The surprising thing about the iPhone 17 Pro that I love
I review phones for a living, so I know the iPhone isn't the best on the market – but I fell for it anyway for one unexpected reason
I’d be lying if I said that Apple makes the best smartphones for photographers. They don’t. It’s probably Xiaomi that does, maybe Samsung. But – and sorry, for all the iPhone haters – there’s just something so pleasingly ‘nice’ about iPhones. Don’t worry, I hate myself for saying it too.
Almost certainly the best phone I’ve used in the past year for photographers was the Xiaomi 15 Ultra, and that’s the one I’d tell you to buy if you were asking for me an objective opinion. It’s great, with a one-inch type sensor which really delivers the goods.
But these pages aren’t for showing off what is the ‘best’, it’s for talking about our favourites. I’m choosing the iPhone 17 Pro because it’s the first review I did after having my new daughter, and becoming a parent to two children under two – it’s not for the faint hearted!
What I did not expect
Image-quality-wise, it’s pretty much the same as the last one. Such is the life of a phone reviewer. But, there’s a feature which I didn’t expect to like. In fact, when I heard about it at the keynote, I scoffed. The new selfie camera sensor is square, meaning you can take vertical or horizontal pictures without having to physically rotate the phone. Instead, you simply tap an onscreen button to rotate the view from portrait to landscape format.
‘Why would I need to do that?’ Yeah – I thought the same. But it turns out, it’s quite useful. Especially when you’re trying to wrangle a child (or even two) in one hand and hold the phone steady in the other. Who knew?
I expect now that Apple has taken this step, we’ll probably start to see the feature roll out on other phones (and yes, I know, it’s usually the other way around with these things). In this case, it really is a genuinely useful thing – once you’ve got used to never having to rotate your phone again for a horizontal selfie, you may even find it a bit weird if went back to a phone that doesn’t have it.
So there we have it, from scoff to actually quite impressed – not often in life you can say that is it?
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Amy Davies
