Apple has also ratcheted up the
screen’s maximum brightness in
typical use, from 625 to 800 nits.
(The maximum HDR brightness
remains 1,200 nits.) I wasn’t hugely
conscious of this change, but then I
never found it necessary or desirable
to push up the brightness on the 12
mini. As before, this simply seems
like a very bright, sharp, colourful
and vivid display that does the
job of pretending not to exist: it’s
supposed to be a transparent window
into a digital world rather than a
design element in itself, and almost
universally achieves this.
Note there’s no ProMotion: that’s
the screen tech in the 13 Pro and
13 Pro Max that adjusts the refresh
rate depending on the requirements
of whatever the phone is doing at a
given time, in order to
produce silky animation
when necessary while
preserving battery life on
other tasks. You can read
more about that in our
iPhone 13 Pro review.PHOTOGRAPHY
I took the 13 mini out
for a series of real-world
camera tests, comparing
its performance with
that of last year’s 12 – which it should
obviously surpass – and the iPhone 12
Pro, which it also beats, according to
an impressive report from DXOMark.
We started with the now-traditional
test of Smart HDR: shooting a subject
with the sun directly behind them.
(This is generally a terrible idea
that you should try to avoid, simply
because of the complex lighting
demands it places on your camera
and the overexposed skies and
underexposed subjects that will
frequently be the result. But there
will be occasions when you can’t
help it, and in any case the yearly
improvements in phone cameras
have become so small that we
have to push the devices into ever
more difficult scenarios in order to
demonstrate them.)If you look closely, you’ll see that the iPhone 13 mini’s
notch is narrower than the 12 mini’s.