I totally agree with your point of view, comparing SE and Mini every one can say what is worth off expect you are serious fan of mini, and saving those extra dollars for ipad is much sensible decision is it!!
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iPhone SE (2022) Well, I went with the SE 3 over the 13 Mini
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Agree, apple can’t keep this design around forever, they’ll have to change it sooner rather than later.
🤔
Seriously there is no reason to get the SE3, it’s literally a phone from 2014 for heavens sake with a faster chip
The mini is a beautiful and thoroughly modern and feature rich device
Couldn’t you have just borrowed the extra £200 from a parent or partner or friend, or just saved up for a bit longer.
I suggest they change it when they have actually improved upon it. IMO, none of the notched phones are an improvement. Each of the so-called improvements comes with annoyances or disadvantages.
You’re hurting my feelings now, I love the notch. ?
Don’t notice the notch when I’m using my phone, non issue for me.
I can see why people love the SE, small, Touch ID, cheap price in some countries.
There is also a lot of people asking for a larger screen SE with a refreshed design.
Reason why apple hasn’t made it happen yet, they know it will eat into their flagship iPhone sales
I wear pants, and I take my phone to the office and carry it around in my pockets. I don't know how people stuff the huge, heavy phones into their clothing and maintain any kind of comfort. It's just absurd. Actually I see very few people at the office carrying the large phones.
Truth be told, I'd like a phone smaller, lighter, and thinner than the SE.
My old, plastic Blackberry 8520 was the most reasonable phone I've ever carried, and it was indestructible, too.
Truth be told, I'd like a phone smaller, lighter, and thinner than the SE.
My old, plastic Blackberry 8520 was the most reasonable phone I've ever carried, and it was indestructible, too.
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Sure there is a reason to get the SE3 over the Mini 13 (or any other giant phone) TouchID and size!
The SE3 is the only option available till they’ll bring back TouchID and small sized phone (rumors says no more Mini…).
Size? The mini has smaller dimensions/footprint! Also TouchId is outdated technology and the vast majority of its advocates are people who have never tried Faceid, which is a far more secure, elegant, modern, natural and generally better solution
In your opinion!
I have the SE 2020 and the 13 pro and much prefer touch id for a few reasons.
Because my opinion is different from yours does it mean I'm wrong?
Of course it doesn't.
The iPhone 8 was a flagship product when it launched.
The trick is reviewers and online posters will try to convince you it's 'mid-range' haha. A midrange iPhone with an A15? Aluminum and glass build on both sides?
It's an inexpensive flagship.
The trick is reviewers and online posters will try to convince you it's 'mid-range' haha. A midrange iPhone with an A15? Aluminum and glass build on both sides?
It's an inexpensive flagship.
Sadly, pockets in female clothing tend to be smaller/shallower than the ones in male clothing. My dad's jeans can easily fit an iPhone 11 in Otterbox case. Meanwhile, my jeans pockets can barely fit the iPhone 5/5s.
Good thing air conditioning is at full blast in the office all the time since I need to wear a jacket to have a large enough pocket to carry the SE2.
I wouldn't say that putting a high end chip and glass front and back constitutes it being a flagship.
I feel this is extremely subjective. Overall I don't mind the notch, but I won't miss it at all if it ever goes away. It annoys me to all end that it takes a chunk out of the top (or side) of whatever you are viewing on the screen.
I would much prefer the screen ended at the notch and the area to the sides was reserved for time, connectivity, battery, etc. That's just my opinion though, barely worth the time it too to express it ;-)
I'd hardly call Face ID a "Fail"...but Touch ID was and is perfect both in reliability and in user interaction. Face ID did not maintain that perfection. I've found both Touch ID and Face ID to be reliable at what they do, but Touch ID has more things it does a little better, in terms of user interaction. What do we ask each of them to do?
UNLOCKING THE PHONE
Touch ID: Place thumb on home button (can do that without looking). Press (or raise) to wake, leave thumb where it is, and you're at the home screen.
Face ID: Touch screen or raise to wake. Ensure Face ID sees your face, which is not difficult but not automatic; while the True Depth camera does have a very wide field of view, it is not 360 degrees. Then swipe up from the bottom to get to the home screen.
This is one of the two places where Face ID falls significantly short of Touch ID. You might consider the Touch ID interaction to be two steps (press button, hold thumb on button) but in practice they are essentially one step, as you do not have to move your thumb. And you could have the home screen up before you even set eyes on the phone.
IN-APP AUTHENTICATION
Touch ID: Place thumb on home button.
