So yesterday I tested out my iPhone 6S that I use for work versus the iPhone 7 that I have for personal use. I'm kind of upset and satisfied at the same time. I did a speed test with both of them. Performance was almost identical. In fact, there were a couple of occurrences where my iPhone 7 was a fraction of a second behind.
Another thing I noticed is the dim, yellow screen on the iPhone 7 Plus, compared to the iPhone 6 Plus. They said it was 25% brighter, but in many cases, I'm struggling to see the screen at all. The screen has actually turned out to be the worst part of the device, to me. If you try to keep it bright enough to see well all the time, you end up with iPhone 5S-like battery life. How can the colors be more accurate, when the entire screen is tinted yellow. It looks like an old AMOLED screen. It's horrible. The 6 Plus displays white on a webpage as white, almost flawlessly. Everything on the 7 Plus, is yellow tinted.
The screen is just so damn dim. The Auto-Brightness is extremely conservative, as well. I can shine a flashlight directly into the ambient light sensor, and it will still fail top out the brightness. I can't think of any "sunlight" that would cause the brightness to go any higher than what I can simulate in my office (two lightbulbs 3 inches from the screen + a flashlight beaming directly into the sensor). They seem to have a limiter in there, as well as an algorithm that forces the screen to stay as dim as possible to pad battery stats - even if it means you're searching for an angle to see the screen well, or taking off your sunshades because the screen refuses to go above 40% even on the sunniest of days...
The camera is basically not an upgrade from the 6S Plus. You get the Telephoto Lens, but the main camera is nothing but "somewhat brighter" in low light. This also brings with it the negative aspects of a wider aperture: Washed out daylight images (dull colors and overexposure), lens flares, halos, and light streaks in low light when a light source (street light) is directly in the frame... That, or the phone will try to control the light and the rest of the image will end up WORSE than an iPhone 6 Plus low light image. The 6 and 6S Plus did not have these issues. I had them both, and I still have the 6 Plus, so I can do side by side comparisons whenever I want.
Another thing I've noticed... Is that the image sizes on the 7 Plus aren't really much bigger than the 6 Plus. This means that Apple is applying higher JPEG compression on the 12MP devices than on the 8MP devices. This supports the reports people had when the 6S was released, where they noticed image quality dropping in some situations. In low light and mixed lighting, you can see the effects of the higher compression on the 6S and 7 Plus compared to the 6 Plus - and not in their favor.
I do like the new Home Button. I think it's great for usability.
However, I was on the road the other day and my iPhone completely froze up on me, for about 25+ minutes. Nothing I did could rectify it... I used to be able to hold down home and power and hard reset the device, but this doesn't seem to work anymore. My phone, was literally useless for half an hours... during the work day, because it froze up... While looking at the News app.
The camera supports RAW (DNG) Capture, but the DNGs are like 10MP, which means either it's not the greatest RAW Data, or they're using compression for the DNGs, which sort of flies in the face of using a RAW format to begin with. I'm going to veer towards the latter point, since it seems to be what they do with their JPEGs, as well. A comparable Android device spits out DNGs that are 50%+ larger than the iPhone's, at the same MP, and the RAW data (when loaded into Lightroom) seems to be of a higher quality. There are artifacts in the iPhone's DNGs that I simply cannot compensate for in post processing, particularly in mixed indoor and low light. These don't show up on other phones.
I struggle to think of any situation where anyone would be able to take better pictures using RAW on an iPhone, than they get out of a third party camera app shooting JPEGs. The amount of work to get anything that looks better, even by a tiny margin is too great to be worth it. It seems like a feature that was thrown in to check a box. The implementation seems rushed and extremely bad at this point in time.
I think they do this compression to not grief users who bought 16GB iPhones, but whose fault is it for selling such a device through 2016?