iPhone SE review: Affordable and mighty powerful phone is a blockbuster hit

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The new iPhone SE has landed and it qualifies as about the best-value phone Apple has yet made. With a price of £419, it very nearly matches the lowest debut price for an iPhone, too. That was the original iPhone SE which launched in March 2016 for £359.

This is the first time Apple has recycled a phone’s name. The original SE (the two letters don’t stand for anything, by the way) matched the chassis of the iPhone 5s with a much newer, more powerful processor – the chip from the iPhone 6s. Since the processor is the most important component in a phone, having the most up-to-date one was remarkable.

The new iPhone SE follows the same process. The iPhone 8, first launched in 2017, is the body that’s used here, but the very latest A13 Bionic processor from last autumn’s iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro is waiting inside. The A13 Bionic is the fastest processor ever in a smartphone.

Not only does this mean the iPhone SE runs very fast, with the latest apps compatible and the most advanced games running smoothly, it also allows the camera to be way more effective than it was in the iPhone 8, even though the hardware is basically unchanged.

Apple says it is the most advanced single-camera system it has ever made – more powerful than the one in the iPhone XR (released in 2018) and currently priced from £629. If taking good photos is important to you, the SE is arguably the one you’d go for, and save £210 as you do.

The reasons for choosing the XR, by the way, would include an OLED display that’s bigger than the SE and covers almost the entire front of the phone, plus facial recognition features.

If you’ve ever seen the iPhone 8, then you know what this phone looks like. It is almost identical apart from tiny design enhancements such as moving the Apple logo on the back to the centre. This also means that, glass back apart, it’s similar to the iPhone 6, iPhone 6s (except this phone has no headphone jack) and iPhone 7. It’s what Apple would call a beloved design.

There’s a 4.7in LCD display with right-angled corners, not the curved corners to match the bezel found on the iPhone X onwards. There are noticeable non-screen areas at the top and bottom of the phone, with the front-facing camera at the top and the Touch ID fingerprint sensor in the Home button at the bottom. This is in contrast to many flagship phones where the display creeps right to the edges.

The display looks good, and you quickly forget about the blank areas. But it’s certainly a change, though as someone who routinely uses a bigger-screened phone, the biggest change in using the iPhone SE was how much smaller everything was, especially the keyboard. I’m used to the bigger screen and my fingers no longer seem dainty enough to type accurately and at speed on a small one, though it’s still usable. For comparison, I also tried typing on the original iPhone SE, which, with its 4in display, was just too small, now. And, let’s remember, the first five iPhones came with a smaller screen than that. How times change.

Apple routinely puts potent processors in its phones, but as subsequent hardware and advanced apps create greater demand, faster chips are needed. The fact that the iPhone SE’s processor is so much more powerful than previous iPhones – and the processors in any other phone, actually – makes the SE attractive. Not only does everything happen at speed, from opening apps to smooth video playback, it makes the hardware capable of much more.

The camera is a case in point. It’s actually the same camera, in sensor and component terms, that the iPhone 8 had in 2017. Apple didn’t need to upgrade the camera hardware to make its photographic capabilities better. That’s because so much of smartphone photography is now down to the software.

Battery life is good, though the huge leap forward Apple introduced with the iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro is not matched here. But it is easily enough to get you through a full day with no anxiety. Unlike the original iPhone SE, the glass back means this one is wirelessly rechargeable.

It’s not that the iPhone 8 camera was poor – it had a lot of strong features, but the addition of the A13 Bionic chip is transformational. Now, much more is possible.

Portrait mode, where the background is blurred while your subject is in sharp focus, wasn’t on the iPhone 8. Usually it needs two cameras shooting together to work out what’s the subject and what’s background. But from the iPhone XR onwards, and on some smartphones from Google, for instance, this effect is achieved in software.

Here, as on the iPhone XR, portrait mode only works for people, so gorgeous photos of pets won’t have that buttery defocused background. The A13 Bionic means it can do a very good job with people, and even allows you to adjust the level of background blur afterwards, helpfully showing you the aperture equivalent in the result.

You can also add special effects, like stage light which turns the background into the darkness outside the spotlight.

It also does something called semantic rendering. No, me neither, but it’s really about how the machine learning in the chip can take an image to pieces and rebuild it once it’s understood what’s in the frame, processing hair differently from skin, from eyes and so on.

There’s a danger when you rely on algorithms and computer chips instead of, well, great glass and studio lighting, for instance. If the programmers have got things even a tiny bit wrong, the results can be tragic.

Fortunately, the engineers at Apple who make these decisions are the most accomplished around. Much more importantly than that, they have exceptionally good taste.

This is the only iPhone to combine a single camera sensor and the A13 Bionic chip, so perhaps it’s not surprising the photos it takes are deeply impressive.

There are other features worth noting, from QuickTake Video where holding on the shutter takes video as well, Portrait mode on the front-facing camera, which also hasn’t been done this way on an iPhone before, and stereo audio recording on video.

But, as with other iPhones, it’s the simplicity of the camera that really makes it the one to turn to, handling all the decisions for you and, usually, making the right ones.

I’ve been comparing this new phone to the Apple iPhone 8: it’s no longer available because, frankly why would you want it? It cost £50 more and had a much older processor.

But, really, I should have been comparing it to the first iPhone SE. After all, that was the first iPhone designed to be super-affordable as well as mighty powerful, thanks to its then-current cutting-edge processor.

But while the first iPhone SE at the time was the right size to feel comfortable and easy to manage, now, it just seems tiny. The new phone, compared to most phones on the market, is compact without being titchy, and is a great fit in the hand.

The new iPhone SE is a world away from the first, with 64GB storage (the original had 16GB), that larger display, improved design and – above all – the fastest phone processor on the planet. Its lead-in price of £419 is amazingly competitive and will make it a blockbuster seller. Remember, this phone is £730 cheaper than the iPhone 11 Pro Max. That phone has a lot of extra features and a huge screen, but both phones share the same storage capacity and processor.

If you want the latest features such as Face ID, triple cameras and an all-screen front to your smartphone, well, Apple can oblige with its iPhone 11 series. But for many, that will be overkill.

If you want something compact, highly affordable but still every bit as speedy as the fastest phone money can buy, then the iPhone SE is hard to resist.