I'm also really excited about this. A lot of people have been distracted by a single issue and are missing some really nice features of this phone.
Beyond the secure enclave, if the haptic home button is anything like the new trackpads, it'll be an amazing feature. One less moving part to break. And the cameras...wow. Finally decent depth of field on the camera that's always in my pocket.
Verge is giving the haptic buttons a big thumbs down:
"Another thing I tried: the new home button, which uses a "taptic engine" to give you physical feedback when you press it — it's pressure sensitive too, so it can tell if you really mean to press it or just tap it. And it's awful. On a MacBook trackpad, you get this uncanny feeling that you're actually hitting a button. On the iPhone, the whole bottom of the phone just sort of "kicks." It's not bad haptics like you remember, with weird vibration, it's just a new kind of bad haptics. It doesn't feel like a button at all. It's a bummer."
The Verge is not a source to be taken seriously on any Apple matters. Remember, this is a news website who's Editor-In-Chief had a temper tantrum on twitter after being called out on his poor criticism [1].
If it was praise, I would take it with a grain of salt, but the verge has typically been very apple biased in their reporting.
Generally I just try and steer clear of it these days.
Hopefully anandtech put something out in a while.
Finally decent depth of field on the camera that's always in my pocket.
Recently I upgraded to the Samsung Galaxy S7. It was about $400 and it has an incredible camera; far better than my old iPhone 5s, and it looks substantially better than the iPhone 6/6s photos I have seen. Plus, it has a headphone jack, microSD support (so nice to be able to upgrade), and a really beautiful screen. Yes, Samsung installed some bloatware but some of it is actually useful (their UI for toggling radios is quite good) Android Kit-Kat is solid. To me, this was Android's first reasonable phone.
I had an S2, an S3, and an S4. After trying each one for a month, I reverted to the respective iPhone. Trust me I've tried. I'm sure the S7 is great, and maybe it is the first "reasonable" phone from Samsung, but I have yet to use an iPhone that I didn't like. I have used 3 Samsung phones that were laggy and loaded up with garbage apps.
That's weird, my work phone is a Samsung S7 Edge and my personal phone is an iPhone 6S. The photos on the iPhone look so much better.
The photos on the S7 look like they have been edited with a filter, like on Instagram. The colors don't look like the colors I see when I'm looking at the thing I try to capture. The iPhone does a better job at that.
You know it's not very helpful to come into a thread about thing X and say "Well I bought thing Y and I like it a lot." This thread is about thing X. (This goes for people coming into an iPhone thread to endorse their Android phone as well as vice versa.)
The grand-parent implied that DoF phone cameras aren't available, but they are. That was my main point. The other stuff was because, well, I was frankly surprised at how good the new Android phones are. I suspect that a lot of iPhone users might not care about Android hardware enough even to consider that it might be competitive. And yet, it is.
I think it is absolutely valuable to talk about products in the context of their environment. It happens all the time with software products here; someone will say "Slack makes this change" and people will say, "oh we use X because of Y feature".
Sorry, my comment was ambiguous. I meant "simulate a shallow depth of field". As you noticed, all smartphone cameras naturally have a very deep depth of field.
Seriously? It's theoretically impossible with a such small camera. When you shoot a portrait of someone at 1.5 meters from the camera, is the background blurred (if the background is let's say 4 meters behind the subject)?
You're right. From 1.5 meters away, there is only a slight blurring of the background. I was mostly referring to the insane bokeh I see in macro photos I take.
Yes, I known what "bokeh" is :-) This is why I was surprised you could get bokeh at a normal range with your smartphone. For macro photos, even with a smartphone, it's inevitable. Thanks for the link to the article.
I guess this is pedantic, but clearly the haptic actuator is itself a moving part.
I take your meaning though, and that there is reason to hope it will work better than the mechanical button. And even if the feedback were to fail, the button might keep working.
Beyond the secure enclave, if the haptic home button is anything like the new trackpads, it'll be an amazing feature. One less moving part to break. And the cameras...wow. Finally decent depth of field on the camera that's always in my pocket.