Apple announced the iPhone XS on September 12, 2017, as part of the tenth generation of its iPhone line. This is one of the two higher-end versions of the iPhone X series with a higher price than the standard version iPhone X.

Announced alongside the iPhone X were the higher-end iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max. To compare, the price of the iPhone X ranges from Rs 79,990 to Rs 99,990 depending on variants, while the iPhone XS is priced at (Rs 99,900) and the iPhone XS Max costs up to Rs 1,31,900.

Display

The iPhone XS comes with a Super Retina OLED display that measures 5.8 inches, a resolution of 1125x2436 pixels, a screen-to-body ratio, and a pixel density of 458 ppi. Besides, it features a top-notch design. All of these specifications are exactly the same as the iPhone X.

About the Super Retina display technology, this is an Apple-owned technology used for the iPhone X. While the OLED technology offers the most accurate colors in the industry, the Super Retina tech results in incredible contrast, along with high brightness and a wide color gamut that meets the cinema standard.

The phone sports a long notch on the top of the display that houses the front-facing camera and speakers for calls. This design is the same for all the X-series devices as well as the iPhone 11 series. Apple was the first to apply this design, quickly followed by other phone makers.

Besides, with the pixel density of 458 ppi and up to 625 nits of brightness. That means the iPhone XS offers a top-quality viewing experience. Its medium-sized screen combined with a high pixel density and resolution allows for very sharp images. Furthermore, it features up to 120Hz frequency of touch-sensing, so swiping, navigating on the screen is really smooth, which gives you the real premium feel on the hand.

The most common problem with the iPhone XS display is its unresponsiveness, meaning sometimes, the screen doesn’t turn on when you press the Home button.

Apart from that problem, there aren’t any troubles using the screen, especially in gaming. With an average refresh rate of 60 Hz, it handles gaming graphics very well with barely any lag.

Overall, the iPhone X assures an amazing viewing experience for both videos and games. It offers great sharpness, contrast, high brightness, smooth graphics, and fast touch sensing for navigation no matter if you’re using an app or playing a mobile title.

Chip

While the standard X version packs the older A12 Bionic processor, the XS is given the newer A12 Bionic chip. This is a 7nm hexa-core processor that consists of dual 2.5GHz Vortex cores and quad 1.6GHz Tempest cores. It also features a 4-core Apple GPU for graphics.

The A12 Bionic offers 40% more energy efficiency compared with the A11 Bionic while its GPU offers 50% more graphics power than its successor.

With this chip, the experience is clearly better than that on the standard iPhone X, including navigation to photo editing. Plus, this chip helps the iPhone XS handle intensive games much faster, such as PUBG Mobile and Clash Royale.

On Antutu, the A12 Bionic achieves 290462 points, which is significantly higher than the A11 (213600 points). But this score is not really high and just comparable with the Snapdragon 845 processor.

In gaming tests, it appears that the A12 Bionic has no trouble loading games and you can opt for the highest settings with ease. Overall, the gaming experience on the iPhone XS is great and smooth as you may expect and there aren’t any frame drops that you can notice, remaining at 60 fps all the time.

Nevertheless, the device heats up quickly and gets very hot after a short session. Though this doesn’t affect the performance overall, it can drain the battery faster and make the phone irritating to hold on the hand. The good news is you can reduce the temperature on the phone by lowering the settings. Indeed, testing with PUBG shows that without the highest settings, you won’t experience any heating issues on the iPhone XS.

Storage

Regarding storage, the XS features 4GB and three variants of onboard memory, 64GB, 256GB and 512GB. This RAM capacity along with the A12 Bionic chip has resulted in a great gaming power for the smartphone.

The RAM and ROM capacity on this handset is also larger than that of the standard iPhone X for more processing power. There is a heating issue as we mentioned above, it’s recommended that you don’t choose the highest settings if you’re playing in a hot environment to reduce the temperature of the phone during gameplay.

Battery

In terms of battery capacity, the iPhone XS packs a 2658mAh battery, featuring support for Qi wireless charging and 15W fast charging that can juice up 50% the handset in half an hour. Testing shows that it can last 14 hours of multimedia and up to 60 hours of music play for you. Its endurance rating is 72 hours.

This capacity, battery life, and the support for fast charging as well as wireless charging will surely last you for long gaming hours.

To compare, the battery is larger and seems to last longer than the iPhone X’s battery, and it should.

Like with the iPhone X, the heating problem during gameplays is most likely due to high graphics settings and the overloaded processor with intensive titles. So, there shouldn’t be any serious problem with this.

Camera

For photography power, the XS houses a dual-lens rear module, which includes two 12MP cameras, one of which is for wide-angle photos and the other is for the telephoto feature with an aperture of f/1.8 and f/2.2, respectively. The camera array is supported with a Quad-LED dual-tone flash and enhanced with HDR, panorama modes. With these lenses, you can also record videos at 4K or 1080-pixel resolution with frame rates of 24/30/60/120/240 fps, depending on the resolution.

Apart from that, the device also has a 7MP front-facing lens on the front with an aperture of f/2.2 as well as a 3D bimometric/depth sensor for phone unlocking and better selfies.