By Aaron Jiang ‘23
Ever since Steve Jobs reinvented the smartphone back in 2007, the industry has seen some unprecedented growth over the past decade. Nowadays, there are many more smartphone brands than ever. However, the two most iconic brands to Americans are Apple and Samsung. This year in 2019, they have both once again presented to the world their latest state of the art smartphones.
Among all the models released, the two eye-catching flagships are the Apple iPhone 11 Pro Max and Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus. These two smartphones both possessed unimaginable computing power and cutting-edge technologies. Now the question begs, who’s better, and which one should you buy?
Apple released the iPhone 11 Pro Max in Sept. 20. This iPhone is gorgeous as usual with the new triple camera setup this year. However, that’s still not enough to be considered as a major upgrade from last year’s iPhone XS Max. I figure the specs of this new phone will redeem itself, hopefully. When it comes to smartphones, I think that the most important thing is the screen and display technology.
Good news for you Apple fans, Apple has claimed that their iPhone 11 Pro Max this year has the best display in the world. Hold on there, Apple: now that’s a very bold claim. They called their new screen technology the Super Retina XDR OLED display. Basically, they said that it has the brightest display ever in a smartphone. To be precise, the brightness can reach 800 nits with a peak brightness of 1200 bits. Personally, I think that is something impressive. Especially, when you are using your phone under bright sunlight. It also contains a screen resolution of 2,688 by 1,242 pixels or 458 ppi(pixels per inch). Apple has always been a big layer in the software world.
This year’s iphone is optimized with Apple’s IOS 13. The new chip that powers the new iphones is the 7 nanometer A13 Bionic Chip. Apple’s A-series chips is said to be very powerful. Year after year, it has been able to defeat Samsung’s benchmark scores. The snapdragon-series just can’t keep up. Despite all those improvements, the biggest selling point of this year’s iPhone is the triple camera setup.
They are the only design changes over last year’s phone anyways. All three of them are 12 megapixels, with the function of wide, ultrawide, and telephoto respectively. They can record up to 4k 60 frames per second. The front facing camera houses Apple’s true-depth sensing camera technology, which is also 12 megapixels. This phone can go up to 20 hours of video playback, which is a huge improvement of battery from last year’s iphone. It’s also rated as a IP68 water resistance device, which means that it can go up to 30 minutes under a 4 meter deep water. The price for this year’s iphone stays the same: starting at $1099.
Samsung released their latest and greatest Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus a few months prior to the new iphones. It is considered to be a few months older,but the technology is not behind at all. With the biggest screen ever on a smartphone, Samsung’s 6.8 inch Dynamic Amoled display contains a resolution of 3040 by 1440 pixels. It also houses one of the most powerful chips in the industry, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 with a whopping 12 GB of RAM!
However, due to Apple’s perfect management of their 4 GB of RAM, the iphone is still neck and neck with Samsung despite the big difference in RAM. It contains three lenses of camera on the back with 12 MP wide, telephoto, and a 16 MP ultra-wide respectively. The front facing camera is a 10 MP. They can shoot up to 4k at 60 frames per second just like apple’s.
One thing that this phone includes but apple didn’t have is the indisplay figure print sensor. Like Apple, this phone is rated at a IP68, but can only go down 2 meters into the water. This phone comes with better colors than the iphone in my opinion:Aura Glow, Aura Black, Aura Blue, and Aura White. The price for this phone is the same as the iphone, however for that price you will get 264 GB of storage compared to Apple’s.
In my opinion, this year’s iPhone is as expected with the same design. Despite the specs and me being an Apple fan, I will prefer buying Samsung’s latest not only because the colors are better but the designs are fairly more sleek than Apple’s. The iPhone have had that design with the infamous notch since 2017. It’s outdated!
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