iPhone SE 2nd Generation price, features & review

What is the iPhone SE 2nd Generation price? What is the upgrade? Next-generation Smart HDR for incredible detail across highlights and shadows. Cinematic-quality 4K video. And all the advanced features of iOS. Features A13 Bionic, one of the fastest chips in a smartphone, for incredible performance in apps, games, and photography. Portrait mode for studio-quality portraits and six lighting effects. Know details in iPhone SE 2nd Generation review.

Pros & Cons – iPhone SE 2nd Generation

FOR

• Lightweight frame
• Powerful chipset
• Fast A13 Bionic performance
• Very good cameras
• Compact design
• Supports wireless charging
• Good battery life
• Software updates for years
• Camera good in light and great at video

AGAINST

• Big bezels
• Lacks 5G
• No Night mode
• Shorter battery life than other iPhones
• No headphone jack
• Noisy low-light photos

Specs

• iPhone SE 2nd Generation price: $399/£419
• CPU: A13 Bionic
• Front camera: 7MP (f/2.2)
• Video recording: 4K video up to 60 fps
• Storage: 64GB, 128GB, 256GB
• Display: 4.7 inches (1334 x 750)
• Rear camera: 12MP (f/1.8)
• Fast charging: Yes via optional 18W adapter
• Size: 5.45 x 2.65 x 0.29 inches
• Water resistance: IP67
• Battery life: Up to 13 hours video playback
• Wireless charging: Yes (Qi)
• Weight: 5.22 ounces

iPhone SE 2nd Generation price

How much is iPhone SE 2nd Generation price? The iPhone SE is available now around the world including the US, UK and Australia. The release date was April 24, 2020, with pre-orders going live the week before.

Although it was rumored to be called the iPhone SE 2, the iPhone SE is the official name that Apple opted for for its 2020 device. You won’t see it referred to as the iPhone SE 2020 on Apple’s website – that’s just our way of distinguishing it from the 2016 device.

iPhone SE 2nd Generation price – Apple store

In the US, Apple is offering the new iPhone SE at $16.62/month through its financing plan or, if you have an older iPhone to trade in, you can get it for less.

Trade in your old device when you buy the iPhone SE, and you could get as much as $120 off your new phone, lowering the price to $279. You can also check out the best iPhone SE deals to see if there are additional savings available.

The iPhone SE is available through all of the major carriers, including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon, as well as other carriers including Xfinity Mobile and Visible.

iPhone SE 2nd Generation price in other countries

The iPhone SE 2nd Generation price starts at $399 / £399 / AU$679, which is a slight price drop in some regions from its launch price of $399 / £419 / AU$749 / Rs 42,500. The base model comes with 64GB of storage, with 128GB and 256GB models also available for a higher price.

The 128GB model costs $449 / £449 / AU$759 while the 256GB one costs $549 / £549 / AU$929.

Compare iPhone SE 2nd Generation vs iPhone 13 Pro Max

iPhone SE 2nd Generation review

Design

The 2020 iPhone SE measures in at 138.4mm tall by 67.3mm wide, it’s 7.3mm thick, and it weighs 5.22 ounces. The back of the iPhone SE houses a single-lens rear camera, a microphone, and an LED flash.

On the left side of the iPhone SE, there’s a mute switch and volume buttons, while the right side features the sleep/wake button. The bottom houses a Lightning port and speaker holes, and like prior iPhones, there is no headphone jack so Bluetooth or Lightning headphones are required.

The bottom of the device features precision-drilled speaker holes, two screws and a Lightning port. 

Bezel

It comes with thick bezels at the top and bottom of the device. The top bezel features a cutout for the front-facing camera, speaker, and accompanying sensors, and at the bottom of the device, there’s a Touch ID Home button covered in sapphire crystal.

Display & brightness

The iPhone SE appears to feature the same 4.7-inch display that was used in the iPhone 8 with a resolution of 1334 by 750 with 326 pixels per inch and a 1400:1 contrast ratio. Based on our tests, the iPhone SE’s display reproduces 111.2% of the sRGB color gamut, which just barely beats the 105.8% from the Pixel 4a’s OLED panel. The iPhone SE delivers accurate colors, too, achieving a Delta-E score of 0.2; a score of zero is perfect. The Pixel 4a’s screen scored 0.29.

A13 Bionic Chip

The big change with the iPhone SE 2020 (and we don’t use the italics lightly there) is the upgraded engine from the iPhone 8. While the external design is nigh-on identical, Apple has supercharged the insides, with an improved chipset running the show.

That extra power is designed to allow the new iPhone SE to rival the iPhone 11 range in terms of speed when flipping between apps, and editing snaps and video, and should also improve the camera performance (thanks to upgraded computational power from the new chipset).

