Reviews page

The iPhone 17 Pro

Absolute beast. So, I have to admit, I am biased here. I bought the phone off of a dear friend of mine who sold it to me at a really "low" price (I am a firm believer that more than ~€450 for a phone is outrageous, but I couldn't let this offer pass...).
I bought the phone at half the buying and retail price. This *will* influence my perception and ultimately this review of the product. 100%. Idc.

That being said, let's get down to business.

Cameras

I'm starting with my favorite thing about the phone. The cameras are just amazing. The 48 Megapixels on ALL 3 main cameras really make a difference. It allows you to have so much playroom when taking out the phone and start composing the scene how you want it.
You do not have to worry about zooming in or out, because you will get virtually the same quality at all millimeters of zoom. This is such a difference compared to my previous phone (Samsung S23), where zooming in ment losing too much quality, especially in lower light conditions.

Low light being mentioned I'll turn to that, the camera (I'm just gonna refer to it as singular) acts well in these conditions.
I had the opportunity to test it in an area where the stars could be seen without problems at night, and with the night mode had no problems capturing the stars and elements of the land-scene too. This being said we are still talking about a phone camera, meaning you cannot expect it to perform as well as a mirrorless camera with all the right equipment - but still, I was left impressed by its performance.
I'll try to insert some snippets/pics of the mentioned scene in here. When I remember and can be bothered to heh

Battery life

The battery life was something I needed to be good. Coming from a refurbished phone I unfortunately did not have a good experience before and had to charge my phone multiple times a day. I can say the iPhone holds up pretty well. I use it to its full potential all the time, I do not use Low Power Mode on a normal day and have the display refresh settings turened up to the max all the time. This is something I am NOT willing to sacrifice, especially on a "Pro" phone with a $1200 price tag. I can say that the battery gets me through the day mostly, I set up the cahrging stop when it hits 80% and set up an automation in Shortcuts to automatically turn on Low Power Mode when the phone goes under 35% charge. Which has not happened yet.
Don't get me wrong tho, the battery isn't amazing, but I have not had any problems with it yet. Not to mention the cahrging speed, when plugging it in it usually reached 80% within 20-30 minutes, feels very fast. I bought it at 99% max capacity with ca. 235 cycles on it, and I am confident I won't have any issues with it for the next few years. And even if I do, I could start to think about compromising on the refresh rate etc., as a last resort...

Everyday use

This is going to be a more general section of the review. I wanted to state how the phone performes in the day-to-day use. Needless to say it crushes everything thrown at it. Which I WOULD HOPE by the Pro label and the price tag. I have not noticed any overheating, never has it been uncomfortable to hold in hand. Only during the initial setup it did get warmer and once during a videocall using Telegram. 20 minute call and the phone was hot. Not great, I can chock it up to the developers of the app not optimizing it for the IOS version or something. But, for example, on WhatsApp calls no problems. So I've just been using that app for calls lately.
Unlocking the phone is super fast, taking out the card by double pressing the power button also works flawlessly.

Action button

The action button. I feel like this is a kind of wasted button. The freedom you have to configure it to do something useful is very restricted. To turn my phone into silenced mode I have the toggle button in the Control Center, so I set up the action button to take me to the timer in the clock app. I've actually used this feature quite a lot, as I do not like using Siri and often need to pull up the timer (especially when throwing pasta in boiling water 😜).
But yeah. I would say having an extra button with a little bit of freedom to configure it to perform different actions is cool (there is the option to make it run a Shortcut when pressed, which I have not yet tried out ((especially as I would not know what Shortcut it would be usefull for))), definitely more useful than having teh physical toggle for the silenced mode, as someone who has their phone in silenced mode 99% of the time.

:P