Apple announced the iPhone XS on September 12, 2017, as part of the tenth generation of its iPhone line. This is the highest-end version of the iPhone X series with a higher price than all the other devices of the same series.

The series also includes the standard iPhone X and the more expensive iPhone XS. While the iPhone X’s price starts from Rs 79,990 and the iPhone XS’ price starts from Rs 99,990, the iPhone XS Max costs Rs Rs 1,31,900.

Display

Like the Plus version in other iPhone series, the Max version is the largest of all, hence the largest display. The iPhone XS Max features a Super Retina OLED screen measuring 6.5 inches.

About the Super Retina display technology, this is an Apple-owned technology used for the iPhone X series. 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.

In addition, the device has a screen resolution of 1242x2688, a pixel density of 458 ppi, and the maximum brightness of 625 nits. That means the iPhone XS Max 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.

There were two problems with the screen of the iPhone XS Max. Firstly, it displayed green lines or burn-in, and secondly, it was unresponsive to the touch. The reason behind these issues varies, including failed software, a conflict between internal commands, damages on the screen, or battery. However, in most cases, you can solve this by resetting or forcing restart the device.

Apart from that, 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

Like the iPhone XS, the XS Max 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 the frame rate maintains at 60 fps all the time, sometimes drops to 57-58 fps. When turning on HDR mode, which displays more realistic graphics, the frame rate maintains at 40 fps. Impressively, the game didn’t lag at all during the gameplay.

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

The storage specifications of the XS Max is the same as those of the XS too, with 4GB of RAM and three options for internal memory, including 64GB, 256GB, and 512GB. This RAM capacity along with the A12 Bionic chip has resulted in a great gaming power for the smartphone.

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

The iPhone XS Max packs a 3,174mAh battery, offering more battery juice than the 2,658mAh battery on the iPhone XS. There’s also support for Qi wireless charging as well as 15W fast charging. It provides enough power for 16 hours of talk time and 65 hours of continuous music play.

This capacity, battery life, and the support for fast charging as well as wireless charging will surely last you for long gaming hours. Based on gaming tests, it’s estimated that the XS Max can last 5 hours of gaming on one charge. Then you can use the 15W fast charging to quickly get more power to get back to your games.

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/2.4, 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, as well as HDR mode.

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