To get more specific, it’s a 6-core CPU that more than doubles the speed compared with the first-generation iPhone SE. There’s also a 4-core GPU that’s four times faster than the GPU in the original SE. That Neural Engine is made up of 8 cores. All of these work in unison to handle tasks and power iOS on the iPhone SE.

Camera

the iPhone SE camera is basically using the same set of lenses, and megapixel count, as the iPhone 8, with a 12MP camera, a six-element lens and a sapphire glass cover for strength.

The front-facing camera, a 7MP affair, has also been given smarter capabilities: you’re able to take the aforementioned portrait mode pictures, meaning the background blurs away and you can arrest the world with only your dazzling features.

The quality of the images is good – they’re sharp and clean, and even look decent in low-light too. Apple has applied its photography algorithms well here, and improved the capability of the front-facing camera to take smooth, well-lit photos.

HDR tech

The iPhone SE also supports Smart HDR, which can happen automatically when you snap a shot with no extra processing time. Essentially, this HDR technology recognizes different parts of the scene. If you’re shooting in direct sunlight, it can make sure the photo is still backlit but not overexposed, while maintaining a clear shot of your face or a group of people. You can also capture burst shots, panoramas and portraits in addition to a traditional photo. 

Portrait mode

Portrait Mode is really impressive with just one lens. But it only works for shots of people, so you can’t take photos of cute dogs or inanimate objects (like prized Legos). But once you have a person detected, you can see the bokeh take effect. And you can switch between Portrait Lighting effects: natural, studio, contour, stage, stage mono and high-key mono. 

Recording in iPhone SE 2nd Generation at this price

You can shoot in up to 4K at 60 frames per second. There is cinematic stabilization throughout and with an extended dynamic range which helps to get clearer and more detailed videos. We didn’t experience any motion blur or unwanted artifacts. It will also record audio in stereo. You can see a gallery of photos and videos shot on the main 12-megapixel lens below.

Audio

The iPhone SE delivers stereo playback with enough volume to fill a living room with sound. There’s even a hint of bass, which opens the soundstage and reduces distortion during complex tracks.

Listening to lo-fi hip-hop beats, I noticed a depth of sound that I don’t often hear in a midrange smartphone. It sounds like an older Oontz speaker I frequently use, though the iPhone SE’s maximum volume is much lower.

Touch ID

Although Apple has offered Face ID on all of its newer phones for the past couple of years, the new iPhone SE 2020 uses a Touch ID sensor underneath the display for unlocking the device. This same sensor can be used for authorizing App Store downloads, Apple Pay and entering passwords.

EarPods

Apple has put its EarPods in the iPhone SE box, which use the phone’s Lightning connector in place of the 3.5mm headphone jack, but those who already have wired headphones that they’re happy with will need to spend $9 / £9 / AU$15 on an adapter. Otherwise, you could use a pair of wireless earbuds.

Wireless connectivity

The iPhone SE isn’t a 5G phone. Apple has been slow to embrace 5G, and the tech hasn’t filtered down to this price point yet. This makes little difference to me, and most buyers, because 5G availability is limited. As far as I know, I’d have to travel more than 250 miles to get a 5G signal.

This is a dual-SIM device, which can be useful for travelers, and is a bit surprising given the phone’s price. The iPhone SE supports Bluetooth 5.0 and the Wi-Fi 6 standard.

Battery

The iPhone SE is rated for less battery life than the the iPhone 11, so you shouldn’t expect the longest endurance. For instance, Apple says that the iPhone SE delivers 13 hours of video playback, versus 17 hours for the iPhone 11.

On the Tom’s Guide Battery Test, which involves continuous web surfing over 4G LTE, the iPhone SE 2020 averaged 9 hours and 18 minutes. That’s well below the endurance of the iPhone 11 (11:16), iPhone 11 Pro (10:24) and iPhone 11 Pro Max (11:54). The iPhone SE did, however, best the Pixel 4a, which scored a mere 8:55.

In my anecdotal testing, I found that the iPhone SE does have less staying power than my iPhone 11 Pro Max, as it has a smaller battery. For example, after unplugging the iPhone SE at 7 am and using it for web surfing, playing games, taking photos and more throughout the day, I had 20% juice left at 8 pm. That’s not bad, but my iPhone 11 Pro Max still had close to 40% power.

iPhone SE 2nd Generation Performance review

Those benchmark scores saw an almost identical single-core (for low-impact tasks) score of 1300 for the iPhone SE, and 3100 for the multi-core test. That’s less than the 3500 for the iPhone 11 Pro range, but not far off the standard iPhone 11.

All the benchmarks we ran painted a similar picture, proving that the iPhone SE 2020 doesn’t have the raw grunt of the Pro range, perhaps designed to provide the most battery life possible.

You can see the same thing on the iPhone 11 vs the iPhone 11 Pro – small differences in benchmark scores, likely in a bid to make sure each experience is tailored to different target users. 

