Apple iPhone XR is now official: LCD screen, Face ID, plenty of colors

Available in a variety of fresh colors, the iPhone XR looks a lot like the iPhone XS, with an edge-to-edge screen, Face ID, and a gesture-based navigation, but unlike the XS and XS Max, it only has a single camera on the back, and features an LCD screen rather than an OLED one.

Following the same design language as the XS and XS Max, the iPhone XR comes with a similar, modern edge-to-edge look with a notch. The XR has toughened glass up front to protect the screen, and Apple says it is the most durable ever used in an iPhone, while the frame in the middle is made of aluminum frame. The aluminum frame with its matte look is one of the obvious differences between the XR and the XS series, which use stainless steel with a glossy look.

In stark contrast with all other recent Apple phones, the iPhone XR comes in 6 vivid colors: white, black, blue, coral, yellow and Product Red. 

All the models come with a black finish on the front, but the red is the one really stands out from all the rest and is easily our favorite. Looking back at history, never have iPhone customers had so much color choice since the iPhone 5c!

The LCD display here is what Apple calls 'Liquid Retina' and describes as "the most advanced LCD ever put in a smartphone". It's a 6.1-inch "Retina" screen, so you get the same pixel density as on earlier iPhones, but since the aspect ratio has changed, you now have a resolution of 828 x 1792 pixels.

One compromise made here is that there is no 3D Touch, but instead you have haptic touch, similar to what Apple does on its MacBooks with ForceTouch trackpads, and this is what you use to start the camera or the flashlight from the lockscreen. It remains to be seen if other features designed to work with 3D Touch will be usable on the iPhone XR's display. You don't get the same high dynamic range colors as you do on the XS series, but you do have support for Apple True Tone that automatically adjusts the white balance of the screen to the ambient light.

Up front, the iPhone XR has Face ID and a True Depth camera, and they all work just as well as on the XS series. Naturally, this means that there is no home button here and you rely on the new gesture-based iOS interface.

Under the hood, the XR runs on the same Apple A12 Bionic chipset, the world's first 7nm CPU, which is the same silicon as on the more expensive XS and XS Max. This chip is a topic on its own and it really is a big step forward for smartphone productivity. Put shortly, it provides a 15% bump in performance, while at the same time drawing 50% less power. Both the CPU and GPU are Apple-designed, and the Neural Engine that was introduced last year is improved in a huge way to recognize patterns, make predictions and provide advanced, real-time machine learning on board.

On the back, you have a single 12-megapixel camera with a larger sensor, featuring larger and deeper pixels for better low-light photography. This is the improved main camera module that will be found on the iPhone XS and XS Max, only without the company of the secondary telephoto lens. The big feature here is that Apple has enabled Portrait mode with bokeh effect, even though the phone only has a single camera. This means that you'll be able to enjoy fancy portrait images with blurred backgrounds, but without the advantage of the closer lens with narrower field of view. In order words, your portraits will be less dramatic and in-your-face, but will still look quite good with an in-focus subject accentuated by a blurred background. Another new feature is that users will be able to control the amount of bokeh effect for each portrait shot from the Photos app.

The improvements in dynamic range translate to video as well, and you now finally have stereo sound recording on the XR. The front camera is a 7-megapixel one and in addition to regular selfies, it can also take portrait mode shots with the option to adjust the bokeh after you shoot the image.