iPhone 7 Plus review. Is it still usable in 2023?

Hey guys, I’m Batuhan and I’ve been using an 128 GB iPhone 7 Plus as my daily driver since January of this year and in this post I’m going to talk about my experiences with it.

I actually wasn’t planning to get this phone. I was using my good old Galaxy Note 3 running Android 4.4.2 as my daily driver and I was happy with it. Becouse only thing I needed was a minimal phone that gets my job done and runs everything I needed. But this is topic of another post and in future I’m planning to make a review on that phone but I’ve lost the one I had at the earthquake and now I have to find one in working condition which isn’t an easy task. But hopefully when I found one, I’ll make a post about it too. Enough talking lets start with 7 Plus.

My Setup and usage:

I have a single page setup with all the apps and widgets I need becouse I want to keep this phone minimal and less distractive as possible. “Minimal and non distractive phone” I mostly use this phone for note taking over Evernote, reading the latest from the RSS feeds I follow using the NetNewsWire, taking some good looking photos using Camera, editing them on Lightroom and uploading to my Nextcloud server and spending some free time over social media apps like Instagram [yes I do use instagram becouse all my friends do and it’s the only place where I could talk to them] and Mastodon. And it does all of these tasks great with no problems. But there is a optimization problem with the Evernote app and it needs to be fixed. What I mean by that, the app runs perfectly fine when it’s offline but it lags so bad when I try to type something while it’s online. I don’t know what is the reason of that but this problem only exists with the iPhone 7 Plus and I hope they’ll fix it as soon as possible.

Battery:

Given at it’s age, this phones battery isn’t in the best condition. It’s at %74 and sometimes leaves me at half a day. But most of the time I go outside, I do keep my wirelles connections like LTE, WiFi and Bluetooth and that helps battery to stay for the entire day with no problem.

Camera:

Back in the August of 2016, when this phone has released. Dual camera of this phone was revolutionary. It was the first dual camera phone on the market and being able to shoot portrait photos with natural blur and video recording at 4k 30fps which was never seen on a mobile device like that before and created a very big hype that still controls the mobile phone market today. And I think that camera of this phone isn’t old yet and still be able to take great looking pictures under daylight. But when it comes to nighttime camera of this phone starts to struggle. Here is some photos I took with this phone to show the difference between daylight and nightlight.

My old iPhone 6 Plus

Portraits

As you can see from photos, light really creates a day and night difference both on portrait and normal photos. But I think that it does a better job than most of the 2016 phones under nightlight.

Final troughs:

So in the end, if you ask me that is this phone is still usable my answer is will be yes. Becouse since it haven’t lost it’s support yet every single app that you could think of still works perfectly fine over there and I never encountered any problems with the performance of this phone. So like if you want to get into Apple ecosystem and wanna start with something cheap or you need an iPhone for your little brother or an old member of your family so you can send iMessage or Facetime with them you can prefer this phone with no doubt. One of these on good condition like mine could last at least 4 years and I think that it’s enough for a phones life.

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Thank You!

Batuhan Yılmaz - 30.04.2023 - 13/100