On Geekbench 5, which measures overall performance, the iPhone SE scored 3,226 on the multi-core test and 1,337 on the single-core portion. Those numbers are comparable to what the iPhone 11 (3,251 and 1,331) turned in. They also beat the Galaxy S20, which scored 3,147 and 867 and costs $600 more.

The iPhone SE performed very well on real-world performance tests, too. It took the phone just 43 seconds to transcode a 4K video to 1080p after applying a few edits in the Adobe Premiere Rush app. That result actually beats the pricier Samsung Galaxy S20, which took 1 minute and 15 seconds.

iPhone SE 2nd Generation Customer reviews

Coming from Android

Unboxing: nothing special here the box contains the phone, a charger, sim removal tool, charging cable, wired headphones.

Set up:
Coming from a Flagship Android device I thought it would be a very tough task to transfer data from my Android to this Iphone SE second edition. I was wrong!
once I started the iphone it asked me if I want to get my data from another device and gave me the option of transfer from Android.
asked me to download an app called MOVE TO IOS. I downloaded the app and then followed the instructions and the transfer started wirelessly and took about an hour or so.

I restarted the phone, created an Apple ID, added my fingerprint, and went about to install my apps and import my Google accounts, and downloaded the latest IOS updates.
Restarted the phone again and started using the phone.

Experience:
The phone is very snappy and fast, although you will notice some tracing while scrolling menus due to the lower refresh rate but the phone performs very very well and I can say that with this price point, nothing can beat this hardware and software Experience:
The IPhone SE 2 has the latest A13 Bionec Chip, an OK screen size and quality, and a very nice camera compared to other phones in this price range.

Build Quality and design:
The build quality is solid. it took me less than 3 hours to drop the phone from the table on hardwood floor flat on its screen. I thought the screen was shattered. I was wrong again.
the design is very similar to the IPhone 8 with its rounded edges and the silver frame with a glass front and back.
although when tapping on the screen with my finger nails, it feels more plastic than glass compared to my other phones.
the power button is located on the right side, and the volume rockers are located on the left side.
this phone does not have stereo jack and instead uses a lightning port (Thanks Apple!), and dual stereo speakers at the button of the phone.
this phone still has a physical button on the left side above the volume rockers to switch to silent mode if you want to. and the sim card slot is located on the right side under the power button.
the finger print touch is located in the center of the screen at the buttom.
the phone has a double chin that measures about a half inch at the top and buttom. and the screen size is 4.7 inches (usable but would love bigger one for sure).
The phone is perfectly balanced and feels good in your hand even if you have a smaller hand. it doesn’t feel lightweight and cheap but it doesnt feel and look like a flagship either.
the frame of the phone is made of metal.
the camera has a slight bump, and has a single camera on the back with a sensor and a flash. the camera app has Portrait, panoramic, slowmo, time- lapse, video, photo out of the box.
you can change the quality and size of the photos and videos and you can record videos of up to 4K with 60 frames per seconds which will cost you a hefty 400MG per minute of recording.
after setting up and importing the necessities from my other phone I was left with less than 20 GB of the 64GB this phone comes with. not much considering i am just done with setup and havent actually used the phone yet. but you can always upgrade to the 128 GB version of this phone.
Battery life:
after using the phone with everything on out of the box I was able to get about 9 hours of continuous use and wast still left with 37% battery life. not bad considering that the phone has wireless charging capability and comes with a fast charging cable (but not a fast charger!).
Sound quality:
the sound quality of this phone is OK, not great but its just good. the same goes for the included wired headphones. you can use them for sure, but we all know you are going to upgrade to those nice wireless pro’s.

final thoughts:
The IPhone SE 2 is a great cheap smart phone in the $400 range for any IOS or Android user.
the A13 Bionec chip is the latest and fastest IOS chip to date, its the same chip used in the flagship Iphone today.
the smaller screen with the less refresh rate and the older looking design are not deal breakers considering you are getting the same flawless experience from Apple.
I switched from Android to Apple for a few reasons:
1- there are apps I need for work that are not available for Android (these are custom made Apps that I need in my day to day work)
2- Security features: although Android has great customization capabilities, but security is still and issue. Apple is superior when it comes to protecting your privacy and security.
3- Some gimmick features that I see everyone around me love and use like Facetime, and impressions in Imessage.

finally, I would totally recommend this phone for anyone who wants to buy an affordable phone with great features and support that will last at least 3 years from Apple. this phone is also a great entry to IOS for anyone coming from Android family.

Last point: if you are an Android user and want to make the switch but afraid that your most valuable apps wont work, rest assured that everything from Google is available on the apple store even Google Authenticator. if you are missing some of Apple features with Android, you can make this leap of faith and will be happy with this purchase.

By Akk1 at Best Buy

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