Face ID: Nothing
Here is where Face ID shines. It's very likely that I'm already looking at the phone when it comes to simple authentication within an app. I don't have to do anything. There are some apps that won't do Face ID automatically, they require you to tap somewhere to confirm you would like to use Face ID each time; the same is true for Touch ID, however.
APPLE PAY
Touch ID: Place phone near reader. Rest thumb on home button.
Face ID: Double-press side button. Ensure Face ID sees your face. Place phone near reader.
This is another place where Touch ID is just better. The process is fluid. Just the act of pulling the phone out of my pocket already puts my in a physical position to do the job. I do look at the screen to monitor progress, but I have to do the same with Face ID, to make sure the transaction goes through. This whole process is still in place for using Apple Pay within an app: I still have to double-press the side button. Again, with Touch ID, the standard hold already has me in position to authenticate. I find it clumsy on Face ID. I not only have to get used to new holding position but also a new set of muscle CONTRACTION: I need to not only touch the side button but double-press it.
GOING TO HOME SCREEN
Touch ID (home button): Press home button.
Face ID (gesture): Swipe up from bottom of screen.
This isn't a comparison of Touch ID to Face ID, but it is a comparison of home button to gesture interface. The home button is a physical target, and again, it's in a location where your thumb just could rest normally, without stretching or reaching: it's not only the phone's home button, but it is essentially your thumb's "home location." It's a place it naturally goes.
The swipe up from the bottom of the screen has an advantage in that it's a big target (I can swipe up from any part of the lower edge), but it's a place I have to reach for. Now, I'm generally a two-handed user, I always have been. At least half the time I am going to swipe up with my opposite finger. But with the home button I never ever have to use the other hand. It's just right there.
ACCESSING THE APP SWITCHER
Touch ID (home button): Double-press the home button
Face ID (gesture): Swipe up from the bottom of the screen, with a brief pause at the end
This has the same dynamics as just going to the home screen, BUT I often accidentally reach the app switcher when I intend to go home on my Face ID phone. As my muscle memory improves it's getting better, but it still happens a lot. It's not a tragedy but it is frustrating. To be fair once in a while I would double-press the home button too rapidly and I would get to the home screen, but that happened WAY less.
And what's more, because the two natural swipes from the bottom are taken (swipe, and swipe-and-pause), that meant that the previous result of that gesture (accessing the control panel) had to be moved; now there are two swipes from the top that achieve different things based on where you swipe. That's a downgrade. Swiping from the bottom for control panel and from the top for notifications was easier, without thinking.
I understand that Face ID makes possible the full-screen experience. I'm on a 13 mini, so the screen isn't all that much bigger; I imagine that the extra real estate is much more noticeable on the larger phones. And it's also fair to suggest that this is a matter of muscle memory. But I never had to worry about muscle memory with Touch ID. It was natural, it worked with how my hand wanted to work the very first time I held an iPhone, way back in 2008.
You may like the edge-to-edge screen a lot and I wouldn't dream of telling you you're wrong. But we had to throw away things that worked to get it, and replace them with things that work, but less well.
Besides just the wonderful experience of first interacting with an iPhone at all, there have been two experiences that just knocked my socks off in the history of the iPhone. One was the jump to a retina display on the iPhone 4. The difference was so drastic, so amazing, that the very next moment when I looked at my 3GS, the screen was garbage. It's truly the only time I've felt that way about older tech. In an instant, it was insufficient.
The second was Touch ID. It was and is brilliant. It added biometric authentication, and shortly thereafter phone-based payment, without asking me do to anything different than I was already doing.
Excellent compare and contrast!
I find the more I use Face ID in different environments, the less I like it. For reference, I have my phone paired with an AW which in theory should take over if Face ID fails. I find this to be extremely unreliable and last weekend, for example, I missed several photo opportunities at my daughter's track meet. Between the direct sunlight, my hat and sunglasses, Face ID failed three out of four times easily. My AW picked up the slack occasionally but more often than not it was paralyzed and unresponsive for seconds causing me to miss the shot. I never had these issues with Touch ID.
Face ID has a lot of potential, it just isn't mature yet. I do like the extra real estate it enables onscreen though, I'm not wanting to go back, just want FID to get better.
I find the extra real estate (if there really is any at all) comes at a significant cost of (1) the stupid notch, which effectively takes away some of that real estate, and (2) the fact that your fingers gotta go somewhere, so they often obscure some of that "extra" real estate.
Those bezels are actually darn useful as places to put your fingers when holding the phone.
