gadgets for hobby can get pretty expensive, and today we're going to take a look at a device that I think, is great value for money, but it may be getting a little long in the tooth, namely this guy here, the iPhone SE from 2020. Now this phone is still on sale, brand new from apple, and it represents the cheapest way to get into the iPhone lineup. So basically, this is apple's third iteration of a cheap phone built specifically to fit into a lower price point.

Their first attempt was the rather horrible iPhone 5c, which is poorly remembered by pretty much everyone, but apple turned it around founded winning formula in 2016, and this successor in 2020 follows the exact same formula almost to a t, what's apple's formula in this case: well, basically, they just go through their parts. Bin put together components from previous premium offerings in their lineup, sell it for a much cheaper price than initially available and profit, and the formula for the SC 2020 is rather surprisingly simple. They took the external body of the iPhone 8 and matched as much as possible from the iPhone 11 into it and called it. The sc2020, however, when a manufacturer usually launches a mid-range or entry-level smartphone for their lineup set phone in question is usually filled with compromises, because, most often it's designed to a price and not necessarily to spec. So today we're going to break up the major categories that make up a smartphone, and we're going to see just how many compromises did apple have to do here and, furthermore, does this make the phone pretty much a compromise overall, or is it still worth it one year later in 2021? And, let's start off with the design, the design of this phone is absolutely fantastic, and it's one that I'm a huge fan of absolutely love it from day one because it's built within the body of the iPhone 8.

The feel and finish is absolutely fantastic. It comes with a glass back and a very premium feeling overall, also it's on the small side compared to most other mainstream phones, and I have to say in my past two months using it as my main phone. This did end up feeling rather refreshing. This is decidedly a one-handed phone that feels absolutely great in the hand. Apple didn't cut any corners here whatsoever, and it feels absolutely amazing now on to the performance.

The performance is also absolutely great, as this phone carries much of the internals of the iPhone 11, namely the a13 chip and one less gigabyte of ram at just free. That may not sound great, but in reality the jump from the a14 to the a14 is actually not that shocking, with benchmarks, showing relatively small differences between the two. What all this means is that the performance on tap here is absolutely amazing. The phone will not lag in day-to-day usage in any sort of way and will be fast enough for most users. I won't cover gaming in great detail here.

I think the phone works well for gaming, but it's not really a great fit for that. Due to the display here, things start falling apart a little while using the components of the iPhone 8 is a great idea and a very successful one. The display is one of the categories that suffers apple, tries to hide the small size of the display using these black bezels, but as soon as we turn it on, we can clearly see that this is a very, very small display. Overall, it's basically a 4.7 inch diagonal display that has a 65.4 screen to body ratio, which is pretty much below every modern phone out there. Today.

I don't want to say that the display is terrible, but it's clearly one of the worst aspects of this phone. This is basically the same type of display technology as we can find in the iPhone 11, but just at a smaller scale. The quality of the screen is similar to the iPhone 11 in terms of brightness and pixels per inch. However, just like the 11, the SE only has 60 hertz refresh rate and uses an IPS LCD panel, which is not ideal in this day and age, but still, I think, it's actually quite okay. For day-to-day viewing, we come to the biggest downside of this phone overall, the battery there's no way around this one.

Unfortunately, the battery is tiny with only 1800 Williams on tap. This means basically 40 hours of screen on times or less. In my usage, I've not been actually using it that much lately as it's no longer my main driver, but still the battery life is pretty meager, no matter which way you look at it. The phone will struggle mightily to get you through a day and if you're on your phone, a lot for messaging media emails calls and that sort of stuff. This is basically a half a day battery.

You can work around the diminutive size of the battery by having a charger close by or charging it in your car when needed, making sure it's topped up throughout the day, but it's still not going to be fantastic and the worst part of it all is the fact that well guess what phone batteries degrade over time, and here you're going to feel the effect a lot more than let's say in a larger battery phone simply put because you already have a small capacity to begin with. Whenever that capacity starts getting smaller, you will absolutely feel it in your day-to-day usage. The only silver lining that I can think of is that, due to its size, the battery will at least charge relatively fast, there's also support for fast charging, provided you have a charger that supports it and again this is sold separately by apple and also supports wireless charging, making it a bit more convenient as well, oh and in true apple fashion. This one that I bought because I bought it used, and it was a 2020 model- still had the 5 watt charger in the box, but critically 2021 models, new that you can buy new today won't have one in the box included anymore. This is one of the things that I hate for apple.

I mean I understand that you move the charger from the box from the latest model, but why remove it from the base models as well? Next up we have the camera, and here the news is actually not bad at all. You see my use case with the phone has been really odd. To begin with, when I began this channel, I wanted to use my iPhone to film all the videos like I do still today. However, at the beginning I had an iPhone 11, which had only 64 gigabytes of storage, and that was wholly insufficient, so because of that, I started to look for cheap alternatives to do 4k filming on an iPhone, but which had to have 128 gigabytes of storage or more, and I was able to pick up the SC 2020 for about 300 to 350. I don't remember the exact price and I used it for the better part of three months to film pretty much all the videos on my channel, so the rear facing camera in terms of filming is actually pretty good for photography.

Similarly, the camera does a good job, taking above average photos in good lighting conditions, even though it's using an older sensor, it pairs that, with the a13 chip for quite good results, the biggest drawback that I have with DSE in terms of camera tech is not the absence of a second sensor, though definitely that would help, but the absence of any form of nighttime photography. The a14 is capable of it, but I think apple held back a little here. Now we get one of the best-selling points of this phone overall, which is the software. If you like, or want to try out iOS this little guy here has you covered it's basically a 450 phone that has the exact same software experience as the thousand dollar plus iPhones in the range. The biggest selling point, though, is the fact that, in terms of software support, if you want to hang on to your phone for a good three four more years, this little guy has you covered, I'm thinking it's going to get three or four software updates from this point on in terms of iOS upgrades.

Remember that its predecessor, the iPhone SE from 2016, is still up-to-date and also has the same version of iOS as this model. So the software front is actually one of the strong points of this phone. Now, some miscellaneous stuff worth mentioning. It has ip67 water and dust resistance. It can be submerged to the maximum one-meter up 30 minutes, which is pretty good.

The speakers are also quite good. In my experience, it uses the earpiece like every other phone and here on the bottom, even though you apparently have two speaker grilles, there's only actually one speaker here on the right, and they're, actually quite good in terms of connectivity. It doesn't have 5g, which I don't miss, that much at this point, but it may be a problem in the future and last but not least, is touch ID which, in these mask wearing times, has been a blessing in disguise. I mean it's been amazing. To use it, it's actually pretty fast, as you can see, as usual touch ID has always been among the fastest fingerprints sensors out there as usual.

The caveat applies. Touch doesn't work very well when wet so yeah. You need to be careful that your hands aren't wetter, or you're not wearing gloves, but it is remarkably fast and still as reliable as it's ever been. Now we have conclusion time. I think this little phone here is absolutely amazing, and it's actually great value for money being a bit of a hidden gem in apple's lineup.

Well, if you can call a phone that sells in the tens of millions in the gym, would I recommend this phone if you are a hardcore gamer or someone who wants the best and greatest phone? Definitely not, but if you're, tired and spending more than a thousand bucks on a phone and just want a cheap, no-frills experience that actually works, pretty well is going to have you covered for the next two three years or more, then the iPhone SC 2020 is still a fantastic blind with that being said, as usual, thank you for watching. If you've enjoyed the video, please consider giving it the thumbs up and subscribe to my channel. That would mean the world to me. Thank you again, and I will see you next time.

Source : Tech with Andrei