Design and display
As you may already know, the iPhone SE looks identical to the iPhone 5s. If our review unit didn’t come in the new Rose Gold colour, it could’ve easily been mistaken for the iPhone from 2013. We are no fans of antenna lines that feature prominently on the bigger iPhones, so this is one vintage design we have absolutely no complaints about.
Performance
The iPhone SE is powered by the same Apple A9 chip that’s inside the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, and it also features 2GB of RAM, though you won’t find any mention of that on Apple’s website. As you would expect, the phone handled everything we threw at it pretty comfortably. The iPhone SE seemed to work better in low signal areas than the iPhone 6s and the iPhone 6s Plus, but other than that the overall experience was pretty similar to the iPhone 6s.
The iPhone SE also comes with slower Touch ID, which may bother some, but it’s actually a good thing in our book, as we found the fingerprint scanner to be too fast for its own good, something we documented at length earlier. The iPhone SE also lacks a barometer, which, amongst other things, is used to accurately track how many flights of stairs you have climbed, and is present in iPhone 6 and later models.
The difference users may notice the most is that the iPhone SE comes with a 1.2-megapixel f/2.4 front-facing camera ( or FaceTime camera as Apple likes to call it) , compared to the 5-megapixel f/2.2 in the iPhone 6s. As you would expect, the images captured by this camera lack detail, though the difference may not be visible unless you are viewing them on the big screen. The camera does support Retina Flash, which is easily one of our favourite features of the iPhone SE. Live Photos are supported as well. ( Read our review of the iPhone 6s for more details on Retina Flash, Live Photos, iOS 9, and a few other features common between the two phones.)