Another issue with the supposed extra real estate of the notched phones: it's vertical real estate, not horizontal, and I don't really need that. I prefer the horizontal real estate of the traditional plus phones for reading. That's what I need for everyday utility. The only notched phones that equal the traditional plus in width are the max phones, and they're so damn large, thick, and heavy that their downsides outweigh the regained width.
I'm fortunate to have not experienced such a negative experience with Face ID as what you've described, but that's circumstancial: it definitely doesn't work when I'm wearing sunglasses, but perhaps I don't wear them as often as you do. I also have an Apple Watch, and I also found that its unlocking was not fully reliable, but mine sounds like it was much more reliable than yours has been, say 80-90% successful.
What I wonder is what can be done to improve it? Because I think most of its weakness is the loss of the home button itself, I'm not sure it can be improved in its current form to get to Touch ID's level. But I do hear two ideas all the time: one is to have Touch ID on the power button, like on some iPads; the other is to have an underscreen fingerprint reader. I think the power button solution is a non-starter, since so many cases would simply cover the power button. I'm not sure Apple would want to go into the engineering to make that work just so three out of four users couldn't use it.
An underscreen fingerprint reader makes me shake my head at first. Part of what makes the home button so great is that you can locate it by feel with virtually no effort. How would that be possible with an underscreen reader? Sure, muscle memory could take over, but if the sensitive area feels just like the dead area of the screen...I don't know. UNLESS...there is no "sensitive area". Unless the entire screen functions as the fingerprint reader. In context, when the phone needs biometric authentication, just hold your thumb ANYWHERE on the screen to read your fingerprint. In fact, there could be some implementations where it is localized and some where it is not. Or localize it anywhere you want. How about letting developers localize their fingerprint reading area wherever they like on screen? This was part of Steve Jobs' original keynote: with software you can redraw the whole screen, put buttons where you want. Then it could be that it will read your thumbprint anywhere to wake up. No extra swipe, just press the home screen and hold for a second and bam, you're at the home screen!
I haven't thought this through a lot, so there may be unintended consequences that need to be corrected for. But this seems a good start towards fixing Face ID's main weakness (that is, its main weakness so long as you find it reliable at doing its job).
I agree with you on each of these points. When I went from my SE 2016 to my SE 2020, the increase in screen real estate was really noticeable, because as you point out a lot of the increase was horizontally. From the SE 2020 to the 13 mini, I find it a wash. I wanted to be really blown away by the edge-to-edge screen, to say, "Wow, now I see why it was worth it!" but I don't.
I haven't had the experience of accidental touches, but I can totally see that happening, depending again on muscle memory. We each probably have our own way of gripping the phone, all the way down to how much our fingers curl around the edges. But I have noticed this: when I am tapping on targets at the farthest reaches of the screen left to right, I more often miss them now. Especially if the targets are meant to tap-and-hold. Muscle memory, again, perhaps: I am used to the "edge of the screen" being so-and-so far inside the edge of the device. Perhaps that will improve with time. Frustrating until it does.
I don't want to give the impression that I'm turned off by all of this to a huge extent. Touch ID is better than Face ID, and I miss it...but I find Face ID OK despite that. Just not as good as Touch ID, which is perfection. Same with the screen size: I find it a wash, while I had hoped to find it a real improvement. The notch doesn't bother me, so that's not an issue. But there are two areas that affect me every day where the 13 mini is very much an improvement on the SE 2020: the camera and the battery life. The battery life difference is just unreal, and that's even on the mini and not the full sized phones. So I don't intend at this point to trade the mini back in and get an SE 2022...but anyone asking me which they should get I think they can't truly go wrong with either, just evaluate the priorities on features and let that lead you.
I'm starting to like the SE series because of how angry people that have the $1,000+ iPhones get. 🤣
Here's how Samsung's budget phones compare to iPhone SE 3- 9to5Mac
Samsung announced the Galaxy A53 and Galaxy A33 budget phones today. How do they compare to the iPhone SE 3?
9to5mac.com
It's not the price. I bought a 12 mini on a whim and I probably own more iPads than a single person aught to (and GAS is kicking in with the Air 5). Alas, the 12 mini's OLED display gives me migraines so back to old tech it is.
Until they stop using PWM on OLED, I expect I'll probably upgrade every time Apple releases a smallish phone that still has LCD. That way, I get relatively up-to-date specs (performance-wise) when they eventually go bigger + all OLED.
That's US$1300 so pretty much normal pricing for the 13 Pro series.
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Surprised these OLED display manufacturers aren’t taking PWM seriously, it affects 1 in 10 people.
Is it even possible to make a OLED panel without PWM?